Courses

Introduction


Visit the UC Davis Registrar's General Catalog listing to view Film Studies (FMS) courses.
Click on the navigation links to the left to view course descriptions for upcoming quarters.


Descriptions of Courses Taught on a Regular Basis

The Film Studies program offers a wide selection of film courses. We have included descriptions of some of our popular recurring courses below:


Art (ART) 24: Introduction to Experimental Film and Video

Historical and contemporary film, video and digital media are presented within a critical dialogue. Artistic practice and engagement of cinematic and broadcast tools will be analyzed in relation to their mainstream counterparts and an array of developing exhibition possibilities. Prerequisite: None.

Topical Outline:
This course will focus on the evolution of moving image technologies and the shifts within avantgarde artistic practices that have responded to these changes. Students will learn about film and video as well as their developmental, conceptual and historical differences and relationships within the fine arts. A strong emphasis will be on experimental short film and video forms. Examples of art works by those specializing in the field of moving images will be viewed including profound works by artists who simultaneously engage more traditional fine art mediums (painting, sculpture, collage, etc.). Seminal texts on the subjects of media history and artistic practice will be read and discussed as well as theoretical texts from philosophy and the sciences. Students will be asked to respond in class discussions and in written essay form.

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Art (ART) 150: Theory and Criticism of Electronic Media

The history of electronic media, stressing development, critique, application, and relationship to art practice. Analysis of the conceptual biases of electronic media as an artistic and cultural mode of expression. Prerequisite: None.

Topical Outline:
This course will be both a contemporary and historic examination of how electronic media has established a strong bridge between the arts and sciences. Artistic innovations on the cultural frontier utilizing various technologies as both medium and metaphor will be thematically explored. Topics may include but are not limited to cybernetics, artificial intelligence, communication theory, automata, responsive environments, surveillance, net art and interactive design. Weekly thematic readings will be supplemented by examples shown in lecture.

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Art (ART) 12: Beginning Video (Production Class)
Darrin Martin, Associate Professor of Art Studio (dtmartin@ucdavis.edu)

Production techniques of video, including shooting, editing, lighting, sound andeffects. A conceptual framework for video-art techniques. Prerequisite: None.

Topical Outline:
This beginning level course will introduce strategies and basic skills for visual and audio production within the context of the certain theoretical and conceptual practices within the visual arts. Structural, experimental, improvisational, and image/audio processing approaches are explored in conjunctions with instruction in the use of analog and digital equipment. Development of critiquing skills and a contemporary and historical study of the independent media field and video within fine arts venues are vital parts of the course.

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Art (ART) 114 A-D: Intermediate Video (Production Class)
Darrin Martin, Associate Professor of Art Studio (dtmartin@ucdavis.edu)

A - Animation: This course will examine the relationship between drawing, digital still and moving images through the use of traditional drawing techniques, collage and digital processes. Animation will be taught as both an artistic approach and a conceptual platform. Prerequisites: ART 12 or TCS 100 and at least one drawing course.

B - Experimental Documentary: Study of the documentary form within the context of experimental practice. Students will examine various forms of media representation and how forms act as privileged or underprivileged messengers of what is socially considered fact or fiction. Prerequisite: ART 12 or TCS 100.

C - Sound for Vision: This course focuses on the area of sound production as a way to insinuate descriptive, exploratory and cinematic experiences upon its listener. Students will be working with conceptual and experimental strategies to produce complex audio compositions that stand alone as pieces themselves and/or accompany a sequence of images. Prerequisite: ART 12 or TCS 100.

D - Performance Strategies: Students engage video as a tool that expands the capabilities of performance art strategies including but also moving beyond its capability to capture an event. Improvisation, direction, projection and image processing in real time are some of the tactics to be explored. Prerequisite: ART 12 or TCS 100.

Topical Outline:
Intermediate level video courses enhance students' skills for visual and audio production through the context of theme specific practices within the visual arts. In relation to the chosen intermediate themes, students will establish conceptual frameworks aligning specific processes to given genres. Further development of critiquing skills and a contemporary and historical study of the independent media field and video within the fine arts are vital parts of the course. Methods of distribution and promotion of art works will also actively discussed.

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Art (ART) 117: Advanced Video and Electronic Arts (Production Class)
Darrin Martin, Associate Professor of Art Studio dtmartin@ucdavis.edu

Students will be encouraged to foster independently driven projects in the electronic arts ranging from single-channel videos to installations that incorporate media to net art and live performances. Prerequisites: upper-division standing, must have taken ART 12 or TCS 100 and any ART 114 and/or TCS 101.

Topical Outline:
Students will further develop an understanding of both analog and digital tools within the conceptual framework of time-based media. Types of creative communities with an interest in the electronic arts will be engaged and discussed. Methods of distribution and promotion of art works will be encouraged and explored.

