ENG 3115: Introduction to Film Theory and Criticism--Text/Context

This course will offer a broad introduction to various strategies for interpreting films contextually. While the focus of the course will be largely methods which may be termed "historical," the meaning of that term is greatly divergent within the various approaches. These approaches will encompass a range of extratextual influences including aesthetic, technological, industrial, and social history. But whatever the specific approach, the course will focus on the importance across these various methodologies of looking at a film as an always contextualized, never simply "textual" artifact.

Readings will span the history of film theory from the early Russian analyses to contemporary scholarship and will include readings from a number of scholarly traditions including genre theory, auteurist criticism, apparatus theory, scholarship on race and gender, postmodern theory, political economy, &c.

This course is designed as an introduction to a broad range of practices sometimes labeled "video art" or "experimental video." The exclusive focus of the course will be exclusively on non-narrative approaches to the theory and practice of videomaking. Students will work on a number of short projects throughout the semester (about one every two weeks) that engage simultaneously with different theoretical problems, technological challenges, and aesthetic strategies. The projects will span all of the stages of video production from storyboarding to sound editing as well as a wide variety of aesthetic forms. The course will conclude with a short final project of the your own devising that grows out of one or a number of the theories and formal approaches that we have explored during the semester.

ENG 4136: Video Production

    
 

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