Genres, Forms, and Movements Courses

COM 346 Exploratory Cinema 

Examines the origin and growth of "avant-garde" cinema. Traces the history of film and video art from the early 1920s to the present focusing on its structural evolution, thematic shifts, coexistence with commercial cinema, and its impact on contemporary media.
Meets general academic requirement HU.

COM 384 ST Representing Disability  

   This course investigates the way disability is constructed, maintained, and challenged within contemporary film and TV, looking at not just on-screen representation, but Hollywood's industrial influences on representation. It embraces an intersectional pedagogical method, whereby the entanglements of disability with gender, class, sexuality, race, and national culture are continuously analyzed throughout the semester.

ENG 229, 232 Black Comedy : Theatre and Film 

A study of nineteenth and twentieth century plays addressing the cultural impact of the African Diaspora.  In addition to plays, the syllabus incorporates theoretical and historical writing exploring Africanisms in the work of writers like Suzan-Lori Parks and August Wilson and the efforts of African American playwrights to remember often unrecorded histories. Meets general academic requirement DE & HU (and W if 229). Meets EXC requirement W if 229.

ENG 238, 239 Plays on Film

"Plays on Film" is a study of the (all too few) successful films made from stage plays, approached in the context of why adaptations of plays to film typically don't, in fact, work. In addition to studying a canon of plays and films, this course will also engage (and contrast) textual, performance-based, and image-based methodologies, and students will be asked to demonstrate proficiency in all three theoretical approaches. 
Meets general academic requirement HU (and W when offered as 239). Meets EXC requirement W if 239.

ENG 255,256 Literature and Film

This course examines the relationship between novels and plays and their film-adaptations, concentrating on the different ways in which we read and interpret these narrative forms. The course will attend closely to the variety of decisions that inform the translation of literary works into a different medium with different conventions for a different audience.
Meets general academic requirement HU and IL if 256. Meets EXC requirement CE.

ENG 282a ST Renaissance Remix 

The purpose of this course is to show how that foreign land, is, in fact, very close to home. Indeed, the class’s central premise is that the 17th century has consequences. The argument we will test is: how far have we travelled from the Renaissance? We will look back to the period’s cultural forms and genres and pair them to contemporary examples: The rise of the lyric + song lyrics, particularly the music of Kendrick Lamar, Renaissance masque + MTV music videos, The Revengers Tragedy + Tarantino, John Dryden + The Game of Thrones, Shakespeare + Succession, Restoration comedy + Pirates of the Caribbean, and selections of Paradise Lost + Blake + Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. We will discuss our obsession with monarchy, as shown in The Crown, among other similar shows and films. In the end, our goal is to figure out why the Obama-Trump-Biden era has been so dominated by the cultural forms that preoccupied 17th-century Europe, and what that may say about our present moment.  Meets general academic requirement HU.

ENG 284 ST Schemers, Connivers & Backstabbers in Theatre & Film

The Renaissance stage was dominated by schemers, fraudsters, connivers, and backstabbers. Early modern playwrights routinely identify as villainous the same set of skills that make for good acting. It is a rare early modern play that does not feature characters who are performing themselves acting, systematically lying, wearing disguises, and assuming the identity of others. In this course, we will explore the problems generated by this puzzle through Renaissance villains, particularly the con-men and swindlers who populate Early Modern English City Comedies. What is the peculiar form of evil on the Renaissance stage? With Renaissance villainy as our guide, we will also analyze a series of contemporary films, investigating the ways these Renaissance stock characters and their stories have persisted to the modern age in noir-film’s femmes fatale, in tricksters in the city, and in con men films such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off, American Hustle, Oceans 11, House of Games, Spanish Prisoner, and Licorice Pizza.