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African and American Studies (AAS) 168 & 198: Black Documentary: Theory and Practice
Christine Acham, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies (cacham@ucdavis.edu)

This class focuses on the art of documentary production. Working in groups students will write and produce documentary films. Documentaries are often seen as objective, as reality. Through an understanding of documentary history and theory the class will ask students to consider this notion by looking at both African American and mainstream documentaries. The students will learn documentary theory and different modes, styles, and types of documentary film-making. Students will produce films based on local social issues and cultural events, such as the Tobago Heritage Festival.  This class is taught as a Summer Session Abroad in Trinidad and Tobago. For more information, please visit the UC Davis Summers Abroad site.

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Chinese (CHN) 101: Chinese Film
Xiaomei Chen, Professor of Chinese - EALC (xmchen@ucdavis.edu)

This course is an advanced survey of Chinese film from inception to the present day in its historical and cultural contexts. Students explore the national and international conditions of early twentieth-century Chinese society that shaped Chinese cinema. We discuss how traditional Chinese culture, such as fiction and theater, and modern culture, such as drama and theories, helped form a film industry that imported Western ideas and forms for diverse political and cultural agendas. Students also analyze the most influential films by different generations of film makers in the Republican period (1911 to 1949), the first seventeen years of the PRC (1949 to 1966), the Cultural-Revolutionary period (1966 to 1976), and the post-Mao period (1976 to present). Particular attention is given to gender, class, and race, and their complex relationships in the formation of Chinese film. Weekly film viewings and reading assignments aid students to understand lectures and to articulate their critical views in writing assignments.

CHN 101 fulfills the General Education Requirements for three areas: Topical Breadth (Arts & Humanities subject area), Diversity, and Writing. It also counts toward the Chinese major or minor's requirements. No prior knowledge of Chinese language, culture and history is required.

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Classics (CLA) 102: Film and the Classical World
Emily Albu, Associate Professor of Classics

The Classical World as portrayed in films. Viewings and discussions of modern versions of ancient dramas, modern dramas set in the Ancient Mediterranean world, and films imbued with classical themes and allusions. Supplementary readings in ancient literature and mythology. Prerequisite: any Classics course except 30 or 31. 

CLA 102 fulfills the General Education Requirements for two areas: Topical Breadth (Arts & Humanities subject area) and Writing.

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Film Studies (FMS) 120: Italian-American Cinema

This course explores representations of Italian American identity in North-American cinema. Working from a historical perspective, FMS 120 analyzes both Hollywood productions and independent films in order to illuminate the different ways in which Italian American ethnicity and culture have been interpreted and represented.

Studying these media representations provides insight into how American society has positioned Italian American culture, as an example of the Other, throughout the twentieth century. Complementing this approach, the course also addresses the question of how American cinema has constructed images of race, ethnicity, and gender in order to dialectically configure a sense of "Americanness."

FMS 120 fulfills the General Education Requirements in the areas of Topical Breadth (Arts and Humanities), Diversity, and Writing. In addition to satisfying the Depth Subject Matter requirement for the Film Studies Major and Minor (Category: Film and Social Identities), FMS 120 meets the Italian Major requirements as an elective in related fields.

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Film Studies (FMS) 121: New Italian Cinema
Margherita Heyer-Caput, Professor of Italian (mheyercaput@ucdavis.edu)

This recently approved course investigates representations of historical, national, social, ethnic, and gender identities in the thriving Italian cinema of the 21st century, in relationship with the deep cultural changes that Italy has experienced since World War II.

FMS 121 fulfills the GE requirements in the areas of Topical Breadth (Arts and Humanities), Diversity, and Writing. In addition to satisfying the Depth Subject Matter requirement for the Film Studies Major and Minor (Category: Cinema, Nation and Nationality), FMS 121 is cross-listed as ITA 121 and meets the elective requirement for the Italian Major and Minor. Previous knowledge of Italian is not required.

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Film Studies (FMS) 125: Topics in Film Genre - Film Noir
Jaimey Fisher, Associate Professor of German

This course introduces students to film analysis, theories, and writing via a special focus on a film genre, film noir. Film noir, the name usually given to shadowy, mostly crime and detective films made from the 1940 to 1950s, has proven one of the most resilient of Hollywood forms, including such important films as Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, and Blade Runner - arguably many of the most acclaimed, certainly many of the most popular films Hollywood has ever produced. In fact, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of film noir is how it has consistently evoked both popular and scholarly interest. The course will examine films noirs, as well as the question of genre more generally, from a number of different critical and theoretical angles, including: a focus on their socio-historical contexts, spectatorship and narrative techniques, their unreliable and unstable masculine heroes, and the femmes fatales that surround them.

