Film History

Open, Lecture—Spring

This is a collaborative lecture course taught by faculty in anthropology, filmmaking, and literature. Bringing these three disciplinary lenses to the cinematic image, the course will ask how films can think—how, that is, cinema gives form to ideas about temporality, perception, memory, history, and life itself, not only through story, but through cinematic design including: rhythm, duration, framing, voice, and the relation between image and sound. Working primarily with ethnography, documentary, the essay film, and the film-journal, we will study cinema's engagement with lived reality. Rather than understanding film solely as representation, the course will treat it as a mode of inquiry: a means of engaging social and environmental worlds and reflecting on lived experience, political conditions, and moments of transformation. We will examine how concepts of culture and the natural world take shape in film form, and how diary and essay practices are transformed when translated into a time-based medium. Across screenings, lectures, and group discussions, students will develop a vocabulary for describing how films make meaning through temporal design and patterning. Attention to sequence and suspension, and to bodily gesture and camera motion, will open larger questions of ethics, representation, and mediation. Throughout the semester, we will ask how experimental documentary, hybrid essay film, animated, and mixed-media work respond to pressing political and existential concerns while also reflecting on their own conditions of mediation. Filmmakers whose work will be considered closely include Trinh T. Minh-ha, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Signe Baumane, Hayao Miyazaki, Su Friedrich, and the Karrabing Film Collective, among others. In addition to class time and screenings, students will attend group conferences, meeting with each faculty member in rotation.

Faculty

• Una Chung
• Robert R. Desjarlais
• Robin Starbuck

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

What was modern art? How did artists respond to a changing world—one altered by fascism, colonization and anti-colonial protest, war and mass migration, the legacies of enslavement, and rationalized forms of labor? What representational strategies did artists use to respond to modernity, to remake the world anew? This course will move in and out of canonical accounts of modernism (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, Mexican Muralism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.) to tell the story of modernism through the work of underrepresented artists—artists of the Black Atlantic and Latin America, queer and trans artists, artists of color, women artists, and artists seen as “outside” the canon. We will look to discourses of leftist politics and collectivity, feminist struggle, abolitionism and antiracist discourse. The emphasis of this course will be on the global plurality of modernism, shifting our understanding of where modernism was produced, when, and by whom. This course will serve as an introduction to art history in the sense that it will equip students with the basic tools of close, slow looking and of descriptive writing about art, art historical research, and practices of curatorial display while also introducing students to broad and diverse histories of modern art. The course will also include field trips to New York City museums. This course is a lecture with weekly seminars. One lecture a week will introduce you to the broader movements, while weekly seminars will look at specific case studies and scholarly approaches to writing about contemporary art.

Faculty

• Sarah Hamill

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

Taking a global approach, this course will look at how artists redefined the mediums, materials, and hierarchies of modernism in the postwar period. We will look closely at how artists embraced radicality, by protesting for civil rights, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and claiming an antiwar politics in the 1960s and 1970s. This radicality shifted in the 1990s with the rise of neoliberalism and the global art market, and we will investigate changes in contemporary art and its display after 1990. Movements this course will explore include: Gutai, Neoconcretism, Happenings, Pop Art, Fluxus, minimalism, global conceptualism, site-specificity, Earthworks, the Chicano Arts Movement, the Black Arts Movement, feminism, video art, institutional critique, installation, activist art, participatory art, Relational Aesthetics, Craft, new media, biennials, and the global art museum. Throughout, we will focus on specific artworks and gain a vocabulary for close looking, while also attending to primary sources (manifestos, letters, statements, poems) and secondary, art historical, and theoretical accounts. Assignments will include papers (based on works in New York City museums and galleries), peer reviews, presentations, reading responses, a contextual research essay, and a group curatorial assignment. This course will be taught in a lecture-seminar hybrid style. One lecture a week will be presented to introduce students to the broader movements. Weekly group conferences will look at case studies of artists and representational issues.

