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Course Descriptions


Film Studies Course Descriptions

 

C292 Introduction to Film

This course is an introduction to the study of film as an aesthetic, cultural, and historical form. We examine the vocabulary of cinema, and elucidate various aspects of the filmmaking process. A grounding in the concepts of film studies will enable us to explore how cinema represents reality and chart the multi-faceted relationship between cinema and society.

 

C390 Topics: Hollywood in the 1950s

This course covers the fascinating period when American life and films entered a postwar period of lasting change. The coming of the suburbs, television, the Cold War, and the breakup of the mass audience and the studio system it supported all transformed the way films were made, seen, and understood. These will be some of the topics the course will explore: the McCarthy-HUAC era film industry blacklist; atomic fears; the new emphasis on the baby-boom family as safe haven; the widening of screens and deepening of genres; the breakdown of the Production Code self-censorship and anticipation of the "new freedom of the screen" in the sixties. Films tentatively include High Noon, In a Lonely Place, Rebel Without a Cause, A Face in the Crowd, Anatomy of a Murder, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and Pillow Talk. There will be textbooks and selected readings. Assignments: short papers, midterm and final exams and a term paper.

 

C391 The Film: Theory and Aesthetics

As film study has become a respected academic discipline, its rise has been accompanied by the prominence of theories, sometimes endemic to film, often borrowed from other disciplines. What often the divergent theories all have in common is a desire to understand what this complex young medium can do and should do. Film theory has ranged from debates over realism, formalism, and authorship, to hypotheses about film as a language. Film theory borrows from Marxist political thought, psychoanalysis, and literary reception theory. Feminists have found the cinema a major site of gender construction. Accordingly, this course will provide an introduction to the rapidly evolving field of theory as a branch of film study. It will also show how theory is helpful to an understanding of a spectator’s relation to the movies she sees, as well as how the development of film has spurred theorists’ constant scramble to keep up intellectually with a rapidly changing entertainment and artistic medium. There will be required textbooks, closed reserve readings, and screenings of film, which inspire and exemplify the theories under discussion.
Assignments consist of weekly journal entries, take-home midterm and final, and a final term paper in which students apply a selected theory to a film of their choice.

 

C392 Genre Study in Film: Musicals: Gotta Sing? Gotta Dance?

This class is on Musicals, and I know what you’re thinking. I think I know what you’re thinking. Why are musicals so toxic? Even though I grew up on musicals the last dace they were made regularly, and may not even have my in interest in film without musicals, by the time I was in film school musicals were not a genre you admitted you liked, especially to your professors! And now that musicals are seen as in effect a historical genre, they are seen to have gay connotations, and perhaps they do. They are seen as speaking a dead language (pre-rock Broadwayese and Tin Pan Alley), as having a queer subtext, as breaking the narrative diegesis of the classical Hollywood-style film, and of being excessively and cutely associated with show business, fairy tale realms, and folklorish Americana. Musicals can be these things but they are a whole lot more. We will look at the evolution of the one genre that didn’t exist in silent cinema, and how it affected the development of the Hollywood studio system.  We’ll sample the works of Busby Berkeley, Ernst Lubitsch, Astaire, and Rogers, Minnelli, Kelly, and Garland as well as a few of the better Broadway adaptations, such as The Music Man (1962) and Oliver! (1968). But these will take up perhaps half of the class. We will also look at rock operas, concert films, bizarre variations on the form like Pennies from Heaven (1981) and the films of Bob Fosse, Elvis movies (maybe excerpts of these), musical biopics, Beatles movies, French musicals, Bollywood musicals, music videos, and of course the neo musicals (Moulin Rouge!, etc.) of recent times. You’ll come away with a head-pulsing understanding that there couldn’t be cinema and media as we know them without musicals. An essential genre. There will be textbooks for the course (you’ll be surprised how much scholarship there is) as well as a course pack. Assignments will be weekly journal entries, two short papers, a research essay, and a final exam.

 

C491 Authorship and Cinema - Clint Eastwood: Star, Director, Male Icon

A peculiarly dominant figure in cinema for four decades, Clint Eastwood can be studied as an actor whose star persona evolved into an exceptionally powerful signifier of American masculinity, as a director whose work has all the characteristics of the classic auteur, and as an independent producer whose methods both mesh with and run counter to the systems of the "New Hollywood." 

The course will study Eastwood as a star image in the films of three directors, Sergio Leone, Don Siegel, and Eastwood himself.  In the three Italian films better known in the U.S. as "spaghetti Westerns," Leone revised the often ambivalent figure of the lone Western hero into an omnipotent spectator identification position as well as a freeform enforcer who acts without apparent principle ("The Good?" queried the subtitle over the character’s introduction in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [1966]).  Don Siegel, then a veteran action film director, helped his younger protégé remold the character in terms of the concrete motivations expected in American films, adapting the postmodern protagonist of the Leone films to Hollywood generic conventions.  It was in the Siegel films, especially Dirty Harry (1971), that Eastwood’s persona became solidified as a white masculinist backlash figure in the polarized era of Vietnam, Civil Rights, feminism, and the Warren Court.  As a director subsequently, Eastwood played to or worked against this persona, a tension that eventually led to such revisionist films as Tightrope (1984), White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), and respectability as an Oscar-winner and elder statesman (deservedly or not) with Unforgiven, The Bridges of Madison County, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, among others.

The course will explore the meaning and impact of the Man with No Name-Dirty Harry avenging hero persona both in the films and in publicity and the press; the deep resonance and complexity of the persona across lines of gender, race, class, and age; the nature of Eastwood’s evolving revisions of his persona and the fascinating reception of this revision, particularly among the very feminist and leftist critics who would presumably oppose Eastwood’s films; Eastwood’s style and methods as a director and as a producer, with a production company Malpaso (The name is an inside joke: It’s "Bad Move" in Spanish) that has made its films almost exclusively for Warner Bros. since the mid-1970s.  The phenomenon of Clint Eastwood presents students of cinema, media, filmmaking, film industry, gender, and cultural studies with an almost unparalleled subject through which to examine the popular culture of the postmodern age.

Assignments will include biweekly response papers, a midterm and final exam, and a term paper on an Eastwood film or an aspect of his career.  Texts will consist mostly of an extensive coursepack, and possibly one or two books.   

 

Note:  For a complete listing of courses with days and times, refer to the IUPUI Schedule of Classes. These course descriptions are meant as a general guide to aid in your course selection; syllabi, textbooks, and requirements are given on the first day of class. In some cases, an instructor’s name is given, and that means the description that follows applies when that instructor teaches the course.