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Film Studies (FMS) 189: Special Topics - France's "Dark Years": Postwar French Cinema Remembers a Difficult Past
Liz Constable, Associate Professor of French

This course examines one of the most important questions that artists, politicians, and legislators in most European nations face today: what are the responsible, ethical ways of dealing with a difficult national past? Our course addresses this question by investigating the diverse roles that films have played and still play in post-World War II (WWII) construction of memories of WWII in France. We focus on films dealing with the memory of WWII in France, the German Occupation of France, the Vichy regime and its politics and policies. Our objective is the examination and analysis of the ways film-makers use the medium of film to interpret contested, and controversial, historical events of WWII in France. How do different films deploy the medium of film to corroborate, or contest, existing narratives of the experiences of the Occupation during WW II? How do films use the medium of film to develop new narratives about those experiences? And how do films intervene to revise and respond to existing narrative accounts of France during the Occupation.

Topics included the following: analysis of filmic interpretations of the French Resistance; role of film in Vichy's anti-Semitism; filmic interpretations of everyday life during the Occupation for the civil population; films as mediators of the impact of Vichy politics on women's lives; conditions of film production during the Occupation.

Course Content: We study films by some of France's most distinguished film-makers of the postwar period: Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Melville, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Audiard, and, of course, Max Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity. We also examine key cultural historical accounts of the Occupation (e.g., Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome), and a representative range of critical analysis of the roles of film in constituting and contesting individual and collective memories.

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Film Studies (FMS) 189: Special Topics - Hong Kong Cinema
Sheldon Lu, Professor of Comparative Literature

The course serves as an introduction to the various aspects of Hong Kong cinema, one of the largest and most dynamic film industries in the world. We study the history and development of Hong Kong cinema, its stylistic features, diverse genres (martial arts, action, comedy, ghost story, historical epic, and melodrama), major themes, and the emergence and characteristics of the New Wave.

We pay attention to internationally acclaimed directors (John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Stanley Kwan, Wong Kar-wai, Peter Chan, etc.) and stars (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, and many others). The course also explores dimensions of Hong Kong's film industry, its local, regional and international markets and audiences, patterns of transnational collaborations, and the global influence of Hong cinema.

The class is conducted in English, and all the films are subtitled in English.

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Film Studies (FMS) 189: Special Topics - Chinese Cinema
Sheldon Lu, Professor of Comparative Literature

This course focuses on the cinematic traditions of China, from the early silent era through to the twenty-first century. Students explore the themes, styles, aesthetics, and socio-political contexts of particular films as well as the evolution of the entire Chinese film industry. Special emphasis is given to the New Chinese Cinema from the early 1980s to the present moment. The representative directors under discussion include such internationally renowned filmmakers as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Ang Lee.

The course examines the New Chinese Cinema as an outgrowth of indigenous, local, and national roots as well as a necessary response to international film culture. The course looks at how films engage in social critique and cultural reflection, and how film artists react to the conditions and forces of socialist politics, capitalist economics, tradition, modernization, and globalization in China and Taiwan. In Fall 2007, UCD's hosting of the Taiwan Film Festival, October 10-13, allowed the course to offer invaluable perspectives on a vital component of Chinese-language cinema---Taiwanese cinema---through rare opportunities to discuss films with the directors, writers, and producers present at UCD film screenings.

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Italian (ITA) 150: Studies in Italian Cinema
JoAnn Cannon, Professor of Italian

Introduction to Italian cinema from 1945 to the present. This survey course will analyze major works by such Italian directors as Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Wertmuller, Bertolucci, the Taviani brothers, Germi, and Benigni. Films are in Italian with English subtitles. The course will be taught in English.

Films studied include:

  • Open City, (1945), Directed by Roberto Rossellini
  • The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette, 1948), Directed by Vittorio De Sica
  • Divorce Italian Style ( Divorzio all'italiana, 1961), Directed by Pietro Germi
  • The Conformist (Il conformista, 1970), Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
  • We All loved Each Other So Much, Directed by Ettore Scola (1975)
  • Night of the Shooting Stars (La notte di San Lorenzo), Directed by The Taviani Brothers (1982)
  • Cinema paradiso, Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (1989)
  • Ciao professore, Directed by Lina Wertmuller (1994)
  • Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella, 1998), Directed by Roberto Benigni
  • Nuovomondo, Directed by Crialesi (2006)

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Japanese (JPN) 106: Japanese Culture Through Films

Taught in English and designed for undergraduates and graduate students with no prior background in Japanese language, literature, or history, this course aims to introduce various manifestations of Japanese cultural paradigms and imagination through the medium of film by some of the most prominent talents in the Japanese cinema from the 1920s to the present-day. They include such artists as Kurosawa Akira, Kobayashi Masaki, Ozu Yasujirō, Ichikawa Kon, Morita Yoshimitsu, and Teshigahara Hiroshi. Some of the films I have used are based on widely-acclaimed literary texts, including Abe Kōbō's Woman in the Dunes, Ōoka Shōhei's Fires on the Plain, and Endō Shūsaku The Sea and Poison. In such cases, comparisons between the cinematic interpretation and the original text would form an important theme for study and analysis.

