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New Class Opportunities

This page lists visiting instructors and artists, as well as descriptions of new classes. This page is updated every semester.

This page also lists internships offered by Film Studies.

New Classes, Summer 2008

FILM 4010-810 / ARTF 5010-820
Topics: Cinema and the Performing Arts
3 semester hours, Section 810
Term A: June 2-July 3, 2008
Taught by Elliot Caplan
Professor of Media Study, SUNY-Buffalo
President and founder, Picture Start Films

This class will explore the relationship between cinema and the performing arts. Students will explore the moving image in relation to the moving figure. This course explores art forms, cinema and dance.

Professor Caplan is returning for the second time as a FIRST faculty member. He is an Emmy-award winning producer and filmmaker. For the past thirty years Professor Caplan has worked with world renown
choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. Their collaborative work has been aired
nationally on PBS, Bravo, A&E and internationally to thirty-five countries. Professor Caplan is an
acclaimed teacher.

FILM 4010-820 / ARTF 5010-820
Topics: Cinema and Magic
3 semester hours, Section 820
Term B: July 8-August 8, 2008
Taught by Thomas Gunning
Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Cinema and Magic are often paired historically and thematically. This course will explore these connections. Cinema in its origins was closely related to the work of stage magicians, whose complex technological magic spectacles easily transferred to film. This tradition continues in contemporary cinema with the use of special effects in fantasy films. Secondly, magic as a system of belief and ritual practice in traditional cultures has been the topic of investigation by a number of important filmmakers. Finally, magic as an alternative to Western enlightenment, as an occult system of analogies, has inspired a number of avant-garde filmmakers. This course will explore these relationships between magic and film, which enabled magic to provide filmmakers with alternative models of cinematic form and structure.

Professor Gunning's research focuses on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His groundbreaking book on silent cinema, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film traces the ways in which film style interacted with new economic structures in the early American film industry and with new tasks of storytelling. In addition to two other books, Professor Gunning has published over one-hundred articles. In addition to being an outstanding scholar, Professor Gunning is an excellent teacher.

New Classes, Fall 2008

FILM 4600-801 / ARTF 5600-801
Creative Digital Cinematography
Contact instructor for details: Daniel.Boord@colorado.edu
MW 3:00-4:50

Explores creative approaches to single camera digital cinematography through short projects, discussions, and screenings. Relates creative photography and poetic approaches to the digital cinema camera. Taught in the new ATLAS performance space, in tandem with FILM 3010-003, Audio Environments, and DNCE 4053/5053, Adv. Dance Composition.

These three classes represent a collaborative, experimental approach to the creation of art for choreography, sound and the moving image within the context of everyday experience. All three of these elements will have equal footing in our collaborative exploration of movement, sound and moving image. The horizon of everyday experiences of sounds, images and movements which we take for granted become the fabric of our bricolage.

The classes will address a range of art making strategies from site-specific work, music concrete, to poetic moving image making. These three classes will work in parallel, meeting in the new ATLAS building's 2700 square foot performance space throughout the semester to view, discuss and work on projects.

FILM 4010-002
Excavation Filmmaking
Taught by Asst. Professor Travis Wilkerson
MW 11:00-1250

Moving-Image Production course that combines research and ambitious field trips to produce short films and videos that emerge from an intense engagement with the past, present, and future of the world around us.

FILM 4010-003
Topics in Film Studies Cinema and the Landscape: A Exploration of Place and Digital Production
Taught by Assoc. Professor Ausin Allen, who is on the faculty of the College of Architecture and Planning at the Univ. of Colorado at Denver.
F 3:00-5:50

