Film Studies
53 Wall, 432.0152
Co-Chairs
Dudley Andrew
Charles Musser
Director of Graduate Studies
Dudley Andrew (Rm 219, 53 Wall, dudley.andrew@yale.edu)
Graduate Committee
Dudley Andrew, Katerina Clark, John MacKay, Aaron Gerow,
Charles Musser, Brigitte Peucker, Noa Steimatsky, Katie Trumpener
Professors
Ora Avni, David Bromwich, Hazel Carby, Michael Denning,
John Mack Faragher, Benjamin Harshav, Thomas Kavanaugh, Christopher
L. Miller, Joseph Roach, Michael Roemer, John Szwed, Paolo
Valesio, Laura Wexler
Associate Professor
Susan Weiner
Assistant Professors
Seth Fein, Kristin Philips
Fields of Study
Film Studies is an interdisciplinary field drawing on
the study of the history of art, national cultures and literatures,
literary theory, philosophy, sociology, and other areas. Film
Studies offers a joint Ph.D. with a number of other departments
and programs, currently including American Studies, Comparative
Literature, East Asian Languages and Literatures, French,
German, History of Art, Italian, and Slavic Languages and
Literatures. In addition to acquiring a firm grounding in
the methods and core material of both film studies and another
discipline, the candidate is advised to coordinate a plan
of study involving comprehensive knowledge of one or more
areas of specialization. Such areas include:
1. Historiography, including archival history, history of
technology, early cinema.
2. Aesthetics: theories of the image, adaptation, film/philosophy.
3. European film: British, French, German, Italian, Slavic.
4. American culture: Hollywood, independent film, African
American cinema.
5. World Film: global image exchange; cinema in Asia, Latin
America, and Africa; documentary. Through course work, examinations,
and the dissertation, the candidate links a film specialty
with material and methods coming from the participating discipline.
Directors of graduate studies from both programs monitor the
candidate’s plans and progress.
Special Admissions Requirements
Interested students must check the joint Ph.D. in Film
Studies box on their applications and indicate the participating
department they plan to work within in combination with Film
Studies.
Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Every student selected for the combined program is subject
to the combined supervision of the Film Studies program and
the relevant participating department. A written protocol
between each department and Film Studies outlines the requirements
and schedule to be borne in mind as a plan of study is worked
out in consultation with the director of graduate studies
of Film Studies and the director of graduate studies of the
participating department. In all cases, students are required
to take two core seminars in Film Studies (FILM 601 and FILM
603) as well as at least four additional Film Studies courses.
Course requirements vary for participating departments but
comprise a total of sixteen courses (fourteen for American
Studies, fifteen for History of Art). A student advances to
candidacy by completing a number of formal procedures by the
end of the sixth semester:
1. One-hour oral examination covering basic primary and
secondary texts in Film Studies and administered by two members
of the Film Studies graduate committee.
2. Qualifying examination, following the regulations of
the participating department with at least one member of the
Film Studies graduate committee participating.
3. The dissertation prospectus presented to a faculty committee
consisting of at least one member of the Film Studies graduate
committee and one member of the participating department who
is not also on that Film Studies committee. Once the student
and dissertation adviser deem the dissertation finished, a
public defense of the completed work shall be held. At least
one examiner of the dissertation must be a member of the graduate
Film Studies committee and one a member of the participating
department who is not also on the Film Studies committee.
The faculty in Film Studies considers participation in the
Teaching Fellows Program to be essential to the professional
preparation of graduate students. Students normally teach
in years three and four. Every student is required for the
degree to serve as a teaching fellow in two of the following
courses: Introduction to Film; Film Theory; World Cinema.
Master’s Degree
M.Phil. See Graduate
School requirements.
Program materials are available upon request to the Director
of Graduate Studies, Yale Film Studies Program, Yale University,
P.O. Box 208363, New Haven CT 06520-8363.
Courses
FILM 601a, Films and Their Study. Dudley Andrew.
