Oberlin College Cinema Studies Program
Spring 2016 courses
(please note recent additions to the schedule)
CINE 118 – The Film Experience: Film Noir—A Transnational Perspective
MWF 9-9:50am; screening Tu 7-10pm
Instructor: A. Zambenedetti
In 1998, the late Jean-Claude Izzo argued that the murder of Abel by Cain’s hand made the Bible the
first noir novel. By situating the origin of noir in the Mediterranean context, Izzo opened the door to
a rethinking of the genre that included not only its Atlantic connections, but also its little-known
influences east of Gibraltar. Through the exploration of works from Great Britain, Italy, Spain, and
France, this course will reposition film noir in a transnational and global context.
Enrollment Limit: 20.
CINE 211 - What is Media? Recording, Transmission, Spectacle
MWF 9-9:50am; screening Tu 7-10pm
Instructor: B. Hilsabeck
This course interrogates the origins, transformation, and effects of media on both individual and
social levels. Exploring a wide range of technological means for recording, transmission, and visual
display from the written word to IMAX, we will survey various approaches to the study of
technology and mass communication. We will primarily focus on media theories and cultural studies
scholarship, as well as on works of contemporary critics who question the possible futures of
communication media. Enrollment Limit: 20.
CINE 267 - Narrating and Documenting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Tu/Th 11am-12:15pm; screening M 7-10pm
Instructor: D. Galili
This course examines cinematic narratives and documentations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
drawing on critical, historical, and sociological writings. We will consider how films about the
conflict have reflected, perpetuated, and criticized national ideologies, as well as how themes of
individual and collective identity, memory, and traumatic experiences have been represented by
Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers from 1948 until the present. By exploring how films have told
stories about the conflict and documented it in real time, we will open further questions about the
place cinema in nation building and formation of historical narratives. Enrollment Limit: 20.
CINE 280 - Technophobia and Occult Media
Tu/Th 3-4:15pm; screening Tu 7-10pm
Instructor: D. Galili
Combining historiographic, theoretical, and fictional source materials, the course looks at
psychological and social anxieties triggered by the introduction of new media forms from
photography and telegraphy throw cell phones and the web. In particular, we will explore
the uncanny characteristics that have been attributed to media in various discourses and relate them
to theories about media effects and ontology. Among the topics the course will engage with are early
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practices of ghost photography, cinema's affinity with the uncanny and the figure of the
doppelganger, the relation between the invention of wireless radio and telepathy, the beliefs that
satanic messages can be heard when vinyl records are played backwards, and anxieties related to
virtual worlds of digital media. Ultimately, the course offers new ways to think about
human/technology encounters and about how media studies can broaden our understanding of media
effects and ontology by exploring occult phenomena. Enrollment Limit: 20. Prerequisite: one or two
courses on cinema/media.
CINE 284F - AOI Workshop-Full
F 1:30-4:30PM & R 6-9PM
Instructor: Claudio Orso-Giacone
Surrounded by computers, video games, and cell phones, children often have little chance to use
media to express themselves or connect with their communities. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s
storytellers, and to become responsible citizens in a digital age they need tools to communicate
through text, image, and sound. We’ll explore community outreach models and media education
projects, lead a video poetry residency at Langston Middle School, and prepare the Apollo Outreach
Initiative’s Summer Media Workshop. Field trips required.
Enrollment Limit: 15
CINE 284H - AOI Workshop-Half
F 1:30-4:30PM & R 6-9P
Instructor: Claudio Orso-Giacone
Surrounded by computers, video games, and cell phones, children often have little chance to use
media to express themselves or connect with their communities. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s
storytellers, and to become responsible citizens in a digital age they need tools to communicate
through text, image, and sound. We’ll explore community outreach models and media education
projects, lead a video poetry residency at Langston Middle School, and prepare the Apollo Outreach
Initiative’s Summer Media Workshop. Field trips required.