Film and digital media do so much to give meaning to our visual and aural sense of place, whether through cinema, video games or other media, that the theories driving the creation of virtual space should not be overlooked. With that in mind, this course hopefully breaks through some of the perceived barriers related to a critical part of film and digital media ---the theories defining the spatial experience. Cinema and the Landscape is a study of the construction of place as an essential element in the production of film and digital media, and the interaction with film and digital media as a critical component in the way we experience landscapes, whether urban or rustic. The class is designed to provide a solid and accessible foundation for the exploration of contemporary film/digital media theory in relation to production through what Edward S. Small calls "Direct Theory," a theory based on the idea that film and digital media may be the object of study as well as the process for examining and developing film/digital media theory, and that experimental film is key in this process. Therefore we will spend time developing ideas about spatial theory through the process of critiquing and producing media. Cinema and the Landscape is for students who wish to integrate film and digital media as a part of the design process. The goal of the class is to provide students with additional tools for investigating and implementing changes in the landscape, through a deeper understanding of virtual space. The course is designed to enable students to explore and examine the processes, movements, chronology, and culture associated with the historical development of landscapes and place through film. I have divided the course into two distinct ideals of place. One is the cinematic urban space and the ideas of landscape and city that give form and meaning to a sense of place. The other is its counter, the natural or pastoral landscape within the context of cinematic expression. Both are in a reciprocal relationship of informing the way we think about architecture in relation to the land and the way urban and natural landscapes shape meaning within film, often through struggles of opposing views.

FILM 4010-004
Recycled Images
Taught by Asst. Professor Jeanne Liotta
TR 1:00-2:50

This course is a hands-on DIY workshop environment where students will create handmade short films without cameras, combined with an analytical film studies approach to screenings and discussions of artistic and historical practices in the art of cinema. Expect particular focus on direct animation and found-footage pioneers, from Len Lye to Craig Baldwin as well as the various and often anonymous creative defenders of free culture. Our adventures begin with the film-material itself, by the direct creation of images and sound on 16mm film using a variety of practical processes including etching, bleaching, painting, and collage.

Students are encouraged to discover their own tools and methods, inventing a personal vocabulary of techniques.

FILM 4010-801
Ephemeral Media: Film/Video/Installation (Film Critical Studies Topic)
Contact instructor for details: Melinda.Barlow@colorado.edu
MW 3:30-6:45

This course explores the converging and diverging histories, practices, and aesthetics of three ephemeral media--film, video, and installation--and asks what, precisely, makes each medium so fleeting, and how this condition affects our experience as viewers. What does it mean, as Laura Marks put it, to "love a disappearing image"? How do images and installations become lost objects of desire? How is this process impacted by both technological change and technological decay? And how does ephemerality transform the act of writing--for artists creating trails of documentation evoking work that is inaccessible or has been deinstalled--and for critics and scholars attempting to imagine and reconstruct works they may have never seen?

This course tries to answer these questions by proceeding chronologically through contemporary experimental film, video and art history, looking at the shift from analog to digital, and considering new installations created by artists who were originally, or are primarily, experimental filmmakers. Single channel tapes by early video artists such as Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci, Peter Campus, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and Martha Rosler are examined simultaneously with experimental films and installations from the same period, and newer experimental and digital works by Phil Solomon, Janie Geiser, Lewis Klahr, and Dan Boord & Luis Valdovino are explored in relation to installations by established and emerging artists such as Mary Lucier, Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Janet Cardiff, Runa Islam, and Casey McGuire. Guest artists working in ephemeral media will lecture on their own work in class, and the course will include a field trip to experience the installation exhibition "The Architecture of Desire," at Colorado College of Art in Colorado Springs.

This is a serious seminar for upper level undergraduates. Oral presentations, research papers, and a commitment to daily, lively discussion are required. Special emphasis will be placed on developing a style of writing that is analytic and lyrical, and thus able to evoke fleeting experiences of different ephemeral media. Same as ARTF 5010-801. As this is a controlled enrolment course, please contact Professor Melinda.Barlow@Colorado.Edu for more information.

Internships

Film Programming with Don Yannacito

Status	available
Credits	1 credit hour
Commitment	Work 5 to 10 hours per week. Some evenings and weekend work required

International Film Series

Status	filled (not available at this time)
Credits	2 credit hours
Commitment	10-15 hours per week. Some evenings and weekend work required