Film Studies

"An introduction to the techniques of dramatic expression utilizing the body, voice, and imagination. Structured play exercise helps the beginner to overcome physical/vocal inhibitions, and develop a sense of trust and teamwork within the group. Scene work is approached using beats, intentions, scores of physical actions, obstacles, and subtext. The class concludes with a recital to provide practical experience in rehearsal and performance. Fall and Spring."

The First-Year Seminar (FYS) introduces new Gonzaga students to the University, the Core Curriculum, and Gonzaga’s Jesuit mission and heritage. While the seminars will be taught by faculty with expertise in particular disciplines, topics will be addressed in a way that illustrates approaches and methods of different academic disciplines. The seminar format of the course highlights the participatory character of university life, emphasizing that learning is an active, collegial process.

This course serves as an introduction to elements of film form and grammar, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound, and acting. Students taking this course will learn how to describe a film's formal qualities and will use these descriptions to make analytical claims about film.

This course serves as an introduction to the history of film as a medium, ranging from its origins to the current moment. Students taking this course will learn how to situate a film in its historical and cultural contexts and will use these contexts to make analytical claims about film and history.

Born in 1975 with the release of Jaws , the summer blockbuster is one of the defining cinematic genres of our cultural moment, shaping what movies look like, how they get made, what a success or flop is, and how we understand the very nature of the medium. This course examines the six aspects of film form—narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound, and acting—to understand better how summer blockbusters communicate, what makes for a successful blockbuster film, and how the genre of blockbuster functions.

This course serves as an introduction to elements of film form and grammar, including narrative, mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound, and acting. Students taking this course will learn how to describe a film's formal qualities and will use these descriptions to make analytical claims about film.

Simultaneously an industry, an entertainment, and an art form, Hollywood cinema is a system that has produced the predominant mass culture of the last 100 years, shaping the way that Americans (and the world) think about American history, culture, and identity. This class examines Hollywood as a business, as an aesthetic, and as a cultural force, considering in particular the following questions: What are the formal and ideological markers of the Hollywood film? How have the poetics and politics of the Hollywood film developed over time? Why has the Hollywood film endured over time? What voices have been neglected by Hollywood history? What does Hollywood history have to teach us about our own moment? In exploring these questions, we will draw on film studies, American studies, cognitive science, economics, cultural theory, history, critical race theory, feminist theory, aesthetics, and ethics to develop a comprehensive understanding of what Hollywood has meant and what it means today.

W. E. B. Du Bois famously described the African-American experience as a kind of “double-consciousness, [a] sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” torn between two identities: “an American, a Negro.” This course reflects this same duality, existing in tension between two simultaneous classes. The first half of the course examines the way that American popular cinema has represented the lives and humanity of black citizens—the “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” that Du Bois refers to. This portion of the course will consider how the industry of Hollywood—a largely white, straight, and male institution—depicted and shaped the lives of black Americans for the movie-going public. The second half of the course examines how black filmmakers from the earliest moments of American filmmaking to our own moment have used cinema as a form of self-expression and meaning-making. This portion of the course considers black filmmaking both as a response to historical representations of African-Americans and as a cinematic history separate from a relationship to white America. In combining these two separate intellectual impulses, this course aims to instantiate Du Bois’s “double-consciousness” and do justice both to the need to examine Hollywood cinema’s history of racial injustice and to the desire to explore the rich tableau of black filmmaking in the United States.

This course serves as an introduction to the history of film as a medium, ranging from its origins to the current moment. Students taking this course will learn how to situate a film in its historical and cultural contexts and will use these contexts to make analytical claims about film and history.

This course takes the concept of the projected image as a machine for reflection and metamorphosis as its starting point, considering the ways in which film both reflects ourselves and our culture back at us while also influencing and changing the very things it reflects. In particular, this course examines the ways in which world cinema—defined as cinema not in English—creates meaning, examining the movement, the auteur, and the society as particular loci of meaning. This course examines films from the beginnings of cinema to movies released quite recently, all in the service of considering what the cinema is, what it has to say about culture and society, and what we should think, say, do, and feel as viewers looking into our own distorted reflections.

This course examines the connection between film and national identity, studying at least one non-US cinema in order to explore the relationship between film art and national culture. Students taking this course will learn how to understand a film in its national, political, and aesthetic context, using these contexts to make analytical claims about the relationship between film and nation.

This course examines the ways a genre of popular film—the horror film—both reflects and alters the way we think about a specific facet of ourselves and our culture—our assumptions, beliefs, and values about gender and sexuality. Content includes films from the United States and from world cinema, from the beginnings of film to the current moment, all in the service of considering what the horror film is, what it has to say about gender and sexuality, and what we should think, say, do, and feel as viewers looking into our own distorted reflections.