Faculty

• Sarah Hamill

First-Year Studies—Year

Students will enroll in a combination of component classes in dance specially designed for the first-year student, including a selection of movement practice classes at the appropriate level; Improvisation (DNCE 5531) in the fall semester; Composition (DNCE 5517) in the spring semester; and Dancing Into the Future (DNCE 5521). Together, these studies will make up the First-Year Studies in Dance. Students will be dancing in the studio nearly every day. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• John Jasperse

Open, Seminar—Year

How can movement inform critical analysis? What can dancing teach us about the workings of our world? In this seminar, we will begin with an extended reading/exploration of Alice Walker’s collection of poems, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010) as entry into the multiple layers of meaning and complexity that movement can convey, pointing to the ways in which we move and are moved as individuals and as collectives. Readings from fields including dance, performance, literary criticism, feminism, science fiction, cultural studies, ethno-ecology, and activism, as well as examples of live and recorded performance events (formal and informal) will serve as inspiration for seeing, thinking, conversing and writing throughout the year. Students’ multiple histories and perspectives will illuminate vigorous examination of these materials. Class activities will include reading, writing, discussion, presentation, and accessible movement practices, as well as viewing art and film images. Assignments will build upon class activities, with opportunities to work with partners and small groups. For yearlong conference projects, supported through biweekly individual conferences, each student will develop one or more substantive lines of inquiry connected to our subject matter. Conference projects may draw upon various disciplines, including those within humanities and creative arts. The aim of this course is to expand our recognition of movement and dancing as essential aspects of existence, and to sharpen our use of the unique theoretical potentials inherent in this study to enliven adjacent studies as well.

Faculty

• Peggy Gould

First-Year Studies—Year

This project-based animation course will explore the art of stop-motion through a wide range of material processes. Using classical techniques as a foundation, students will approach animation as an improvisational and exploratory practice, investigating both the art form and its technical applications. During the first half of the year, students will focus on limited down-shooting animation through a series of workshops centered on materiality, concept development, and postproduction editing. In the second half of the course, students will expand into upright camera projects, including pixilation and green-screen performance work. Blending handmade techniques with digital tools, students will develop their animation skills to create stop-motion works that communicate through cut-out and other material-based methods. Working with Dragonframe, Adobe After Effects, and select Toon Boom software, students will share drawings, ideas, materials, and performances while producing short animated films in a collaborative workshop environment. The course will begin with the design and creation of flipbooks, followed by the construction of a simple 2D cut-out puppet. Students will explore how to generate movement using various materials, light, and camera techniques within two-dimensional space. Later projects will focus on live action pixilation and green-screen silhouette work. Throughout the year, students will engage in all stages of directing a short stop-motion film—from initial concept to final edit. The course will culminate in a final project: an original short film created using the student’s chosen animation material from those explored in class. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences. 

Faculty

• Robin Starbuck

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

This course aims to guide students in editing a rough cut of a film that they intend to picture lock, color grade, and sound mix as the core of their work for the semester. We will begin with a few short, simple editing exercises to get up and running, and then dive into editing a complete five- to 10-minute short film. A rough cut is an opportunity for a new jumping-off point. Dailies will be re-examined for “hidden gems"—little moments that may have been filmed unexpectedly or captured between takes. A deep review of this material can help the editor fully flesh out a moment that the director may have wanted but was not fully achieved on set. Is this shot too long? Is this scene necessary? Is this emotional beat realized? The work of the editor is not just to cut, but to choose when to cut and when to hold a shot. As editor Walter Murch says, “The editor is actually making 24 decisions a second: No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No... Yes!” The aim of this course will be to do a deep-dive into an existing student project and make it as good as it can be. Students will polish a rough cut to picture lock by the midpoint of the semester so that color grading and sound mix can be the focus of the second half of the course and completed in time for the final-class screening. This is not a class that will tolerate the bulk of a student’s work to be completed at the end of the semester; rather, your work must be completed in stages over the course of the semester. Collaboration with students in other filmmaking courses will be encouraged and fostered. The course will use both Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve: Premiere to edit; Resolve for color. Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions will be provided to students, and the software will be available for use in the Ziskin Digital Media Lab. Students will need a solid state drive. The software is cross-platform and available for both Mac and PC.

Faculty

• Brian Emery

Advanced, Seminar—Spring

This course will build on fundamentals learned in Introduction to Television Writing (FILM 3313), with the focus on creating new work for original television pilots. Students will be expected to enter the course with a pitch for an original pilot. That pitch will be revised and turned into an original one-hour or half-hour show (no sitcoms). Focusing on engineering story machines, we will power characters and situations with enough conflict to generate episodes over many years. Having taken both courses in the television writing sequence—“spec” and pilot—students will have the beginnings of the components, in first draft form, that they will need for a professional portfolio. In conference, students may wish to begin to develop character descriptions and pieces of a series pitch for their show or to work on previously developed material. Students are expected to have an extensive working knowledge across many genres of television shows that have aired during the past 25-30 years internationally, and a commitment to developing work from concept through premise lines, beat sheets, and outlines with multiple drafts of each, and with extensive peer collaboration, before writing script pages. Students will not be permitted to write pages until their outlines have been “green lit.”

