Catalogue

Film and Electronic Arts

film.bard.edu

Faculty

Overview

Critical thinking and creative work go hand in hand in the Film and Electronic Arts Program, which integrates a wide variety of creative practices with the study of history and criticism of the medium. All production majors take required courses in film history while pursuing filmmaking. A student writing a Senior Project in the history of film or video will have taken one or two production workshops. 

Areas of Study

The program encourages interest in a wide range of expressive modes in film and electronic arts. These include animation, narrative and non-narrative filmmaking, documentary, performance, and installation practices. Regardless of a student’s choice of specialization, the program’s emphasis leans toward neither fixed professional formulas nor mere technical expertise, but rather toward imaginative engagement and the cultivation of an individual voice that has command over the entire creative process. For example, a student interested in narrative filmmaking would be expected to write an original script, shoot it, and then edit the film into its final form. Students are also expected to take advantage of Bard’s liberal arts curriculum by studying subjects that relate to their specialties.

Requirements

A student’s first year is devoted primarily to acquiring a historical and critical background. The focus in the sophomore year is on learning the fundamentals of production and working toward Moderation. For Moderation, each prospective major presents a selection of work in film/electronic arts or a historical/critical essay of 10 pages. In the Upper College, students choose one of two tracks: production or film history and criticism. The junior year is devoted mainly to deepening and broadening the student’s creative and critical awareness; the senior year to a yearlong Senior Project, which can take the form of a creative work in film/electronic arts or an extended, in-depth historical or critical essay. Students majoring in the program are expected to complete the following courses prior to Moderation: two film history courses and two 200-level film or electronic media production workshops. Upper College students must complete Film 208, Introduction to 16mm Film; a 300-level film or electronic media production workshop; a 300-level film history course; Film 405, Senior Seminar (no credit); and the Senior Project.

Students on the film history and criticism track are expected to complete the following courses prior to Moderation: three film courses and one 200-level film or electronic media production workshop. Upper College students must complete two 300-level film history courses; a course outside of the program related to proposed Senior Project work; the Senior Project; and additional coursework charted in consultation with the adviser.

Recent Senior Projects in Film and Electronic Arts

• “Baagh-e-Sindh/Sindhi Garden”
• “The Gospel According to Andrei: Biblical Narrative in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky”
• “minor landscape study no. 0.1”
• “Violence for a Cause: How Mainstream American Cinema Thrives on Its Spectacles of Violence”

Facilities

The Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center houses a 110-seat theater equipped with 16mm, 35mm, and 4K digital projection; performance space with digital projection capabilities; shooting studio with a control room; computer lab with current Adobe editing software; darkroom; two seminar/screening rooms; editing suites for sound and video; studios for seniors; and a film archive. Artist talks, screenings, symposia, and other public events are regularly scheduled in the theater. For production classes, students take advantage of the resources of the equipment office and have access to various workrooms. The program also has a media collection that consists of features, documentaries, experimental films, and past Senior Projects.

Courses

In addition to regularly scheduled academic and production courses, the program offers advanced study on a one-to-one basis with a professor. Recent tutorials include Film Sound; Buñuel, Almodóvar, and the Catholic Church; and LGBTQ Archiving.

The descriptions below represent a sampling of courses from the past four years.

Introduction to the Documentary
Film 106
Topics addressed include the origins of the documentary concept, direct cinema and cinema verité, propaganda, ethnographic media, the essay film, experimental documentary forms, media activism, fiction and documentary, and the role of technology. Vertov, Riefenstahl, Rouch, Flaherty, Pennebaker, Maysles, Wiseman, Spheeris, Moore, and Morris are among the filmmakers studied.

Aesthetics of Film
Film 109
Designed for first-year students, this course offers a broad, historically grounded survey of inter­national film aesthetics. Key elements of film form are explored through close analysis of important works by Griffith, Eisenstein, Dreyer, Hitchcock, von Sternberg, Rossellini, Powell, Bresson, Brakhage, Godard, Tarkovsky, and Denis, among other directors. Readings include critical and theoretical texts, and discussions address central issues in the other arts.