CINE 290 - Introduction to the Advanced Study of Cinema
MWF 10-10:50am; screening Th 7-10pm
Instructor: B. Hilsabeck
This course teaches students to engage critically with cinema. They examine elements of film form,
style, and technique and explore how these produce meaning. Through theoretical and critical
readings they consider cinema as art, industry, technology, and politics. They study approaches to
watching and assessing movies, concepts and contexts in cinema studies as a discipline, and film in
relation to other media. And they pay special attention to writing about cinema. Enrollment Limit:
20.
CINE 298 - Video Production Workshop I
M 7-10pm; Th 1:30-4:30pm; S 1-4pm
Instructor: J. Pence
This course introduces students to the practical relationships among form, style and meaning in
cinema through hands-on experience with the medium’s technical elements. Students will not only
read about cinema but design, compose, and edit their own sequences using sound and image.
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Enrollment Limit: 10. Consent of the instructor required, by application. Prerequisites: at least one
course on cinema (two are preferred).
CINE 301 - Sound for Moving Picture
F 1:30-4:30pm; screening R 7-10pm
Instructor: K. Hartzell
This course explores the relationship between sound and its affect on visual perception in relation to
moving images. By practicing the creative application of audio post-production techniques (foley,
ADR, sound design, surround mixing) the class will learn about various conceptual elements of
sound (diegetic, non-diegetic, on and off screen, visual magnetism). Students will learn to approach
sound in film with a better understanding in both theory and application. Enrollment Limit: 10.
Consent of the Instructor Required. Prerequisites: CINE 298.
CINE 311 - Silent Cinema: Technology, Industry, Modernity
Tu 7-10:30pm; screening W 7-9:30pm
Instructor: B. Hilsabeck
The thirty years between the cinema’s invention in the 1890s and the institution of synchronized
sound in the late 1920s constitute a dynamic and contested era of film history. This course will seek
to understand the silent cinema from a variety of perspectives, including the cinema as a
representative technology of modernity, the formation of the cinema as industry and cultural
institution, and the relationship between the cinema and other media. Enrollment Limit: 20.
Prerequisites: CINE 290 or consent of instructor.
CINE 324 - Video Production Workshop II: The Short Film
Tu 1:30-4:30pm; screening W 7-10pm
Instructor: G. Pingree
The short film is a distinct form, with its own limits and possibilities. Put another way, short films,
whether fiction, non-fiction, or experimental, are not simply reduced versions of feature-length films.
In this advanced production workshop, students will consider the Short in its historical, formal, and
industrial contexts, but mostly they will practice the art of conceiving, producing, and exhibiting
short films. Enrollment Limit: 12. Consent of the Instructor Required. Prerequisites: CINE 290,
CINE 298, and consent of instructor.
CINE 328 - Media Networks: Interconnections of History and Theory
W 7-10pm; screening U 7-10pm
Instructor: D. Galili
The concept of network came to typify the social and the technological character of new media in
popular, critical, commercial, and scientific discourses. New means of computer communication,
formation of virtual communities, and the culture of the “information age,” all share the structure of
network as a common denominator. Yet, the network structure of social groups and of media
technologies is not a new phenomenon. Networks played a key role in shaping technological
modernity from its very beginning, with the rapid spread of the railway, telegraph, and telephone
networks across the world in the nineteenth century. Drawing on media and literary studies,
sociology, and science and technology studies, this course aims at presenting a historically informed
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exploration the concept of network as both a cultural metaphor and material arrangement. We will
explore how media networks constitute ubiquitous, transient, and expansive structures of
interconnection that trouble notions of center and hierarchy; trace the history of network media from
telegraphy to television and the Internet; and will inquire how the notion of networks is used as a
metaphor for social structures in recent writings on globalization, economy, and narrative forms.
With the understanding of the history and implications of network media, we will turn to examine
current critical issues in online network technologies and practices. Enrollment Limit: 20.
Prerequisites: CINE 290 or consent of instructor.