Faculty

• Marygrace O’Shea

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

In this course, we will practice the fundamental skill of successful television writers—the ability to craft entertaining and compelling stories for characters, worlds, and situations created by others. Though dozens of writers may work on a show over the course of its run, the “voice” of the show is unified and singular. The way to best learn to write for television is to draft a sample episode of a pre-existing show, known as a “spec script.” Developing, pitching, writing, and rewriting stories hundreds of times, extremely quickly, in collaboration and on tight deadlines is what television staff writers do every day, fitting each episode seamlessly into the series as a whole in tone, concept, and execution. Students will be introduced to these fundamental skills, working step-by-step through the writing of their own spec script for an ongoing scripted television series, effectively taking students from premise lines, through the outline/beat sheet, to writing a complete draft of a full teleplay for a currently airing show. No original pilots will be pursued in the fall. In conference, students will work on deepening characters, understanding dramatic and comedic techniques, and developing additional components of their portfolios. Students are expected to have an extensive working knowledge across many genres of television shows that have aired during the past 25-30 years domestically, and a commitment to developing work from concept through premise lines, beat sheets, and outlines with multiple drafts of each, and with extensive peer collaboration, before writing script pages. Students will not be permitted to write pages until their outlines have been “green lit.”

Faculty

• Marygrace O’Shea

Open, Large seminar—Fall

In this course, we will explore the power dynamics behind images and how they shape the way we see and experience the world. Drawing on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, we will examine how visuals—whether in art, film, or everyday life—are never neutral but, rather, always tied to politics. We will dive into works like Harun Farocki’s An Image, Tony Cooke’s Disco Inferno, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Jean-Luc Godard’s radical cinema, and Brechtian approaches to audiovisual composition. Through these films and ideas, we will see how artists and filmmakers use images to challenge the status quo, resist dominant ideologies, and spark political change. With screenings and discussions, we will sharpen the ability to critically analyze the images that surround us and understand how they influence both political consciousness and personal identity. This course is a thought-provoking investigation into how images can manipulate, provoke, invent, and sometimes resist the political forces at play in our world. 

Faculty

• Jazmín López

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will approach the moving image as an art form and as a way of thinking about the world. It is designed for artists and authors interested in film and video as conceptual, poetic, and political practices rather than as technical or narrative media. Classes will be structured around shared viewing and discussion, with close attention to how images produce meaning, authority, and belief. Drawing on traditions of critical looking associated with John Berger, the course will ask how images circulate, whom they address, and what kinds of power they reproduce or resist. Works by artists such as Tony Cokes, Martha Rosler, Andrea Fraser, Vito Acconci, and Jean-Luc Godard will frame discussions around language, institutions, spectatorship, the politics of representation, and the poetic possibilities of all mentioned. Through sustained looking, discussion, and shared work, students will develop an authorial and critical relationship to the moving image, understanding film and video as poetic, political, and aesthetic forms. Individual film production is not required. Participation may include collaboration on collective works or contributions to others’ projects, with making understood as an act of thinking rather than a finished object.

Faculty

• Jazmín López

Open, Lecture—Spring

This is a collaborative lecture course taught by faculty in anthropology, filmmaking, and literature. Bringing these three disciplinary lenses to the cinematic image, the course will ask how films can think—how, that is, cinema gives form to ideas about temporality, perception, memory, history, and life itself, not only through story, but through cinematic design including: rhythm, duration, framing, voice, and the relation between image and sound. Working primarily with ethnography, documentary, the essay film, and the film-journal, we will study cinema's engagement with lived reality. Rather than understanding film solely as representation, the course will treat it as a mode of inquiry: a means of engaging social and environmental worlds and reflecting on lived experience, political conditions, and moments of transformation. We will examine how concepts of culture and the natural world take shape in film form, and how diary and essay practices are transformed when translated into a time-based medium. Across screenings, lectures, and group discussions, students will develop a vocabulary for describing how films make meaning through temporal design and patterning. Attention to sequence and suspension, and to bodily gesture and camera motion, will open larger questions of ethics, representation, and mediation. Throughout the semester, we will ask how experimental documentary, hybrid essay film, animated, and mixed-media work respond to pressing political and existential concerns while also reflecting on their own conditions of mediation. Filmmakers whose work will be considered closely include Trinh T. Minh-ha, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Signe Baumane, Hayao Miyazaki, Su Friedrich, and the Karrabing Film Collective, among others. In addition to class time and screenings, students will attend group conferences, meeting with each faculty member in rotation.