History of Cinema before World War II
Film 115
The first of a two-part survey, this course offers an interdisciplinary look at the development and significance of the cinema during its first 50 years. The class considers the nature and function of film form through lectures, discussions, the reading of key texts, and close study of works by exemplary directors such as Griffith, Chaplin, Eisenstein, Vertov, Hitchcock, Dreyer, Lang, Murnau, Renoir, Ford, Welles, and Mizoguchi.

History of Cinema since 1945
Film 116
This course, the second part of survey designed for first-year students, addresses the history of cinema since the end of World War II. In addition to studying major movements in postwar global cinema, the class considers the nature and function of film form through lectures, discussions, key texts, and close study of works by Rossellini, Wyler, Deren, Resnais, Varda, Shepitko, Sembène, Cassavetes, Kiarostami, Zhang Yimou, Haynes, and others. Also considered is how cinema shapes and is shaped by discourses on gender, politics, and race.

Praxis
Film 130
This 2-credit course, designed for first-year students intending to major in Film and Electronic Arts, covers the basics of video production: camera operation, lighting, sound recording, and editing. Participants produce a final project utilizing the techniques covered in class. Prerequisite: one film history course.

Survey of Electronic Art
Film 167
CROSS-LISTED: STS
An introduction to the history and aesthetics of the moving image through an exploration of the ways in which audiovisual technologies have been used in both mass-produced entertainment and works of individual expression, with a special focus on how modes of commercial and artistic production have influenced and reacted to one another. Topics: experimental cinema, home movies, Hollywood, and the avant-garde; documentary; television, video art, music video, and early electronic arts; radio, sound art, and Net Art; video games, homebrew games, and game art. For first-year students.

Performance and Video 
Film 203 
CROSS-LISTED: EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
How does video technology mediate between on-screen performer and audience? How can artists interested in creating critical and self-reflexive media respond to video’s immediacy and “liveness”? How can performance artists use video playback devices, displays, projectors, and interactive elements to shape and enhance live art? Students in this course develop ways of using video’s most fundamental property: its ability to reproduce a stream of real-time synchronized images and sounds.

Gesture, Light, and Motion
Film 205
This filmmaking workshop considers the narrative form through the qualities of gesture, light, and motion, rather than through dialogue and literary approaches to storytelling. Students explore visual storytelling techniques as well as solutions to practical and/or aesthetic problems.

Electronic Media Workshop
Film 207
An introduction to various elements of video production, with an emphasis on video art and experimentation. Camera and editing assignments familiarize students with digital video technology while investigating various aesthetic and theoretical concepts. The course culminates with the completion of a single-channel video piece by each student. Technology training includes cameras, Adobe Premiere, studio lighting and lighting for green screen, key effects, microphones, and more.

Introduction to 16mm Film
Film 208
An introduction to filmmaking with a strong emphasis on mastering the 16mm Bolex camera. Assignments are designed to address basic experimental, documentary, and narrative techniques. A wide range of technical and aesthetic issues is explored in conjunction with editing, lighting, and sound-recording techniques.

Border Cinemas
Film 216
The course considers how contemporary debates around borders, both literal and figurative, can be viewed through the lens of visual media given that “borderlines”—frames, boundaries, thresholds—are integral to the language of cinema and art. Themes of movement and migration, citizenship and belonging, self and other, landscape and space, and surveillance and (in)visibility are discussed through a broad range of texts from a global perspective. Weekly screenings of film and screen-based art.

Found Footage and Appropriation
Film 221
CROSS-LISTED: EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
A survey of appropriation in experimental media, from the found footage, cut-up, and collage films of the '50s, through the Lettrists and Situationists, and up to current artistic and activist production efforts such as culture jamming, game hacking, sampling, hoaxing, resistance, interference, and tactical media intervention. Issues regarding gender, media and net politics, technology, copyright, and aesthetics are addressed. Students produce their own work in video, gaming, installation, collage, and/or audio through a series of assignments and a final project.

Graphic Film Workshop
Film 223
This course explores the materials and processes available for  production of graphic film or graphic film sequences. It consists of instruction in animation, rephotography, rotoscoping, and drawing on film.

Ethnography in Image, Sound, and Text
Film 224 / Anthropology 224
CROSS-LISTED: EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
The relationship between the self and others, the problems and pleasures of cross-cultural encounters, the sensory aspects of culture—all are themes found in a range of productions that might be called ethnographic in nature. This course, taught by an anthropologist and a filmmaker, uses the tools of anthropology (observation, interviews, immersion) to create ethnographies in different media, including film, video, audio, and experimental writing.