Fundamentals of the process of designing for the theatre - developing the design from the initial script study through the collaborative process in design meetings. Learning how to “see” and developing points of view and approaches are studied. The course also covers the business of design, working in regional theatres and other professional venues. Fall, even years.

The fundamental techniques of play analysis, actor communication, and composition are introduced and applied to model plays. Organizational, leadership, and conceptual skills are developed as students audition, cast, and rehearse chosen scenes from the modern realistic repertoire for performance. Fall.

An experiential, hands-on course that introduces students to the fundamental aspects of digital filmmaking. Students will learn basic camera operation, audio recording, and video editing while also examining the creative and ethical considerations associated with the craft of filmmaking. Spring

This course examines some aspect of film production (ranging from screen writing to costuming, directing to acting, etc.) with the goal of understanding how the process of film production shapes film meaning. Students taking this course will learn how to use the circumstances of production to explicate and analyze film and other media objects.

This course examines film as a means of expressing some aspect of human experiences, ranging from the political to the ethical, the philosophical to the spiritual, the cultural to the personal. Students taking this course will learn how filmic language expresses express ideas, emotions, experiences, and beliefs, using this knowledge to understand both particular films and broader questions of spirituality, philosophy, politics, culture, and/or social justice.

This course examines the connection between film and national identity, studying at least one non-US cinema in order to explore the relationship between film art and national culture. Students taking this course will learn how to understand a film in its national, political, and aesthetic context, using these contexts to make analytical claims about the relationship between film and nation.

Course Description: This course examines the relationship between film and genre, either in the traditional sense of story-type (horror, musical, etc.) or in the sense of a particular filmmaker (Hitchcock, Kurosawa, etc.) or filmmaking movement (the French New Wave, New Hollywood, etc.). Students taking this course will learn how to situate specific films within broader generic contexts and will learn how these broader contexts can operate as an expression and/ or critique of cultural values and ideologies.

This course examines some aspect off film production (ranging from screen writing to costuming, directing to acting, etc.) with the goal of understanding how the process of film production shapes film meaning. Students taking this course will learn how to use the circumstances of production to explicate and analyze film and other media objects.

This course examines film as a means of expressing some aspect of human experiences, ranging from the political to the ethical, the philosophical to the spiritual, the cultural to the personal. Students taking this course will learn how filmic language expresses express ideas, emotions, experiences, and beliefs, using this knowledge to understand both particular films and broader questions of spirituality, philosophy, politics, culture, and/or social justice.

Images and sounds saturate our daily lives and while we often pay attention to content, we may neglect the visual and aural dimensions of these media. As citizens and consumers, we need to develop critical visual and aural interpretive frameworks to make sense of media. This course invites students to sharpen their analytical tools to attend to the sights and sounds that animate everyday life. This course examines media aesthetics through mise-en-scene, camera and point of view, editing techniques, visual style, and sound. From still to moving images, from print to online, students will conduct detailed aesthetic analyses of movies, television, radio, advertisements, podcasts, art, photography, websites, gifs, memes, and other forms of digital media. Additional topics may include industry, genre, power, visual culture theory, and identity. Fall.

This course serves as a continued study of elements of film form and grammar, including narrative, mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound, and acting. Students taking this course will learn how to describe a film's formal qualities and will use these descriptions to make analytical claims about film.

This course embraces the concept of “text as city,” using film to read the urban landscape and to understand history, geography, and culture, with a particular focus on films from the “long Seventies,” 1969 – 1981, that were filmed in and take place in New York City. Using these narrow chronological and geographical boundaries, this course explores ways of reading this singular moment in history, interrogating local demographics and neighborhoods, national culture, and the visions of a variety of filmmakers to understand what is important and distinct about New York City, about the 70s, and about film. In particular, these movies document the city’s racial and ethnic populations, emergent queerness, elite enclaves and decaying districts, and the vicious eruption of neoliberalism. In considering these films, this course also studies the reciprocal relationship between film and culture, as well as a variety of parallels between the 1970s and our own moment.

The word “interregnum” refers to an interval of time between the reigns of two monarchs, a liminal moment between one ruling system and another when possibilities flourish, and this political term gives us a perfect metaphor for the moment of film history—sometimes called “New Hollywood” or “the American New Wave”—students will study in this course. In the mid-sixties, the studio system of Hollywood collapsed, and in the late seventies, a new blockbuster era emerged, an era we still live in today. What will interest students in this course is what happens between the fall of one system and the rise of another, when there were no rules and American filmmakers were more free to create than they ever had been before . . . or since.

