Film and Video - Winter 1999

This class is designed to introduce students to the analytical study of the motion picture. Film in America can be understood from a number of different perspectives: as a technology, as a business, as entertainment, as art, and perhaps most importantly as a social artifact which to some extent reflects the cultural conditions under which it is produced and received. Towards that end, we will be introducing and/or exploring a wide variety of issues related to the study of film: production, distribution, reception, film form, film style, genre, auteur theory, issues of representation, ideology, realism, formalism, documentary, the avant-garde film, cinematic modernism and the current postmodernity of Hollywood film practice. Ideally, students will develop critical methodologies for analyzing film form and meaning in relation to the larger spheres of culture and ideology.

This quarter we will be examining the work of Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, two of the most distinctive and celebrated filmic stylists of contemporary cinema. Films will be screened in class and readings will cover both biographical and theoretical/critical concepts. Students will get the chance to study in depth the thematic and stylistic underpinnings of these two auteur filmmakers, and we will examine the changing meanings of auteur theory, film art, and cinematic agency in American film over the last several decades.

Dept. of Film and Video, Winter 1999

instructor: Julianne Burton-Carvajal

Surveys a range of cinematic representation of the US-Mexico border region from the 1950s to the present-Hollywood, independent, Chicano/Latino, Mexican. Examines "border" as concrete physical (trans)location, site of metaphor and projection, and trope for new ways of knowing and being.

Some of the films: Like Water for Chocolate, El Norte, Mi Familia, Zoot Suit,The Devil Never Sleeps, Touch of Evil, Mi Vida Loca, Salt of the Earth, El Mariachi, La Bamba, Lonestar, and more.

Readings: Rebel Without a Crew, Robert Rodriguez

El Norte: The Border in US and Mexican Cinema, David Maciel

Chicano Images: Refiguring Ethnicity in Mainstream Film, Christine List

The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture, Rosa Linda Fregoso

Revised 7/26/04.