3D Animation
Film 225
In this course, students are introduced to processes for creating moving image artworks using 3D animation software and its ancillary technologies. Topics include the basics of 3D modeling and animation, 3D scanning, and creative use of other technologies that allow artists to combine real and virtual spaces. Readings reflect on the psychological, cultural, and aesthetic impacts of computer-generated imagery in contemporary media. Students are not assumed to have any previous experience with 3D animation.

Film among the Arts
Film 230
CROSS-LISTED: ART HISTORY
An exploration of the ways in which cinema has been informed and enriched by developments in other arts. Attention is paid not only to the presence of other arts within the films but also to new ways of looking at and thinking about cinema through its relationships with other media. Directors studied include Antonioni, Bergman, Duras, Eisenstein, Godard, Hitchcock, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kubrick, Marker, Pasolini, Resnais, Syberberg, and Watkins, among others.

Avant-Garde Film
Film 232
A survey of the avant-garde pioneers of the 1940s (Deren, Peterson, Menken, Broughton); the mythopoeic artificers of the 1950s and early 1960s (Anger, Brakhage, Baillie); and the formalists of the late 1960s (Frampton, Snow, Gehr). Also considered: the strong graphic/collage cinema of artists like Cornell, Conner, Smith, and Breer; and the anarchic, comic improvisations of Jacobs, Kuchar, and MacLaine. The course ends in the mid-1970s by touching on the revitalization of storytelling through autobiography (Mekas) and feminist/critical narrative (Rainer).

Cinematic Romanticism
Film 236
CROSS-LISTED: ART HISTORY
An intensive exploration of the manifestations and permutations of Romanticism in cinema from the silent era to the present. Topics include the development of Romantic thought, the relationship between film and the other arts, the impact of 19th-century aesthetic paradigms on 20th- and 21st-century film practices, and the changing meanings of Romantic tropes and iconography in different historical moments. Films by Murnau, Borzage, Vidor, Minnelli, Ray, Brakhage, Godard, Herzog, Tarkovsky, and Malick, among others.

Film Blackness and Black Aesthetics in Contemporary Cinema
Film 237
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES
An exploration of the philosophy of Black aesthetics in relation to the concept of film Blackness. Screenings and discussions focus on films made between 1980 and 2017, with an emphasis on films made by members of the African diaspora. Directors studied include Cheryl Dunye, Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen, Kevin Jerome Everson, Abderrahmane Sissako, Jordan Peele, Raoul Peck, Barbara McCullough, and John Akomfrah. Writers studied include bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Michael Boyce Gillespie. 

Feminist Film and Media
Film 253
CROSS-LISTED: GSS
The course engages the main questions and debates of feminist theory across cinema, television, and new media, with a focus on feminist film practice. Weekly screenings showcase the work of female-identified (and feminist-identified) filmmakers working across narrative, experimental, and documentary filmmaking traditions. Filmmakers and artists discussed include Chantal Akerman, Laura Mulvey, Yvonne Rainer, Yoko Ono, Sara Gómez, Julie Dash, Dorothy Arzner, Agnès Varda, Sally Potter, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, Peggy Ahwesh, Zeinabu irene Davis, Sadie Benning, Ngozi Onwurah, and Trinh T. Minh-Ha.

Writing the Film
Film 256 
CROSS-LISTED: WRITTEN ARTS
This introductory course looks at creative approaches to writing short films and dialogue scenes. In addition to writing and research exercises, the course features screenings, discussions, readings, and script critiques, with a special focus on researching and developing ideas and structure for stories, building characters, poetic strategies, and writing comedic, realistic and awkward romantic dialogue. 

Asian Cinematic Modernisms
Film 258
CROSS-LISTED: ART HISTORY AND VISUAL CULTURE; ASIAN STUDIES
This seminar explores the various permutations of modernism in and between the cinemas of East, Central, South, and Southeast Asia by looking closely at major films and the cultural configurations from which they emerged. Special attention is paid to the way in which directors from different traditions use formal innovations to mediate on the dramatic changes taking place in their societies. Also considered are the ways in which the modernisms being discussed differ from Western paradigms and from each other.