Faculty

• Una Chung
• Robert R. Desjarlais
• Robin Starbuck

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

This course will examine feature-length animation as a site of aesthetic experimentation, cultural expression, and authorial practice. Focusing on independent and international works rather than large-scale commercial studio productions, we will explore how artist-driven animated features challenge dominant narrative conventions, production models, and visual languages. Through weekly screenings and writing in a private notebook, students will analyze the relationship between form and content in animated cinema. Particular attention will be given to how animation constructs time, space, memory, and subjectivity, and how different material processes—hand-drawn, cutout, stop-motion, puppet animation, and independent Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI)—shape meaning. The course will situate these works within broader theoretical conversations about global modernisms, spectatorship, alternative narratives, documentary practice, and the politics of representation. Spanning films produced from 1970 to the present, the syllabus will highlight works that operate outside dominant commercial systems and foregrounds alternative narrative structures, hybrid documentary forms, autobiographical modes, and experimental storytelling. We will consider how conditions of independent production—often characterized by concentrated artistic control—generate distinct aesthetic and structural outcomes. Readings will introduce key frameworks from animation studies providing tools for aesthetic analysis and critical interpretation. The course does not include animation production. As a semester project, students will be expected to present in a small group one lecture on the thematic concerns and formal strategies of an assigned film. Students will also be required to maintain a weekly research/creative practice notebook that integrates theoretical reflection with personal inquiry.

Faculty

• Robin Starbuck

Open, Seminar—Year

This course, for students with no previous knowledge of Italian, will aim to provide a complete foundation in the Italian language with particular attention to oral and written communication and all aspects of Italian culture. The course will be conducted in Italian after the first month and will involve the study of all basic structures of the language—phonological, grammatical, and syntactical—with practice in conversation, reading, composition, and translation. In addition to material covering basic Italian grammar, students will be exposed to fiction, poetry, songs, articles, recipe books, and films. Held once a week, group conferences will aim to enrich the students’ knowledge of Italian culture and develop their ability to communicate; this goal will be achieved by readings that deal with current events and topics relative to today’s Italian culture. Activities in pairs or groups, along with short written assignments, will be part of the group conference. In addition to class and the group conferences, the course has a conversation component in regular workshops with the language assistant. In small groups, conversation classes will center on the concept of Viaggio in Italia: a journey through the regions of Italy through cuisine, cinema, art, opera, and dialects. The Italian program will organize trips to the Metropolitan Opera and relevant exhibits in New York City, as well as the possibility of experiencing Italian cuisine firsthand as a group. By the end of this course, students will attain a basic competence in all aspects of the language. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, regular individual meetings with an Italian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will aim to improve and perfect the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works studied will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. Biweekly conference topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. In small groups, conversation classes will be held with the language assistant; students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture.

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

First-Year Studies—Year

As our societies address the challenges of climate change, it is important that we explore the implications of the concept of “nature” in the Western and Judeo-Christian tradition. In this course, we will read literary classics—such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, among many others—and examine how they represent the environment, animals and the natural world in ways that directly shape our own perception of nature. We will take different approaches by comparing, for example, stories of world creation from Indigenous nations with narratives taken from the Bible and Greek and Roman texts, or exploring the combination of Celtic magic and Christian symbolism in medieval Arthurian romances, or examining how the aesthetic concept of the sublime is present in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as in the written account of the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri River. Going in different directions, we will analyze how feminism developed new ways of relating to nature as counter-narratives to masculine domination, explore the questions of science, machines and technology, or examine how writers and philosophers have integrated animals in their thinking as a way to move beyond the “human-ist” understanding of nature inherited from European Renaissance. In previous iterations of this first-year studies course, students have developed a variety of personal projects: from how flowers are featured in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, or how a community farm in the Bronx challenges outdated urban-planning decisions, to the depiction of nature in Hayao Miyazaki’s films or in Jane Austen’s novels. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside weekly small group activities.

