This course will survey the major works of French cinema from the outset of filmmaking to contemporary films. The French made the first films and we will examine various different genres and styles of French film in relation to their representations of French culture.

This course focuses on Turkish German cinema, its history and aesthetic conventions, and also introduces students to literature, music, and cultural production at large along the Turkish German axis. We will discuss questions of identity, migration, mobility, nation, and belonging, and explore how these topics have been treated cinematically and across other genres. Special emphasis will also be placed on the cities of Berlin and Istanbul. Through on-site visits and field trips, we will explore firsthand the connections between historical context, cultural expression, social practices, and urban form, and trace the lasting impact of Turkish German entanglements and transnational cultural flows on the makeup and identity of those cities today. Sample filmmakers and other artists might include: Fatih Akın, Kutluğ Ataman, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Sabahattin Ali, and Ipek Ipekcioglu.

The purpose of the class is to study the history and themes of great movie thrillers. We will start early (1930, Fritz Lang) and go late (2017), and look at key elements of form and theme in these films, from the heist film to the political thriller, the police procedural, Hitchcock, the drama of the final girl, and ?race? and the thriller. All of our films raise important political and existential questions. We?ll look a little at genre theory, and film form: why do Lang or Hitchcock or Jordan Peele do this with the camera, with the lighting, with that graphic match. Another question: why do (some) people seek to be frightened by these movies?

Gender, sexuality, as well as other markers of identity like class, race, and status are the result of cultural, political, and historical constructs. In this class, we will focus on sexual politics, and on sexualized politics, as represented in Italian cinema, in particular by women directors (a rarity of sorts in the landscape of the Italian cinema, and beyond). Some of the larger questions that will be discussed are: How is sexuality politicized? How is politics romanticized? Which are the major factors, agents, and ideas that have contributed, and may continue to do so, in the making and unmaking of sexual politics in modern Italian society and how do films represent such ideas? How has the feminist movement developed, or not, in Italy? Has the so-called “male gaze” been a significantly powerful force, finding its way even in the minds of radical female directors who declare to reject it?

What is the origin of the mafia? How do Italians and Americans represent the mafia and its relationship to culture? This course will examine films from Italy and some from America in an attempt to explore the complex and embedded nature of the mafia. This course will go far beyond stereotypes to examine the deep-rooted nature of the piovra, or octopus, as the mafia is called. The course will take a broad view of the history of the representation of the mafia in film and focus on close analyses of films that engage the mafia in different ways.

This course offers a broad overview of the study of comedy and politics in contemporary U.S. popular media, electioneering, and governance, drawing expansively from methodologies in the critical Humanities and Social Sciences, including Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School, British Cultural Studies, and contemporary Critical Race Theory, among others. The concept of ‘ideology’ will serve as a lynchpin in the course. We will examine how the structures and appeals of comedic performance, both as a means of commenting on politics and as a device employed by politicians, have shifted over time in ways that resonate with similar shifts in academic definitions of ideology (i.e., ideology as a product of the culture industry, ideology as irrationality or reification, ideology as practice rather that cognition, ideology as affect, etc.)