ENG 287 ST The Tempest on Stage and Screen

ENG 360 Gay & Lesbian Theatre & Film

This course explores a "gay and lesbian" canon of plays and films that both shaped and mirrored the evolution of a specific (historical) "gay and lesbian"subjectivity over the course of the twentieth century. We will also examine how the very forms of twentieth-century theatre and film the subtexts of modern drama, the psychoanalytic mirrors of the silver screen were themselves seen as symbolic of gay and lesbian subjectivity and experience.
Meets general academic requirement HU and DE

FLM 225 The Western Film

This course will examine the Western as the American film genre par excellence. Numerous theoretical approaches will be used to study the rise and fall of the Western’s popularity, its role in shaping popular myths about the United States, and its representation of masculine identity.
Attendance at weekly screenings required.
Meets general academic requirement HU.

FLM 227 Melodrama

“Melodrama” does not just mean exaggerated emotion; it is a form of popular storytelling that puts its characters in dramatic situations in which the stakes are nothing less than the victory of good over evil. This course will focus on the prominence of melodrama in narrative film, particularly popular American film, to reveal the flexibility of what some scholars argue is more than a genre, but is actually one of the dominant modes of filmmaking from its inception. The course proceeds chronologically from 1915 through the present. It focuses on films that are often classified as “women’s films” and “social problem films,” but also includes films that could be classified as action films or “men’s melodramas”― and so there will be a lot of discussion about issues of gender and race. We will also consider how these topics are illus trated throughmelodrama’s aesthetics, such as music, dramatic editing, and symbolic use of setting. 
Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
Meets general academic requirement HU.

FLM 229, 230 Travel and Cultural Encounters in Film

This course looks at narrative and experimental films that thematize the act of travel as a trigger for cultural encounters, which often result in conflicts, power differentials, and individual senses of displacement or disorientation. The cultural encounters depicted include those in colonial Africa, India, and the Americas, as well as post-colonial encounters in new relationship configurations such as migration and tourism. The course also considers as a sub-theme the “road movie” in American culture and what it says about the relationship of dominant American culture to the land and the indigenous inhabitants. As a theoretical lens, students will consider the cinematic medium as a vehicle for virtual travel and read accounts of film spectatorship that consider particular travel experiences. 
Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
Meets general academic requirement DE, and IL if 230

FLM 284 ST The Musical on Film 

We will historicize and theorize musical dramas of both stage and screen. We will examine not only traditional stage musicals and the films that have been made from them, but also various other genres of musical storytelling including the Hollywood musical film, the rock and roll movie, the rock opera, the cast album, and the music video. We will examine these musical works as cultural (and subcultural) artifacts and also theorize musical theatre's relationship to the mass media, paying particular attention to the construction of rhythm and musicality in film editing.

FLM 348 Cinema’s Altered States

From the avant-garde to Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix and Inception, the cinema provides a fertile ground for playing at the edge of narrative, and for testing credibility by constructing alternate logic. When films provide the rules of their own reality, spectators and their surrogate characters grope for a foothold of understanding and sanity. This course explores the phenomenon of film experience within the experience of film’s poetic manipulation of “reality”.
Attendance at weekly screenings is required.

FLM 354 Film Noir

Dark shadows, low-key lighting, unusual camera angles, flashbacks, a sense of paranoia, and males manipulated by sultry, cigarette-smoking, seductive femme fatales characterize film noir, the only typically American film genre after the Western to emerge from Hollywood. Created during the 1940s and 50s, many by Jewish émigrés from Central Europe, film noir is usually considered a combination of German Expressionist cinematic style and the American hard-boiled detective story. This course will examine the classic works of the genre within their sociopolitical context and investigate why they were so popular among audiences, why they were able to violate some rules of the Production Code, why certain actors are inextricably linked to the genre, and why neo-noirs are still being made.
Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
Meets general academic requirement HU.

FLM 383 ST Experimental Documentary

Explores the redefinition of traditional modes of categorization in documentary films through screenings and readings of historical, influential works that exemplify hybridity in documentaries and fiction film; it also includes hands-on production-based cinematic experiments. Students work will borrow from both documentary and fiction methods, such as working with social actors, archival documentation, performance, dramatization, and stylization.

FLM 386 ST Animation from Disney to Anime