Faculty

• Eric Leveau

Open, Seminar—Fall

Horror movies are a staple of recent Spanish cinema. With titles like The Others, The Orphanage, Buried, Rec, and Julia’s Eyes, directors Alejandro Amenábar, Juan Antonio Bayona, Paco Plaza, Jaume Balagueró, Rodrigo Cortés, Guillem Morales, and others have conquered the international market, attracting the attention of online platforms and theaters alike. Spanish horror mirrors the function that German Expressionism held in the Weimar Republic: it incarnates social anxieties in the figure of the monster. This genre rose to prominence during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in which a similar typology of monstrous characters (vampires, werewolves, mad scientists, etc.) provided an allegorical cover and line of escape during a period of profound repression. This course will trace a genealogy between the key works of that historical moment and the present. We will tackle the resurgence of horror in the early 2000s in Spain, coinciding with the onset of aggressive neoliberal policies that led to the economic crisis of the 2010s. We will ask how recent horror movies, such as Carlos Vermut’s Magical Girl (2014), Carlota Martínez-Pereda’s Piggy (2022), and Mar Coll’s Salve Maria (2024) make sense of their political context. What distinguishes this new period of horror? How do these films renegotiate the toxic masculinity and macho aesthetics that traditionally characterize the genre? Where can we locate the influence of feminist, ecocritical, and anti-ableist social movements in this genre’s shifting aesthetics? Throughout the course, students will design an original research project and discuss its development in individual conferences with the instructor.

Faculty

• Pedro Cabello del Moral

Open, Small Lecture—Year

Powdered, ruffled, and bewigged, the ghosts of the 17th and 18th century playhouse still stalk the stages, screens, and red carpets of the global entertainment industry. After a period of suppression by a puritan government, London theatres came roaring back to life in the 1660s, thanks in part to England’s first professional female actors—by some accounts the original modern celebrities—and the reign of a king, Charles II, who was besotted with drama and the people who made it. Over the coming century, the practices and theories of the theatrical arts would be thoroughly and durably transformed, and a new dramatic canon would be consolidated through both print and repertory enactment. Theatre was not only big business in Enlightenment Europe but also, arguably, the representative art form of the age. Part of the public’s fascination with stagecraft lay in the unsettling questions it raised about the nature of performance itself, not only as a form of artistic practice but also as an element of social and political life: What if, for instance, our putatively God-given identities (king and subject, wife and husband) were merely factitious roles that could be adopted or discarded at will? This seminar will consider how authors and theatrical professionals from the 1660s to the 1790s imagined the potential of performance to transform—or sometimes to reinforce—the status quo, with a look ahead to major films, mostly from classical Hollywood, that inherited and adapted the legacy of Restoration and 18th century entertainments. Our primary emphasis will be on plays, with a survey of major Enlightenment-era comedies (some of the funniest and most outrageous ever written), parodies, afterpieces, heroic tragedies, imperial pageants, sentimental dramas, and Gothic spectacles by authors such as William Wycherley, George Etherege, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, John Gay, Henry Fielding, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Elizabeth Inchbald. We will also consider nondramatic writing on performance and theatrical culture, including 18th-century acting manuals, racy theatrical memoirs, and a “masquerade novel” by Eliza Haywood, in addition to films by directors such as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Oscar Micheaux, F. W. Murnau, Lois Weber, and Billy Wilder. Wigs not required.

Faculty

• James Horowitz

Open, Seminar—Year

In this seminar, we will examine the First and Second World Wars, two vast and savage armed conflicts which shaped the 20th century and its aftermath. In the first semester, we will study the course, outcome, and aftermath of the First World War, and our syllabus will focus on theories of the war’s origins, some of its literature and its representation in other media, the logic of its development, the experience of combat, the experience of the home fronts, and the effect of the war on cultural history, including the much-debated question of the war’s relationship to modernism and modernity. The second semester will focus on the Second World War, and we will be looking at many of the same questions. Our own era remains shaped by the memories of these wars and by their outcomes and afterlives. Both wars shaped and reshaped our cultures, including our understanding of the nature of war itself, which in their wake we have successively mythologized, demythologized, re-mythologized, and serially reimagined. Memories and interpretations of these wars have produced the rise and fall of modern ideas of the heroic, the false heroic, the anti-heroic, and the post-heroic. We shall explore all of these ideas.

Faculty

• Frederic Smoler

Open, Lecture—Spring

Do new media fundamentally alter the way we produce and consume works of art? This seems like a 21st-century question, but it was also a central preoccupation for modernist writers in the first half of the 20th century. How, they asked, can literature reach the distracted modern reader? Writers we will read this semester, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, rejected Victorian literary conventions, which they argued were no longer able to touch the modern reader’s senses directly; in doing so, however, they relied on techniques such as collage, allusion, stream of consciousness, and symbolism that often alienated the “common reader.” Other forms of entertainment were increasingly available to such readers: the cinema, the music hall, newspapers, radio, and (later) television. Literature was, for many, losing its audience to these other venues. Scholars have argued that modernism emerged as a reaction against the rise of mass culture; however, as we will see in this course, modernist reactions to media are, in fact, diverse and complicated. We will identify and explore a range of critical approaches and, in so doing, will detail the extent to which modernist aesthetics emerged alongside the rise of new forms of popular mass culture—whether as a negative, positive, or ambivalent response. We will also interrogate the enduring legacy of modernist approaches to media and question whether we have, in fact, moved beyond these concerns or whether they continue to define our literary and popular cultures. Working through a range of texts—including novels and stories, as well as radio plays, manifestos, and films—we will identify the intimate relationship between modernism and changing media. 