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Jewish Studies (JST) 120: Jews in American Cinema

Why has Barbara Streisand become a cultural icon? How has Woody Allen shaped our idea of the Jewish male? Is Borat anti-Semitic or funny (or both)? This course will examine representations of Jews in American popular film from the birth of the motion picture through the present day. We will also explore the role Jews themselves played in the entertainment industry. Topics will include: the significance of the Hollywood "moguls," Jews and blackface minstrelsy, representations of gender and relationships between Jewish men and women, antisemitism on the silver-screen. Note that film screenings will take place on Tuesday with lecture/discussion on Thursday.

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Religious Studies (RST) 135: God and Satan Through Film

Known by many names and in various guises, God and Satan are among the most central figures in many cultures. This class will explore some of their manifestations and actions by using the lens of film. While the focus will be on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we will also note their importance in other religions. Films will include works by Bresson, Polanski and Kieslowski, and works from Mexico, the USA, and Russia. Texts will include biblical books, Bulgakov's Master and Margarite, and scholarly studies. Guest speakers will also present their interpretations and share their knowledge.

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Spanish (SPA) 159: New Argentine Cinema
Ana Peluffo, Associate Professor of Spanish

This course studies the cinematic production of young and established filmmakers who started producing their films in the context of Argentina's deep economic collapse (2001). Paying close attention to the post-dictatorial context in which these low budget films were made, the course examines issues pertaining to the films' production, circulation and consumption by local and foreign audiences. Films by Lucrecia Martel, Carlos Sorin, Martín Rejtman, Celina Murga, and Israel Caetano will be the focus of the course, but other filmmakers will also be covered. Topics to be discussed include the visions of Argentina that these films promote, the way in which ideologies of gender, ethnicity and class intersect within the narrative of the films, and the displacement of the filmic referent from Buenos Aires to the periphery in recent years. Readings include writings by the directors and theoretical essays by film critics.

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University Writing Program (UWP) 102A: Writing in Film Studies
Pamela Demory, Lecturer of the University Writing Program (phdemory@ucdavis.edu)

This course is designed for upper-division students in Film Studies, Technocultural Studies, English, American Studies, or any other discipline that includes the analysis and understanding of film as a medium. In class, we will analyze and discuss a number of classic and contemporary Hollywood films (which will be required viewing outside of class) and a selection of essays (including analyses of individual films, film theory, movie reviews, academic research papers). The course is primarily a discussion and workshop course - not a lecture course - so students will often work together in small groups and present their ideas orally as well as in writing. Students will write papers of various kinds, including an analysis of film form, a critical analysis (employing genre, auteur, historical, ideological, or popular culture approaches), a research paper or script proposal, and a film review. We will discuss how to analyze the rhetorical situation of a given writing task; how to effectively use the terminology of film studies; how to plan, draft, and revise papers; and how to do research in film studies - including using specialized library databases.

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Women's Studies (WMS) 164: Gender and Cinematic Representation - Mothers and Daughters

This course explores the cinematic representation of the often vexed relationship between mothers and daughters. In contrast to Freud, whose focus on the Oedipal conflict as primary for ego development causes him to pay scant attention to the relationship between mothers and daughters, many feminist theorists have privileged the mother-daughter relationship, viewing it as vital to a woman's psychic development. Drawing on readings by object relations theorists such as Nancy Chowdorow and Jessica Benjamin, as well as on the work of Nancy Friday, we will explore both the positive and negative ramifications of the more fluid ego-boundaries that exist between a mother and a daughter for both members of this dyad.

In studying the ways in which the mother-daughter relationship has been represented cinematically, we will discuss, among other things, the institution of motherhood and the role of the maternal in classical Hollywood melodrama; the gender implications of the melodramatic genre; the relationship of melodrama to the so-called woman's film; and the sociocritical possibilities inherent in the melodramatic genre.

In addition to providing critical readings of such film classics as Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce, the course will foreground the films of Douglas Sirk, as well as more recent remakes of Sirk's melodramatic masterpieces, All That Heaven Allows (eg. R.W. Fassbinder's Ali, Fear Eats the Soul and the recently released Far From Heaven and Imitation of Life, Almodovar's High Heels). We will then turn to women filmmakers' representation of the mother-daughter relationship in such films as Antonia's Line, Daughters of the Dust, The Piano and Real Women Have Curves in an effort to determine the ways in which the perspectives brought to bear by women impact the cinematic representation of the mother-daughter relationship.

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