Documentary Production Workshop
Film 259
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS
An introductory video production course for students interested in social issues, reportage, home movies, travelogues, and other forms of the nonfiction film.

Sound in Film and Electronic Arts
Film 262
This course explores the aesthetics, history, and theory of sound technology in film and electronic arts. Attention is paid to films which use the juxtaposition of image and sound/music in a particularly creative and challenging way. Weekly screenings—of global art films, Hollywood blockbusters, and key avant-garde works—are paired with discussions on topics including early talkies, film music, the role of voice, soundscapes, silence, noise pollution, field recordings, sound design, musique concrète, immersive sound systems, compression, fidelity, MP3s, and podcasts. 

Music Video
Film 265
Music has been a driving force in experimental video and avant-garde film from its inception—with artists, directors, and musicians working in collaboration, lifting and borrowing from each other, all while blurring the boundaries between art and popular culture. From early live action musical shorts with Cab Calloway to collaborations between Kenneth Anger and Mick Jagger, the course examines historical works as well as present-day examples of the form. Prerequisite: completion of one 200-level Film and Electronic Arts production course.

The Films of Andy Warhol
Film 267
CROSS-LISTED: ART HISTORY AND VISUAL CULTURE, GSS
Between 1963 and 1969, Andy Warhol made more than a hundred 16mm films, many of them shot in and around his Manhattan studio, the Factory. This course studies selections from Warhol’s cinematic output, including his later forays into producing features by other directors, as well as his work in television and video art. Also addressed is the impact of Warhol’s filmmaking and how it intersected with his other activities in art, publishing, photography, and music. 

Narrative Production Workshop
Film 290
Through weekly video exercises, students in the course explore visual storytelling strategies, shooting original assignments or excerpts from selected narrative films. They work both individually and on crews, where they act as a production team: planning, shooting, and editing. Crew members rotate positions so that everyone gets the chance to experience the various areas of filmmaking. Students also construct a sound design for each piece but must refrain from using music.

Advanced 16mm Workshop
Film 302
Students explore special effects using a Bolex camera, and learn how to hand process film, shoot sync sound film with an Arriflex SRII camera, and optically print film. They also have the opportunity to shoot color film, work on collaborative projects, and participate in screenings and discussions that illustrate and exemplify the approaches taught in class. Prerequisites: Film 208 and one film history course.

Landscape and Media
Film 307
The course compares a variety of landscape forms throughout the history of cinema and painting. Through discussion and visits to local sites, the class considers environmental issues, the social uses of land and parks, travel and tourism, and the politics of place. A broad range of tools and techniques are introduced, including panoramas, cartography, image archives, drones, creative geography, and 360-degree cams.

Postwar France and Italy
Film 310
A survey of four concentrated historical moments of remarkably intense creative activity: the immediate postwar years in Italy, dominated by Rossellini, Visconti, and De Sica; the mid-1950s in France, when Tati and Bresson are most impressive as “classicists”; the late ’50s and early ’60s of the French New Wave, with Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Varda, Rohmer, Chabrol; and the maturation of a number of key directors in Italy at roughly the same time, best represented by Fellini, Antonioni, Olmi, and Pasolini.

Advanced Screenwriting
Film 312
CROSS-LISTED: WRITTEN ARTS
The last few years have seen a wave of narrative films structured around multiple points of view. Starting with Rashomon and ending with Syndromes and a Century, the course considers several films that use multiple protagonist structures to express complex ideas. The second part of the course functions as a workshop. Students break into groups to collaboratively create multiple protagonist scripts. 

Reframing Reality
Film 315
How can documentary filmmaking open a portal for learning about ourselves and the world we live in? Students use documentary filmmaking as a means to articulate provocative, nuanced questions about how the world works and what it means to be human. In the process, they interrogate how power is embedded in authorial voice, question how documentary grammar can be used to subvert or reify metanarratives, probe the relationship between form/content and process/end product, and examine the intersection of filmmaking and social justice. 

Internet Aesthetics
Film 320
This course examines how critical and philosophical approaches to thinking about art’s relationship to the internet have evolved along with changes in networked technology since the advent of the World Wide Web. Topics considered: Does art made with, on, or about the internet require new evaluative models? Has the internet altered the relationship between the artist, the artwork, and the audience? How has internet art been curated and exhibited? The class also looks at examples of internet art in relation to literature, cinema, and performance.

