Courses in Film Studies
Below are short descriptions of undergraduate film courses offered in the Department of English for the Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 semester. For graduate courses, please click here.
ENG 230: Introduction to Film (Fay/ Fall 09, Schoonover/ Spring 2010)
This course introduces the basic tools of film analysis. The first half of the semester we study “Classical” Hollywood films, exploring how these mainstream feature films make meaning through a variety of formal and stylistic strategies. Here, students learn to identify and interpret the specific components of film’s visual and aural language, such as narrative, mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound. We examine spectatorship, realism, stardom, genre, and other central concerns of film scholarship. The second half of the course assumes proficiency with basic film analysis. By expanding our focus to include non-mainstream cinemas, it also challenges the primacy of the Classical Hollywood model. Here, we investigate documentary, the avant-garde, and various world cinemas. Throughout the term, the course attends to cinema as an articulation of historical, social, industrial, and political cultures. For more information contact Professor Jennifer Fay fayj@msu.edu or Professor Karl Schonover schoono8@msu.edu.
LL250B Korean Cinema (Shin/ Spring 2010)
This course examines the history and aesthetics of Korean cinema in relation to Korean society. The recent boom of Korean cinema since 1999 - in and outside of its small territory - has gained global enthusiasm as well as academic attention. The variety of Korean cinema, from commercial popular genre films to festival-circulating art films, has proven that Korean cinema is one of the most noteworthy and promising film industries today. The goal of this course is to develop broad understanding of Korean society by looking at the social and cultural issues in Korean cinema – –to name a few, Korean War and the division of the country, politics, gender and sexuality, and modernity. The course includes a wide range of films including the classic, blockbuster, melodrama, action film, comedy, documentary, and independent film. Taught in English, no prior knowledge in Korean language required. For more information contact Professor Mina Shin: mshin@cal.msu.edu.
ENG 330: Classical Film and Media Theory (Fay/ Fall 09)
What is film? What is the relationship between film and photography, painting and the “real” world that a film may capture? What is a good film? What are its unique aesthetic properties? How does a film affect, construct, or delimit a spectator? What is a film spectator? And how does cinema enable us to better understand ourselves as perceiving, emotional, and political subjects? Answers to these queries may seem obvious. (“A good film is entertaining…”) But there is a long and rich tradition of film theory that is concerned with elucidating and complicating not only how we answer these questions, but also on how we pose them in the first place. This course introduces film theory as a mode of inquiry through some of the major figures from the “classical” period (roughly from 1896 to 1960) including: Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, as well as the Surrealist forays into film criticism and filmmaking. It also considers films, in their own right, as theoretical experiments in perception, aesthetics, and politics.
ENG 331: Contemporary Film and Media Theory (Schoonover/ Spring 2010)
contact Professor Karl Schoonover:schoono8@msu.edu
ENG 332: Film History (Nieland/ Fall 2009)
This course offers a broad introduction to ways of approaching film within historical contexts of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. To do this, we will explore film’s status as a modern medium. Film’s modernity—its role in projects of industrial-commercial, cultural, national, or political innovation or renewal—has meant very different things across the globe, and throughout the twentieth-century and beyond. We will consider the interwar heyday of experimental cinematic movements (e.g., Soviet montage cinema, German expressionism, surrealism); the role of state-sponsored modernism like the British G.P.O. film unit in the 1930s and 1940s; the revival of cinematic modernisms following World War II in the guises of international new waves or art cinema; and more radical alternatives to commercial narrative cinema like underground film and third cinema. We will also explore the status of “classical” Hollywood cinema as itself an incarnation of “the modern” often inseparable from US political and economic power. We will be attentive to how the various styles and political agendas of modern cinema are fueled by technological developments, material constraints, international movements of resources and personnel, and industrial trends in film style and production, as well as urgent socio-political realities—war and revolution, the booms and busts of national economies, and the displacement of “traditional” social patterns by forces of capitalist modernization, to name a few. Secondary readings will model various methodologies of film historiography as well as claims to modernity advanced in artistic manifestoes. For more information contact Professor Justus Nieland nieland@msu.edu.
