Graduate courses in Film Studies

(Same as FILMSTUD 101.) The close analysis of film. Emphasis is on formal and narrative techniques in structure and style, and detailed readings of brief sequences. Elements such as cinematography, mise-en-scène, composition, sound, and performance. Films from various historical periods, national cinemas, directors, and genres. Prerequisite: FILMSTUD 4 or equivalent. Recommended: ARTHIST 1 or FILMSTUD 102.

4 units, Aut (Bukatman, S)

FILMSTUD 302. Theories of the Moving Image

(Same as FILMSTUD 102.) Major theoretical arguments and debates about cinema: realism,formalism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and phenomenology. Prerequisites: ARTHIST 1, FILMSTUD 4.

4 units, Spr (Ma, J)

FILMSTUD 311. The Body in American Genre Film: From Chaplin to The Matrix

(Same as FILMSTUD 111.) The American genre film as a mass form that shares elements with a carnivalesque, folk culture such as a rejection of politeness and piety, and an emphasis on the physical. Genres include comedy, western, war, science fiction, musical, horror, melodrama, gangster, and cult, exploitation, and blaxploitation films. The place of the body onscreen. How does the body exist in relation to the world, other bodies, and the act of perception? What meaning does bodily movement have in relation to narrative?

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 314. Comics: A Lively Art

(Same as FILMSTUD 114.) History and aesthetics of comics in relation to emerging mass media and modernist and postmodernist aesthetic and narrative practices. Focus is on innovators in humorous and dramatic strips, superheroes, undergrounds and independents, political commentary, and autobiography.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 315. Documentary Issues and Traditions

(Same as FILMSTUD 115.) Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 316. International Documentary

(Same as FILMSTUD 116.) Historical, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary through nonfiction films in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

4 units, Aut (Meltzer, J)

FILMSTUD 330. Italian Cinema: Neorealism and Beyond

(Same as FILMSTUD 130.) The post-WW II era. Aesthetic and sociopolitical dimensions of neorealism; 60s cinema of economic miracle; and Italian variations on popular film genres such as the spaghetti western. Filmmakers include Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, and Antonioni.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 331. Politics and Aesthetics in East European Cinema

(Same as FILMSTUD 131.) From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Czech new wave, and new Yugoslav film. Thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of filmmakers such as Wajda, Jancso, Forman, and Kusturica.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 332. East Asian Cinema

(Same as FILMSTUD 132.) Social, historical, and aesthetic dimensions of the cinemas of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and Korea. Topics such as nation and gender, form and genre, and local and transnational conditions of practice and reception. Screenings include popular and art films from the silent to contemporary eras, including, Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, and Im Kwon-taek.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 333A. Latin American Cinema

(Same as FILMSTUD 133A.) Emphasis is on Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba. How filmmakers represent and sometimes rewrite key moments in national history. When have filmmakers constructed a dialogue with older cinematic traditions versus breaking from past practices? How have political concerns shaped cinematic practices. Directors include Fernando de Fuentes, Luis Buñuel, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, Patricio Guzmán, Humberto Solas, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Lucrecia Martel, and Héctor Babenco.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 334A. Poetic Cinema: The Soviet School

(Same as FILMSTUD 134A.) The poetic or archaic school of Soviet cinema which emerged primarily in the non-Russian Soviet Republics in the 60s and 70s and traced its aesthetic to the films of Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Films by Dovzhenko, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, Tengiz Abuladze, and Otar Ioseliani.

4 units, Spr (Staff)

FILMSTUD 344. Experimental Video Workshop

(Same as FILMSTUD 144.) Theory and practice of the moving image. Students work on video exercises and experiments as applied theory: attempts at practically implementing, verifying, or challenging ideas about sound, image, and performance. Prerequisites: FILMPROD 114 or equivalent, and consent of instructor.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 350. Cinema and the City

(Same as FILMSTUD 150.) Utopian built environments of vast perceptual and experiential richness in the cinema and city. Changing understandings of urban space in film. The cinematic city as an arena of social control, social liberation, collective memory, and complex experience. Films from international narrative traditions, industrial films, experimental cinema, documentaries, and musical sequences. Recommended: 4 or equivalent.

4 units, Win (Bukatman, S)

FILMSTUD 352. Cinema-Machine

(Same as FILMSTUD 152.) The film medium as culmination of the industrial and electronic revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the apotheosis of modernist impulses around the problematic of a perfect vision and visibility. The ideal of cinema in relation to its technological basis: the film apparatus as mechanical artifact, desiring machine, phenomenological toy, and instrument of knowledge. Screenings.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 400. Cinema and Surrealist Imagination

Theoeretical and practical approaches to cinema in the framework of ideas and aesthetic principles pursued by 20s and 30s European writers and artists associated with Dada and Surrealism. Forms of avant garde filmmaking and cine-writing engaged in a rebellion against reason and logic, and invested in explorations of the unconscious through automatism, oneirism, chance, and visualization of desire. Writers include Breton, Bataille, and Artaud; filmmakers include Buñuel, Dali, Man Ray, and Duchamp.

5 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 404. Postwar American Avant Garde Cinema

History and theory of post-WW II American independent and experimental film. Emphasis is on issues of audiovisual form, structure, and medium specificity. Films and writings include Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, and Hollis Frampton.

5 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 407. The Still Moving Image

Tension and overlap between cinema and photography as technological media, beginning with Frankfurt school critiques of media theory, classical film, and photography theory through recent considerations of the post-cinematic age of digital and virtual images. How ideas of indexicality, medium specificity, memory, duration, narrativity, chance, stasis, repetition have informed accounts of the relationship of these media.

5 units, Aut (Ma, J)

FILMSTUD 410A. Documentary Perspectives I

Restricted to M.F.A. documentary film students. Topics in nonfiction media. Presentations and screenings by guest filmmakers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

4 units, Win (Krawitz, J)

FILMSTUD 410B. Documentary Perspectives II

Restricted to M.F.A. documentary film students. Continuation of 410A. Topics in nonfiction media. Presentations and screenings by guest filmmakers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

4 units, not given this year

FILMSTUD 660. Independent Study

For graduate students only. Approved independent research projects with individual faculty members.

1-15 units, Aut (Staff), Win (Staff), Spr (Staff), Sum (Staff)

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Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Alphabetical Index

Bulletin Archive

Graduate courses in Film Studies