Faculty

• Emily Bloom

Open, Lecture—Spring

This is a collaborative lecture course taught by faculty in anthropology, filmmaking, and literature. Bringing these three disciplinary lenses to the cinematic image, the course will ask how films can think—how, that is, cinema gives form to ideas about temporality, perception, memory, history, and life itself, not only through story, but through cinematic design including: rhythm, duration, framing, voice, and the relation between image and sound. Working primarily with ethnography, documentary, the essay film, and the film-journal, we will study cinema's engagement with lived reality. Rather than understanding film solely as representation, the course will treat it as a mode of inquiry: a means of engaging social and environmental worlds and reflecting on lived experience, political conditions, and moments of transformation. We will examine how concepts of culture and the natural world take shape in film form, and how diary and essay practices are transformed when translated into a time-based medium. Across screenings, lectures, and group discussions, students will develop a vocabulary for describing how films make meaning through temporal design and patterning. Attention to sequence and suspension, and to bodily gesture and camera motion, will open larger questions of ethics, representation, and mediation. Throughout the semester, we will ask how experimental documentary, hybrid essay film, animated, and mixed-media work respond to pressing political and existential concerns while also reflecting on their own conditions of mediation. Filmmakers whose work will be considered closely include Trinh T. Minh-ha, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Signe Baumane, Hayao Miyazaki, Su Friedrich, and the Karrabing Film Collective, among others. In addition to class time and screenings, students will attend group conferences, meeting with each faculty member in rotation.

Faculty

• Una Chung
• Robert R. Desjarlais
• Robin Starbuck

Open, Seminar—Spring

The conflation of Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism that so often marks our understanding of cultural production in the Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet spaces has often gone unnoticed in the West. As the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine in the face of current Russian aggression makes clear, a remapping of that literary landscape is long overdue. This course will supply some historical context while centering our attention on the remarkable flowering of Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature currently underway. We will begin with the curious emptiness of Russian nationalism as expressed first in Russian-American journalist M. Gessen’s recent contribution to This American Life, “Eight Fights,” and then in a classic text of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1831). While still in the 19th century, we will make a brief foray into Polish and Ukrainian literature as written at a time when neither Poland nor Ukraine existed as sovereign nations: our reading here will include Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s long narrative poem “Pan Tadeusz” and then in a classic text of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1834); a few shorter poems by the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko; and a few short stories by the Ukrainian writer Mikolay Hohol, better known by his Russian name, Nikolai Gogol. We will then jump to the 20th century with Viktor Shklovsky’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution in Sentimental Journey (1921). With the Russian empire re-established now in Soviet terms, we will trace the rise of contemporary Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature in turn. In the Polish context, we will read Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles (1934) as written in the shadow of the Nazi invasion; Witold Gombrowicz’s gender-bending tale of post-World War II exile in Trans-Atlantyk (1953); and watch Andrzej Wajda’s tribute to the Solidarity movement in his 1977 film, Man of Marble. We will then finish with the 21st century and 2018 Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (2007). For Belarus, we will return to World War II with The Ordeal (1972), first as originally written by the Soviet-Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ (in Russian, Vasilii Bykov) and then as adapted by Soviet-Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko in her 1977 film, The Ascent. We will then read Voices From Chernobyl (1997) by the 2015 Nobel Prize-winning writer, Svetlana Alexievich. From Alexievich’s Russian-language account of a disaster that struck Belarusians and Ukrainians alike, we will turn to Markiian Kamysh’s more narrowly Ukrainian reflection on life after Chernobyl, Stalking the Atomic City (2014), before exploring just a few of the works that mark the vibrant contemporary Ukrainian scene: Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), Evgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks (2022), Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage (2017), and Halyna Kruk’s recent collection of poems, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (2023).