ENG 333: Film Movements and Genres: The Popular Hindi Cinema (Pillai/ Spring 2010)
This course offers a critical overview of one of the world’s largest and most beloved film industries—the popular cinema produced mostly in Bombay (Mumbai) and consumed around the world often under the label “Bollywood.” Focusing on the post-Independence (1947) era to the present, it introduces key films, directors, stars, genres, formal techniques, and themes, as well as critical analyses of these and other topics. Special attention will be given to the pervasive role of music, song, and dance. Other topics to be addressed include: the cultural sources of Hindi cinema, cinema and nationalism, the star system, and global audiences. This course assumes no previous knowledge of Indian culture or cinema, and all films have English subtitles. For more information contact ProfessorSwarnavel Pillai: eswaran@msu.edu. To see some great posters, click here.
ENG 334: Screenwriting ( Vincent, Pillai/ Fall 09. Wray/ Spring 10)
A workshop in writing for the movies, this course focuses on proper formatting, structure, dialogue, and characterization. Students write a short script and a feature-length script—about twelve pages per week.
ENG 431A: Studies in Ethnic Film, topics vary (Wray/ Spring 10)
Contact Professor Jeff Wray: wrayj@msu.edu
ENG 431B:Studies in Postcolonial Film. Thid World Cinema: Africa, The Caribbean, the Edges of Globalizations (Harrow/ Spring 10)
Third World Cinema is a loose and generic title intended to group together films from outside the mainstream Hollywood or European studios. Initially this grouping naturally included films from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. With time, the concept of Third World cinema has come to include "ethnic" films, and more generally, films associated with a minority, or Fourth World, population within First World countries or films made by peoples of the Third World, regardless of whether they actually live in their home countries or abroad.
Our work this semester will be focused on the films from Africa and the Caribbean, with particular attention to such issues as race, urban settings, globalization and melodramaz. We will view a number of films that present the current moment in their countries as experiencing varying degrees of crisis as seen in the worlds that children come to inhabit, the illegal immigration flows, and especially the consequences of a world order that has left their societies in difficulty. Not all the films deal with crises, but the settings are urban and as such set the stage for issues involving the passage into modernity, the failures of the state, the day-to-day scramble for living for many, and ultimately the drama of children who live on the edge, in the street, often on their own. For more information contact Professor Ken Harrow harrow@msu.edu.
ENG 431C: Studies in Film and Gender
Film and Gender: Feminist Experimental Film. This course examines experimental films by a range of women filmmakers, primarily from the seventies through the early nineties. These films have been touchstones in the development of much feminist film criticism that emerged around the same time. Experimental film becomes the focus for both creative and critical work because women filmmakers sought ways to represent experiences that had not previously been part of the filmic or cultural conversation. The challenge to use new forms was political as well as aesthetic. Central concerns of the course include the relation between women's cinema and feminist film studies; the connection of film form to the representation or expression of identity and desire; the politics and possibilities of an avant-garde then and now; and a greater understanding of the influence of psychoanalysis on feminist film work. The presumption is that students enter with a working knowledge of general film theory and familiarity with the classic Hollywood cinema.
ENG430: Seminar in Film Theory and Criticism (Topics Vary)
ENG 432: Seminar in Film History: British Film and Culture of the Past Twenty Years ( Vincent/ Spring 10)
In the early 1990s three interrelated phenomena galvanized the British cultural scene: British film began a renaissance with works such as Mike Leigh’s Naked, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, and Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels; the music scene saw the birth of BritPop, with Oasis, Blur, and Pulp leading the way; and the art scene saw the advent of the YBA (Young British Artists). This course concentrates mostly upon the films of the past twenty years, but will also focus upon the music and art scenes. For more information contact Professor Bill Vincent vincent@msu.edu.
ENG 434: Advanced Screenwriting (Vincent/ Spring 10)
A workshop in which students who have completed ENG 334 can hone their skills. Students will write a feature-length screenplay and will work on revision, preparing treatments, and practicing pitches. For more information contact Professor Bill Vincent vincent@msu.edu.
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