Undergraduate Courses

Film is a hybrid medium, the meeting point of several others. This course focuses on the relationship of film to theater, painting, and video, suggesting that where two media are in evidence, there is usually a third. Topics include space, motion, framing, color, theatricality, tableau vivant, ekphrasis, spectatorship, and new media. Readings feature art historical and film theoretical texts as well as essays pertinent to specific films. Films by Fassbinder, Bergman, von Trier, Jarman, Godard, Haneke, Antonioni, Greenaway and others.

Consideration of the centrality to media practice of political identities, including those based in class, gender, ethnicity, region, and religion among others. Films by such directors as Todd Haynes, Shirley Clarke, Barry Jenkins, Barbara Kopple, and Charles Burnett; literary and critical works by Edouard Louis, Etienne Balibar, Clarice Lispector, and Judith Butler among others.

Cinema is uniquely prominent in French culture. Painters, writers, philosophers engage it. Its ambitions took off after WWII, when teen-age film fanatics Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer, developed into feared critics at Cahiers du Cinema, then began making world famous New Wave films in 1959. This seminar examines the directors they admired (Renoir, Bresson) or eviscerated in order to capture the “idea of cinema” they injected into their own productions—romantic, existentialist, finally political—right up through the events of May ’68 in which cinema played a key role. The feminism of the 70s, (Varda, Duras, Akerman), challenged and expanded the New Wave idea which has been carried into the 21st c. by actors like Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Juliet Binoche and Isabel Huppert and by passionate philosophical directors like Claire Denis and Olivier Assayas. We study the politics of culture that fosters such ambitious cinema, while each participant explores one director or trend in depth.

The history of French cinema c. 1930 to 1970, from the onset of sound through the New Wave movement. The New Wave “idea of cinema”; the relation of cinema to national self-perception and state policy in France.

Close study of the intersection of aesthetics and ethics with regard to how German films, since 1945, have dealt with Nazi history. Through the study of German-language films (with subtitles), produced in postwar East, West, and unified Germany, students consider and challenge perspectives on the Third Reich and postwar Germany, while learning basic categories of film studies.

Jan Hagens jan.hagens@yale.edu

Close study of the intersection of aesthetics and ethics with regard to how German films, since 1945, have dealt with Nazi history. Through the study of German-language films (with subtitles), produced in postwar East, West, and unified Germany through 2007, students consider and challenge perspectives on the Third Reich and postwar Germany, while learning basic categories of film studies.

Course multi titled as GMAN273/FILM319

Introduction to contemporary Latin American cinema from 1980 to 2016, with review of films from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala, Cuba, and Mexico, and emphasis on how the legacy of the sixties informs contemporary film language and how films articulate the relation between politics and art today. Topics include: discourse of human rights in the aftermath of dictatorship; representations of social and economic injustice; transnational migration; and indigenous peoples. Sequel to LITR 360/FILM 363.

Prerequisite: Suggested, but not required: FILM 363/ LITR 360 (students who have not taken this course will be asked to watch four movies from the syllabus for background information); knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese.

From the late 1950s, demands for “new cinemas” were being raised in different parts of the world. What was soon to come forth changed the practice and understanding of film until our time. While open to diverse intellectual approaches, this course investigates the emergence of various “new wave cinemas” by placing them not only in their national contexts but also within a global frame. Our comparative critical approach focuses on the cinematic, with a constant sideway gaze towards the visual and literary,  modernism of Brazil (Cinema Novo), France (Nouvelle Vague with an eye for Nouveau Roman), Iran (Moj-e Now, often juxtaposed and analyzed with the “New Poetry” ), and Yugoslavia (The Black Wave). Authoritative historiographies of these new wave cinemas have repeatedly underappreciated documentary films, often placing them into the evolutionary narrative of a “national cinema” or that of an auteur. This course, in reverse, foregrounds the transnational and the nonfiction. The documentaries produced in the formative years, the moment of emergence, of these new waves are established as a kind of “pre-history” that impacted how these cinematic modernisms developed in time. As the class moves forward, two major sub-themes will emerge: the body and the city. We consider these questions: Do films brought under the designation new wave have a different relationship to the materiality of the profilmic world? In what ways the bodies and urban environments they film affect them? Can one speak positively of a global new wave style? And, if the answer to that question is yes, what were the conditions of its border crossings?

The course covers most of the performing arts: ballet, opera, mass spectacle, and theater. Students read selections from famous Russian theoreticians of the performing arts, such as Constantine Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Mikhail Fokine. They also explore these directors’ productions and some of the major plays of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (e.g. by Anton Chekhov, Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and the documentary theater movement of Teatr.doc).   All readings are available in both Russian and English; no knowledge of Russian is required.

The years between 1918 and 1933 are the Golden Age of German film. In its development from Expressionism to Social Realism, this German cinema produced works of great variety, many of them in the international avantgarde. This introductory seminar gives an overview of the silent movies and sound films made during the Weimar Republic and situate them in their artistic, cultural, social, and political context between WWI and WWII, between the Kaiser’s German Empire and the Nazis’ Third Reich. Further objectives include: familiarizing students with basic categories of film studies and film analysis; showing how these films have shaped the history and the language of film; discussing topic-oriented and methodological issues such as: film genres (horror film, film noir, science fiction, street film, documentary film); set design, camera work, acting styles; narration in film; avantgarde cinema; the advent and use of sound in film; Realism versus Expressionism; film and popular mythology; melodrama; representation of women; modern urban life as spectacle; film and politics. Directors studied include: Grune, Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau, Pabst, Richter, Ruttmann, Sagan, von Sternberg, Wiene, et al.