This course serves as an continued study of to the history of film as a medium, ranging from its origins to the current moment. Students taking this course will learn how to situate a film in its historical and cultural contexts and will use these contexts to make analytical claims about film and history.

This course will focus on a series of representative Latin American films in order to explore issues of national formation and cultural identity. Emphasis will be given to the social, political, and economic factors which affect the production and reception of these films.

This course provides an introduction to the history of Spanish cinema through the study of representative films of different historical periods (Francoist and/ or democratic period). Particular attention will be given to the historical, social, and cultural context of the production and reception of those movies, as well as to questions of authorship/genre, gender/sexuality, and national/cultural identity.

A study of French cinema as it has evolved in the last two decades. The films viewed will be used as a means to encourage reflection on the history, ideas and values that have gone into the making of modern France. The course is offered in English and French in separate sections. For students who take the English section of the course through the INST cross-listing, there is no French prerequisite. Spring.

This course explores African history by examining the roles that Africans have played historically as creators, audiences, and subjects of films. Using both film studies and African studies concepts, the course interrogates African film as both artifacts and interpretations of the past.

Survey of the parties, institutions, political processes, issues and policies of the major western European industrialized nations. Special focus on England, France, and Germany, but coverage extends to the other European democracies as well. Fall, even years.

This course examines Russian and Soviet culture during the twentieth century through the prism of film, a cultural medium that was critical for shaping life in the Soviet Union. Students who complete this course should be equipped to describe the evolution of film over the course of Soviet history (1917-1991) and to explain what these films reveal about politics, gender, empire, war, and daily life during what has been called the “Soviet century.”

This course examines the connection between film and national identity, offering advanced study in at least one non-US cinema in order to explore the relationship between film art and national culture. Students taking this course will learn how to understand a film in its national, political, and aesthetic context, using these contexts to make analytical claims about the relationship between film and nation.

The goal of this course is to examine the Western film genre in depth, exploring its historical development, American and international instantiations, the structural, sociopolitical, and aesthetic features that define it, and the contemporary state of the genre. This course will engage with of the breadth and depth of the genre, particularly from historicist and structuralist perspectives, and explore the relationships between the Western film and the historical, cultural, social, ethical, and material contexts from which it emerges.

This course explores the life and career of Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live. Kurosawa’s films return again and again to a central question: “why can’t people be happier together?” In examining this question—one that touches on fundamental questions of ethics, history, and society—Kurosawa will take us to burning medieval castles, modern Shakespeare adaptations, samurai battles, the atomic aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even his own dreams. This course will consider how Kurosawa’s films offer an ethic and a philosophy for life in the modern world, while at the same time offering a template for films like A Fistful of Dollars , A Bug’s Life , and Star Wars …and ultimately, contemporary cinema itself.

This class examines the life and works of Alfred Hitchcock, not only one of the most important filmmakers to ever live, but perhaps the most important image-maker of the 20th century. The director of 53 feature films—including Vertigo , named as the best film ever made by the BFI in 2012—Hitchcock worked in the early beginnings of silent movies, made films in Germany, England, and the United States, made careers (and ended them), revolutionized cinematic technique and storytelling, and changed the way we think about the movies. This course examines Hitchcock’s stories, filmmaking craft, and cinematic philosophy, exploring how these reflect both their own times and the obsessions, impulses, and genius of the man behind the camera.

By any measure, Breaking Bad , Vince Gilligan’s “story about a man who transforms himself from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” is one of the most successful television series of all time. It was one of the most-watched cable shows in the United States, was recognized by the Guinness World Records in 2013 as the highest rated show of all time, and was nominated for sixteen Emmy awards (among many other accolades). In addition to its compelling characters and propulsive plot, part of Breaking Bad ’s popularity can be attributed to its aesthetic, thematic, and ethical complexity. Indeed, Breaking Bad draws on modes of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, asks the same questions that appear in Faust and Paradise Lost , and emplots the philosophical arguments of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. This course will examine Breaking Bad in detail, considering what the series means within the material and formal contexts of television, early 21st century American economy and culture, and broader ethical, political, philosophical, and artistic discourses.

This course offers advanced study in the relationship between film and genre, either in the traditional sense of story-type (horror, musical, etc.) or in the sense of a particular filmmaker (Hitchcock, Kurosawa, etc.) or filmmaking movement (the French New Wave, New Hollywood, etc.). Students taking this course will learn how to situate specific films within broader generic contexts and will learn how these broader contexts can operate as an expression and/ or critique of cultural values and ideologies.

With a foundation in conceptualization, play analysis, actor communication, and design, student directors will create a vision for a short play. Student directors cast their shows and collaborate with a design team to realize the production in a public performance. Emphasis is placed on building conceptually rich, unified productions and the development of an individual creative voice. Spring.