T 10.30–12.20
“Films and their Study” sets in place some
undergirding for graduate students in various disciplines
who plan to develop a subspecialty or who want to anchor their
particular film interest to something like the “professional
discourse” of this field. Providing a coordinated set
of topics under the rubrics of (a) spectacle, (b) narrative,
(c) realism, and (d) signification, the flow of this survey
is interrupted first by the often discordant relation of history
to theory and second by the obtuseness of the films examined
each week. As the title of this seminar is meant to convey,
films themselves take the lead in our discussions. Also
CPLT 917a.
[FILM 603, Problems in Film History.]
[FILM 721u, Spatial Dimensions in Cinema.]
FILM 728au, Film and the Transformation of Theatrical
Culture. Charles Musser. T 3.30–5.20
Explores the transformation in American theater that
resulted from the introduction of motion pictures. Cinema
is examined as a theatrical form of entertainment that restructured
both the theatrical world and spectatorship between 1895 and
1930. The unfolding interactions between stage and screen
are considered through a variety of films and texts (plays,
critical and theoretical writings). Adaptation is employed
as a crucial lens for exploring this historical dynamic. Works
by Belasco, Wilde, O’Neill, Porter, Griffith, Lubitsch,
DeMille, and Micheaux. Also AMST 716a.
FILM 729au, German Cinema 1945–1965: Cold War
Film Culture. Katie Trumpener. TTh 11.30–12.45
Juxtaposing East and West German films, this course explores
their diverging accounts of Nazi and postwar life; the theory
and practice of socialist filmmaking; cinema culture; questions
of genre; the emerging New Waves. Also CPLT 932au, GMAN
730au.
FILM 730au, New Chinese Cinemas. James Tweedie. F 1.30–3.20; screenings Th 7 p.m.
The course introduces a range of films produced in Taiwan,
Hong Kong, and mainland China from the early 1980s to the
present; situating them within social, political, and cultural
contexts. What has been the role of cinema in constructing
the cultural framework for the emerging “Pacific Rim,”
and how do the boundary zones of trans-national China challenge
the logic of national or area studies approaches to cultural
phenomena?
[FILM 731u, Classical Hollywood Cinema.]
[FILM 736u, Contemporary Documentary Film and Video.]
[FILM 737, American Documentary Film and Photography.]
FILM 763bu, The Films of Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders. Brigitte
Peucker. Th 1.30–3.20
The three major directors of the New German Cinema. Topics
include postmodernism; high and low culture; film’s
relation to the other arts; issues of gender, race, and national
identity; the influence of Hollywood. Also GMAN 720bu.
[FILM 811, Cinematic Landscapes in Postwar Europe.]
[FILM 822, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov.]
FILM 827b, The Face on Film. Noa Steimatsky. M 1–5 (includes screenings)
The human face is a paradigmatic arena in which the largest
questions on referentiality, the inscription of identity and
subjectivity, and the articulation of interiority in art intersect.
This seminar explores cinema’s intervention vis-à-vis
portraiture’s traditional concerns, the narrative, discursive,
ideological uses of facial representation, and its modern
transfigurations. In extending its photographic basis to consider
the parameters of movement, the incorporation of speech, and
the shifting trajectory of the look, our discussion juxtaposes
narrative fiction film in relation to documentary and experimental
“cinematic portraits.” We explore the close-up,
the regime of the shot-reaction shot, the debates surrounding
identification, expressivity, and notions of animism in cinema,
in light of theoretical writings and of classical and experimental
films by such makers as Epstein, Kuleshov, Dreyer, Bresson,
Pasolini, Hitchcock, Warhol, Cronenberg. Also HSAR 727b.
FILM 843b, The Archive of Popular Front France. Dudley
Andrew. T 1.30–3.20; screenings TBA
In 1930s Paris, novelists (Céline, Malraux), intellectuals
(Gide, Benjamin), and filmmakers (Renoir) found themselves
recruited by politics. Using cinema to bracket the Popular
Front (Surrealism on one side, Poetic Realism on the other),
this seminar examines publishing, the art scene, and radical
groups such as the Collège de Sociologie to track the
social changes visible in French culture at the end of the
Third Republic. In English. Also CPLT 934b, FREN 931b.
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