Fictionalizing the Biopic
Film 322
Students in this live-action course dramatize the life of a nonfictional person (or persons), ­concentrating on visual storytelling, sound design, the three-act formula, narrative tropes, and revealing an interior life through the framing and “blocking” of a scene. Working from the documentary Herb and Dorothy (about civil servants/art collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel), each ­student selects a portion of the documentary to ­dramatize, and all students move through the ­various stages of production: research, story­boarding, casting, location scouting, costume design, set dressing, shooting, sound design, and editing.

Science Fiction Cinema
Film 324
CROSS-LISTED: STS
A critical examination of science fiction film from the silent era to today, with a special focus on the relationship between science fiction and the avant-garde. Topics include visualizing technology, alien and robot as human countertype, utopia and dystopia, Cold War and post–Cold War politics as seen through science fiction, camp and parody, counterfactuals and alternative history, and the poetics of science fiction language.

Script to Screen: Ethnographic Film
Film 326
“Ethnographic” is a term applied to a variety of films and sound recordings that attempt to describe aspects of cultures different from one’s own. These works range from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North to the fictive works of Australia’s Karrabing Film Collective. In between lies a rich history of visual anthropologies, traditional documentaries, and experimental works that reveal various techniques for working with and ultimately recording the lives of other people. The class studies the writings and visual/sonic work of a wide range of anthropologists and filmmakers.

Script to Screen
Film 330
A live-action film workshop that concentrates on the narrative form as a means of exploring visual storytelling strategies. Students produce a dramatic recreation of the 1929 Hitchcock film Blackmail. Each student produces, directs, and edits a sequence of the feature-length film.

Video Installation
Film 335
An exploration of the challenges and possibilities of video installation, an evolving art form that extends video beyond conventional exhibition spaces into site-specific, physically immersive, and multiple-channel exhibition contexts. Workshops hone technical skills and introduce methods for the creative use of video projectors, monitors, sound equipment, surveillance cameras, multichannel synchronizers, digital software, and lightweight sculptural elements.

Queer Cinema
Film 337
CROSS-LISTED: GSS
A critical examination of how queer identity has been explored on screen, from the silent era to recent times. Topics include the representation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans characters in classic Hollywood and European cinema; theories of camp, gender subversion, and other forms of articulating queer sensibility within historically heteronormative frameworks; the pioneering work of openly queer 20th-century filmmakers; the role of cinema in activism around such issues as AIDS, feminism, and trans visibility; and the mainstreaming of queer images in the 21st century.

Color
Film 340
An exploration of the aesthetics of color in cinema and related arts. Topics include the development and impact of color processes; the perceptual, cultural, and historical registers of color; changing theoretical approaches to color and light; the relationship between figuration and abstraction; the preservation, restoration, and degradation of filmic color; and the effects of digital technologies and methodologies. Priority to Upper College students.

Immersive Cinema
Film 342
Students learn to use 3D and 360 video cameras, 3D projection systems, VR headsets, and related technologies that exploit binocular and panoramic viewing. The class examines moments in the evolution of 3D technology and historical attempts at what André Bazin called “total cinema,” considering the perceptual and ideological implications of apparatuses that attempt to intensify realistic reproductions of the physical world. Assignments challenge students to explore the expressive potential of the immersive frame, while developing new and experimental approaches to shooting and editing 3D images.

Contemporary Moving Image Practices
Film 350
This course looks at diverse practices that comprise the contemporary moving image landscape, including documentary, avant-garde film, video and installation art, and experimental narrative cinema, with a focus on socially and politically engaged approaches. Each week features a different guest artist who presents (in person or virtually) their work; students have the opportunity to engage in close dialogues with these artists in a seminar setting. Readings and supplemental materials are assigned for each session and discussed in conjunction with the moving image work. 

Advanced Documentary
Film 357
Students research and complete a short documentary film in the form of their choosing. Screenings, as well as cinematographic and editing instruction, are tailored to enable the exploration of the specific forms of student work. Prerequisite: at least one other 200-level Film and Electronic Arts production course or comparable videomaking experience and permission of the instructor.