CINE 350 – The Poetics and Politics of the Essay Film
MWF 10-10:50am; screening Tu 7-10:30pm
Instructor: G. An
This course addresses documentary cinema from France, from the invention of the Lumiere
cinematographe in 1896 to digital filmmaking at the beginning of the 21st century. As we study early
city symphonies, ethnographic and anthropological films, war documentaries, cinema-verité, and
biographical and advocacy films, we will investigate the structures, techniques, and ideologies that
identify these practices as non-fictional, and wrestle with claims of truth and objectivity. Taught in
English. Enrollment Limit: 20. Prerequisites: CINE 290, FREN/CINE 250, or the equivalent.
Cross List Information This course is cross-listed with FREN 404.
CINE 398 - New Wave, New Hollywood, New Cinema Studies
MW 2:30-3:45pm; screening M 7-10:30pm
Instructors: G. An, W. P. Day
We will study various New Waves that characterize world cinema in the mid-20th century,
particularly the French Nouvelle Vague (1958-1964) and American New Hollywood (1968-1974).
The trope of the “new wave” – or “the tradition of the new” according to critic Harold Rosenberg –
has enjoyed a powerful hold on filmmakers, historians and critics. Therefore, we examine how the
discipline of Cinema Studies developed simultaneously with the advent of these New Waves. How
and why do we understand cinema in terms of “New Waves”? And how has Cinema Studies been
shaped by this tradition – becoming perhaps the last “new wave” of cinema? Enrollment Limit: 15.
Consent of the instructors required by application. Prerequisites: at least two 300-level CINE
courses.
CINE 399F - Cinema Studies Practicum—Full Course
CINE 399H - Cinema Studies Practicum—Half Course
W 1:30-4:30pm (F)
W 7-10pm
T 1:30-4:30pm (H)
W 7-10pm
Instructor: G. Pingree
This practicum allows students to produce substantial independent work of their own design.
Enrollment Limit: 20 Consent of the Instructor Required.
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CINE 995F - Private Reading – Full Course
CINE 995H - Private Reading – Half Course
Instructors: G. An, E. Brown-Orso, W. Day, J. Pence, G. Pingree, Staff
Consent of the instructor required.
Oberlin Cinema Studies Courses
Taught in Other Departments/Programs
Spring 2016
PHIL 232 - Philosophy of Film
Tu/Th 9:35-10:50am
Instructor: K. Thomson-Jones
This course examines the philosophical assumptions behind classical and contemporary film theory.
Topics include the uniqueness of film as an art form, the nature of expression in film, realism, film
authorship, whether there is a language of film, and the nature of film narrative. The aim of the
course is to bring us to understand the nature of film and our engagement with it.
Enrollment Limit: 30. Prerequisites: One course in philosophy or consent of instructor.
EAST 309 - Chinese Popular Cinema and Public Intellectualism
M 2:30-4:20pm; screening Th 7-10pm
Instructor: HC. Deppman
Does Chinese popular cinema function as public intellectualism? This course examines the history,
genre, aesthetic, and politics of the post-reform Chinese fiction films and documentaries from 1982
to 2014. Studying the works of Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke, Wu Wenguang, Wong Kar-wai, Ann
Hui, He Zhaoti, Wei Desheng and others, we examine the extent to which influential directors have
become a new class or organic intellectuals who raise political questions to propel social change.
Enrollment Limit: 15.
EAST 322 – The Avant-Garde in Japanese Literature, Art and Film
M 2:30-4:20pm
Instructor: A. Sherif
This course explores the avant-garde in Japan’s literary and visual cultures (19th century to the
present). What was considered aesthetic and ideological innovation in cultural production in times of
radical change and of relative stability? We will also examine the role of avant-garde art and political
activism in elite, mid-brow, and mass culture, and in nation building. This class uses cultural theory
and comparative analyses of gender and class. Taught in English. Enrollment Limit: 15. Consent of
the Instructor Required. Prerequisite: Previous course work in literature, cinema, art, history, or
East Asian Studies is strongly encouraged.
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