Faculty

• Melissa Frazier

Open, Large seminar—Fall

The impact of The Beatles has been immeasurable. In their seven years as an international touring and recording band, they explored and enlarged every aspect of song-writing technique, producing musical milestones with almost every album. This course will trace the development of The Beatles chronologically and will focus on the ways the Beatles used harmony, phrase structure, rhythm, structural ambiguity, sonority and production techniques in continuously innovative and beautiful ways. The background to this course will be the political events and social transformations of the 1960s, as well as the musical styles and cultural phenomena that The Beatles assimilated and transformed. No previous musical training or experience is required.

Faculty

• Martin Goldray

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course will study David Bowie’s music styles and cultural influences over a career that spanned almost fifty years. The focus will be on how he conveyed through music and lyrics ideas about alienation, isolation, madness, dystopia, gender ambiguity and identity, glamour, role-playing and self-realization, among other things. We will trace how he conveyed those ideas by using elements of German Expressionism, Weimar cabaret, Asian culture, dadaism, surrealism, European art films (by Buñuel, Dalí, Fellini, Dreyer, Bergman, and others), the cut-up technique made popular by William S. Burroughs, commedia dell'arte, English music hall, the Broadway musical, mime, French chanson, blues, soul, Krautrock, minimalism, science fiction, and other things. We will attempt to understand what was more interesting to him than conventional pop stardom, and why he sought an exit from that whenever he achieved it. Singer and songwriter Siouxsie Sioux said that Bowie was an unusual pop star in that he comes with a reading list; we will try to find out what might be on that list and how it might illuminate his career.

Faculty

• Martin Goldray

Open, Lecture—Spring

Presumably, you care about movies. Why do you care about movies? Because they entertain you? Because they are beautiful? Because they are informative? Because they make you feel things? The guiding thought of this course will be that we care about movies because they participate in the practice of philosophy—or at least they have that potential. Of course, this also presumes that we care about philosophy—a claim that will take some time to defend. To test that hypothesis—that films have the potential to participate in the practice of philosophy—we first need to consider what the practice of philosophy is. Then, we will need to say something about what film is. And then, we can examine whether film can do philosophy. In the first part of the course, we will analyze the medium of film in order to clarify the characteristics of film that would allow it to be philosophical. In the second part of the course, we will explore how those characteristics of film contribute to how we think philosophically about our lives. In particular, students will explore problems pertaining to subjectivity (What it is to be a human being?) and to ethics (How do I know the right thing to do?). Each week, we will watch a film—including Jeanne Dielman, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Get Out, and Spring Breakers—and read a philosophical text—including Aristotle, Cavell, Merleau-Ponty, Parfit, and Adorno—with the aim of placing the two in conversation.

Faculty

• Scott Shushan

Open, Lecture—Fall

Why is the topic of laughter so often siloed or scorned in discussions of high art, literature, and the sciences? Why don’t we take laughter seriously as a society? How many professors does it take to teach a course on laughter? (Two more than usual...) In this lecture with weekly seminars, students will develop a highly interdisciplinary understanding of laughter as a human behavior, cultural practice, and tool for creative expression. Based on the expertise of the three professors, lectures will primarily investigate laughter through the lens of psychology, film history, and visual arts. The goal of placing laughter at the center of our discourse is to think and play across disciplines to explore the many contradictory ideas and experiences signified by laughter, from humor and collective joy to unease and social rupture. For weekly class assignments, students will be asked to conduct observational studies of themselves and others’ laughter patterns, make artworks inspired by stand-up, sitcoms, and slapstick comedy, or write close analyses of classic cinematic gags. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the building blocks of laughter; classic devices of modern comedy; and laughter as a force of resilience, resistance, and regeneration. Topics to be discussed will include the evolutionary roots of laughter as a behavior; the psychological and physiological substrates of laughter as a mode of emotional and self-regulation; humor in Dada, surrealism, performance art, and stand-up comedy; jokes and the unconscious; comic entanglements of modern bodies and machines; hysterical audiences of early cinema; and how to read funny faces, word play, spit takes, toilet humor, and sound gags. Experiential, hands-on opportunities for engaging with the course will involve expert panels, improv/comedy workshops, scientific laughter labs, and an art exhibit organized around laughter.