With experience of basic acting techniques in hand, the student actor works in front of the camera to meet the challenges of electronic media. Simplicity of presentation, performance of the authentic person, and active listening are key skills. Work is in a variety of forms, from feature films to public service announcements. The class concludes with a public showing of student work. Periodic offering.

This course offers advanced study of some aspect of film production (ranging from screen writing to costuming, directing to acting, etc.) with the goal of understanding how the process of film production shapes film meaning. Students taking this course will learn how to use the circumstances of production to explicate and analyze film and other media objects.

Explore different ways in which religion (and theology) and film can be placed into mutually critical conversation. Specific attention given to constructing mutually enriching dialogues between recent films (1999-present) and specific biblical texts. How can biblical texts provide new lenses for the viewing of films? In what ways can films enrich the understanding and interpretation of biblical texts? Offered every semester.

Explore Asian religions in contemporary Asian, European, and North American cultures through film. By focusing on how Asian religious themes are treated in each film, we learn to identify longstanding Asian religious themes in contemporary films. We also investigate how Asian religions are employed in films to address contemporary issues. Offered every year.

This course explores different ways in which religion (and theology) and film can be placed into mutually critical conversation of central concern are the diverse responses by theologians (Jewish and Christian) and films to trauma such as the Holocaust. Offered every year.

This course offers advanced study film as a means of expressing some aspect of human experiences, ranging from the political to the ethical, the philosophical to the spiritual, the cultural to the personal. Students taking this course will learn how filmic language expresses express ideas, emotions, experiences, and beliefs, using this knowledge to understand both particular films and broader questions of spirituality, philosophy, politics, culture, and/or social justice.

The Core Integration Seminar (CIS) engages the Year Four Question: “Imagining the possible: What is our role in the world?” by offering students a culminating seminar experience in which students integrate the principles of Jesuit education, prior components of the Core, and their disciplinary expertise. Each section of the course will focus on a problem or issue raised by the contemporary world that encourages integration, collaboration, and problem solving. The topic for each section of the course will be proposed and developed by each faculty member in a way that clearly connects to the Jesuit Mission, to multiple disciplinary perspectives, and to our students’ future role in the world.

In this class, the film career of Pedro Almodovar (1949-), the most important Spanish filmmaker in recent decades, will be analyzed taking into account both the recent history of Spain and the history of the Spanish movie industry in the last 30 years. We will discuss several of his feature films and short films, as well as some of his writing. The topics of discussion will mainly focus on questions of identity in his movies, the relationship between his films and the cultural-political market of the democracy in Spain (the "Movida"), and the evolution of his movies in terms of cinematography, genre (from comedy to melodrama and lately, film noir), and gender representation. Film titles vary from semester to semester; however, could include films such as: Labyrinth of Passions (1982), Dark Habits (1983), What Have I Done to Deserve This?! (1984), Matador (1986), The Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), High Heels (1991), All About my Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009). This class will be conducted in Spanish.

A course offering the student an opportunity to study aspects of classical civilization, with a specialized focus on aspects of the Roman world and its culture.

The course explores documentary film as both a popular art form and as an instrument for constructing social knowledge. From early cinematic experiments to contemporary award winners, students will critically review the evolution of non-fiction filmmaking while analyzing the techniques that documentary filmmakers use to craft their documentaries. The larger ethical and societal impacts of documentary film will also be explored. Spring.

Documentary filmmaking provides an environment in which students experiment with the combination of digital film aesthetics and documentary storytelling to produce an original short non-fiction work. The course includes examination of ethical issues in documentaries, the use of animation and interactivity in film and the role of documentary work in different cultures. Lab fee. Spring.

An exploration of moving images and digital video as they relate to documentary films and art. Students learn how artists employ digital video and moving images in their artistic work. They also learn how to apply fundamental visual strategies of digital media and technological tools, including media editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, to the creation and editing of video. Lab fee. Fall.

Many current films raise first-order philosophical questions or issues, though few films are particularly good at solving those same problems or resolving the conflict underlying the issues. This course seeks to explore many contemporary films (none older than Blade Runner) and the philosophical issues they raise, both by their explicit content and by their implicit content. Metaphysical issues about the mind and body relationship, the nature and extent of free will, and the nature of personal identity will be included. Some epistemological issues having to do with how well we can expect to have access to reality, and what might be among the impediments to the access will also be included. The course generally avoids treating ethical or moral issues, but also takes an interest in the use of the emotions in films, the treatment of violence and human sexuality in films and the nature of comedy in films. Some attention will also be given to film techniques, especially from the point of view of the audience.