FILM 392 - Research Seminar in Film History and Theory

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

This course is designed as an in-depth exploration of a theoretical topic. Students contribute to the class through research projects and oral presentations. Their work culminates in lengthy research papers. Because topics change, students are permitted (encouraged) to take this course more than once. Preference is given to film majors who must take this class during their senior year; junior majors and others admitted if space permits.

Topic for 2026/27a: Cinema and the Everyday. From its earliest beginnings, cinema has been a companion as we move through our everyday lives, chronicling our commutes, helping us to stop and notice the wind through the trees, and inviting us to look with new eyes at our immediate surroundings. This course explores the traditions and history that make up cinema’s entanglement with the quotidian. The first half of the semester focuses on key movements that developed the language cinema uses to engage daily life: the city symphony, neorealism and its descendants, the diary film, slow cinema. The second half deals with one of the main settings in which we experience and negotiate the everyday: the home. Films screened may include Peter Hujar’s Day, Jeanne Dielman, High-Rise, Sorry We Missed You, Kes, Little Fugitive, Fallen Leaves, and Perfect Days. A seminar presentation and a research paper are required. Erica Stein.

Topic for 2026/27b: Sensuous Theory. (co-req FILM 391 - Sensuous Theory Writing Workshop) This seminar explores the relationship between film and the senses. How can film, an audio-visual medium, represent and engage with the proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell? How might films employ the senses to reconfigure the relationship between the cinema and the spectator? How can these sensuous films articulate senses of belonging, displacement, or exile? The seminar situates our discussions of these questions within discourses of film phenomenology, postmodernism, gender studies, and postcolonialism. Readings may include: Jennifer M. Barker (The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, 2009), Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, 2010), Laura U. Marks (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, 2000, and Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 2002), Hamid Naficy (An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 2001), and Vivian Sobchack (Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 2004). Film screenings may include: The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977), The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Calendar (Atom Egoyan, 1993), Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar, 2011), Cyclo (Tran, Anh Hung, 1995), Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015),Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971), and Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019). Sophia Siddique Harvey.

One 2-hour period plus outside screenings.

Course Format: CLS