Faculty

• John O’Connor
• Maia Pujara
• Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

First-Year Studies—Fall

Why is the topic of laughter so often siloed or scorned in discussions of high art, literature, and the sciences? Why don’t we take laughter seriously as a society? How many professors does it take to teach a course on laughter? (Two more than usual...) In this lecture with weekly seminars, students will develop a highly interdisciplinary understanding of laughter as a human behavior, cultural practice, and tool for creative expression. Based on the expertise of the three professors, lectures will primarily investigate laughter through the lens of psychology, film history, and visual arts. The goal of placing laughter at the center of our discourse is to think and play across disciplines to explore the many contradictory ideas and experiences signified by laughter, from humor and collective joy to unease and social rupture. For weekly class assignments, students will be asked to conduct observational studies of themselves and others’ laughter patterns, make artworks inspired by stand-up, sitcoms, and slapstick comedy, or write close analyses of classic cinematic gags. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the building blocks of laughter; classic devices of modern comedy; and laughter as a force of resilience, resistance, and regeneration. Topics to be discussed will include the evolutionary roots of laughter as a behavior; the psychological and physiological substrates of laughter as a mode of emotional and self-regulation; humor in Dada, surrealism, performance art, and stand-up comedy; jokes and the unconscious; comic entanglements of modern bodies and machines; hysterical audiences of early cinema; and how to read funny faces, word play, spit takes, toilet humor, and sound gags. Experiential, hands-on opportunities for engaging with the course will involve expert panels, improv/comedy workshops, scientific laughter labs, and an art exhibit organized around laughter. Students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences, as part of regular class time, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Faculty

• John O’Connor

Open, Concept—Spring

This course will center the practical labor that sustains an arts and exhibition program through structured, hands-on work across galleries, studios, and program infrastructure. Students will meet weekly during scheduled class time and complete required supervised hours outside of class supporting exhibition installation and deinstallation, maintenance of shared spaces, documentation and archiving, and assistance with publications and communications, including websites and social media. As part of the course, students will collaboratively curate a student exhibition and contribute to the development of an arts publication or series of small catalogs. Students are responsible for weekly monitoring of the Heimbold Galleries and are expected to assist with and attend artist lectures, workshops, and exhibition openings. The course will emphasize collaboration, care, and professional responsibility, and will provide practical preparation for work in museums, galleries, studios, and arts organizations. Assessment will be based on participation, completion of assigned work hours, and regular written responses to exhibitions on campus, locally, and/or in New York City.

Faculty

• John O’Connor

Open, Lecture—Fall

Why is the topic of laughter so often siloed or scorned in discussions of high art, literature, and the sciences? Why don’t we take laughter seriously as a society? How many professors does it take to teach a course on laughter? (Two more than usual...) In this lecture with weekly seminars, students will develop a highly interdisciplinary understanding of laughter as a human behavior, cultural practice, and tool for creative expression. Based on the expertise of the three professors, lectures will primarily investigate laughter through the lens of psychology, film history, and visual arts. The goal of placing laughter at the center of our discourse is to think and play across disciplines to explore the many contradictory ideas and experiences signified by laughter, from humor and collective joy to unease and social rupture. For weekly class assignments, students will be asked to conduct observational studies of themselves and others’ laughter patterns, make artworks inspired by stand-up, sitcoms, and slapstick comedy, or write close analyses of classic cinematic gags. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the building blocks of laughter; classic devices of modern comedy; and laughter as a force of resilience, resistance, and regeneration. Topics to be discussed will include the evolutionary roots of laughter as a behavior; the psychological and physiological substrates of laughter as a mode of emotional and self-regulation; humor in Dada, surrealism, performance art, and stand-up comedy; jokes and the unconscious; comic entanglements of modern bodies and machines; hysterical audiences of early cinema; and how to read funny faces, word play, spit takes, toilet humor, and sound gags. Experiential, hands-on opportunities for engaging with the course will involve expert panels, improv/comedy workshops, scientific laughter labs, and an art exhibit organized around laughter.

Faculty

• John O’Connor
• Maia Pujara
• Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

First-Year Studies—Year

In the first half of this yearlong course, we will read, and use as models for our own essay writing, a range of classic essays and well-known near-contemporary and contemporary essays and memoir fragments that address the panorama of our experience on this planet. We will engage with work that considers nature, class, gender, race, deep memory, political praxis, aesthetic appreciation, existential joy or dread, and personal and family life. We will look at how the traditional essay appropriates narrative and lyric energy both to accommodate and create a living mind on the page. We will sharpen our own writing by developing principles of practical criticism that expose the tangled interactions of form and content. The second half of the course will focus on one or two canonical literary figures, whose work we will read closely and to which we will respond by employing all the new and radical literary forms of our moment-mashups, fan fiction and nonfiction, adaptations, interviews, podcasts, and any and all other ways contemporary mediums confront and assimilate the past. We will write clearly, dramatically, and well about many crucial things. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Vijay Seshadri