Auteur Studies: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Film 358
Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s body of work has become a paradigm for international art cinema. The course examines Dreyer’s relationship to Scandinavian artistic, theatrical, and theological traditions; his relationship to his contemporaries; and his influence on subsequent generations, with a special focus on film style, film sound, cinematic adaptation, and artistic representations of gesture and the human figure. Other directors studied include Bergman, Bresson, Christensen, Sjöström, Tarkovsky, and von Trier; texts by Ibsen, Strindberg, Blixen, and Kierkegaard.

Movement/Inciting Memory/Activating Character
Film 362
CROSS-LISTED: DANCE
With movement as the catalyst, this screenwriting workshop incites memory, activates character development, and clarifies story and plot through visual storytelling and found identities. The course culminates in writing assignments that form the bedrock for vigorous analysis as participants develop and workshop a short screenplay. No prior dance experience necessary.

Defining Black Cinema
Film 363
What constitutes Black cinema? Films made by filmmakers representative of the African diaspora or themed around issues related to the African diaspora? A film that features Black actors, or a set of formal concerns and approaches that separate Black cinema from dominant modes of production? This course explores these and related questions of historical representation, cultural identity, and stylistic innovation. Filmmakers covered include Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, Ousmane Sembène, Melvin Van Peebles, Spike Lee, and Madeline Anderson, among others.

Artists’ Television
Film 365
A study in the history of television as an artists’ medium. Organized chronologically, the course begins with studio broadcast precursors like Ernie Kovacs and Stan Vanderbeek, continues through the birth of guerrilla television in the 60s after the release of the Sony Portapak, the first generation of video artists in the 70s, the rise of cable and satellite networks, the impact of VHS and other new technologies, and the 21st-century move to streaming platforms. Taught in collaboration with Manhattan-based nonprofit arts institution Electronic Arts Intermix.

American Innovative Narrative
Film 366
An exploration of unconventional, usually low-budget narrative cinema that moves against the grain of standard populist work. Films studied are primarily from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, when there were a number of dynamic experiments in narrative, but the class also looks at relatively contemporary work. Filmmakers considered include Shirley Clarke, Michael Roemer, Adolfas Mekas, Curtis Harrington, Monte Hellman, Robert Frank, Yvonne Rainer, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, Susan Seidelman, and Jim Jarmusch.

Public Access / Local Groove
Film 367
Students collaborate on the production of a biweekly video art program to be broadcast on PANDA 23, Tivoli’s local public access cable television station. With reference to the 50-year history of amateur “narrowcasting” and artists whose work has been exhibited on television, the class engages with methods for creating and distributing episodic artwork for a local audience. Students work in a studio setting designed to mimic and update the small production studios used by public access stations, using both analog and digital video production tools.

The Vampire: Blood and Empire
Film 376
The vampire as a cinematic trope is reinvented with each era as a means to address prevalent fears and desires, and as a marker of social change. A mutable in-between creature, the vampire offers specific lessons regarding genre, character, and style, as well as a critical analysis of feminism, race, spirituality, genetics, and otherness. In the first half of this production class, students compose short videos in response to assigned texts, locations, and film fragments; in the second half, they produce an ambitious final project.

Chronicle of a Season
Film 368
Adapted from the title of Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s 1961 Paris documentary Chronicle of a Summer, this production course is taught simultaneously on several Bard campuses (Annandale, AUCA, Al-Quds) and OFF University in Istanbul with the goal of creating a cinematic chronicle of each locality. The theme of these synchronized chronicles is also derived from Morin and Rouch’s film; each project takes as its prompt the deceptively simple question, “Are you happy?” Ideally, the making of these films will reveal points of connection for course participants and provide opportunities to learn about the subtleties of contemporary life in each locality.

Cinema and Dictatorship
Film 373
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS
The current strains on democratic governments make the subject of dictatorship more important than ever. This course shows how film has been used in 20th-century dictatorships for propaganda purposes and how dictatorships have been dramatized in film. The work of Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein are analyzed, as are wartime films from Japan. The second category includes films like Memories of Underdevelopment from Cuba, Man of Marble from Poland, and To Live and A Touch of Sin from China. Screenings also include Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. 

Senior Seminar
Film 405
This seminar, a requirement for all program majors, allows students working on Senior Projects to share methods, knowledge, skills, and resources. The course includes sessions with visiting film- and videomakers, who discuss their processes and techniques; a life-after-Bard skills workshop; a review of grant opportunities; and critiques of works in progress.