Undergraduate Courses

A study of important Italian films from World War II to the present. Consideration of works that typify major directors and trends. Topics include neorealism, self-reflexivity and metacinema, fascism and war, and postmodernism. Films by Fellini, Antonioni, Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Wertmuller, Tornatore, and Moretti.

Most films in Italian with English subtitles.

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.

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.

An examination of Hitchcock’s career as a filmmaker from Blackmail to Frenzy, with close attention to the wide variety of critical and theoretical approaches to his work. Topics include the status of the image; the representation of the feminine and of the body; spectatorship; painterliness and theatricality; generic and psychoanalytic issues.

The New Wave movement in film examined in the context of French arts, culture, and politics of the 1950s. Films by Chabrol, Varda, Resnais, Rohmer and others, with a special focus on the lives and films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. No knowledge of French required; readings and discussion section in French available.

Courses in this group are conducted in English; readings may be in French or English. French Group C courses numbered above 100 are open to all students in Yale College.

The history of Japanese cinema to 1960, including the social, cultural, and industrial backgrounds to its development. Periods covered include the silent era, the coming of sound and the wartime period, the occupation era, the golden age of the 1950s, and the new modernism of the late 1950s.

No knowledge of Japanese required. Formerly JAPN 270. 

Study of works that challenge and provoke philosophies of life—how to live, what to live for, what life is. The point of departure is a selection of writings from the Hebrew Bible and moves from there to modern philosophical and literary re-imaginings and alternate realities. What are questions to which a philosophy of life is the reply? Insofar as a philosophy of life is itself a question, what is the repertoire of replies offered in our texts? What is your reply? Readings from among the Bible (Genesis, Job), Shakespeare, Spinoza, Diderot, Kierkegaard, Woolf, Camus, Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, and Achille Mbembe. The course is co-taught with James Wood.

Poetry and song run through the heart of both Judaism and Islam, and so-called mystical verse plays a vital role within both traditions. This class looks at key works from both of these bodies of verse, on their own terms and in relation to one another. It also examines the cultural and historical matrices that gave rise to the poetry. Subjects range from alphabets of creation, the poetry of ascent, wine poetry, and the divine nature of the beloved to negative theology, interacting planes of macrocosm and microcosm, antinomian breakthrough, and, above all, poetry’s power to bring about critical transformations of consciousness. Readings are drawn from the Bible, Hebrew visionary poetry of Late Antiquity (Poems of the Palaces, Book of Creation), pre- and early-Islamic material, the Qur’an, the Arabized Hebrew of two major Andalusian poets, Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Judah HaLevi, the syncretic Sufism of Ibn al-‘Arabi and of the great Persian poets Rumi and Hafez, the extensive Kabbalistic tradition that developed in 13th-century Spain and 16th-century Palestine, the hybrid liturgy of the Muslim-Jewish Donmeh of Salonika (and their Turkish precursors), Ghalib’s Urdu ghazals, Kabir’s Bhakti-influenced vernacular Hindi poetry, and secular transformations of this mystical material into the modern era. All work is read in English translation. Material in the original languages is available to interested students.

In this course we study different kinds of narratives about the end of times and its consequences in Iberian and Latin American cultures. We include political, theological, social, and environmental narratives across periodizations in Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Instruction is in Spanish.

In this course we study different kinds of narratives about the end of times and its consequences in Iberian and Latin American cultures. We include political, theological, social, and environmental narratives across periodizations in Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Instruction is in Spanish.

Consideration of the architecture, town planning, and symbolic functions of various cities in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and East Asia. Discussion of the representation of these cities in literature and film. Works include older Soviet and Chinese films about Shanghai and contemporary films about Hong Kong and Beijing.