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Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), directed by Peter Tscherkassky, from a print in the collection of the Harvard Film Archive.
Courses>>
GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES IN FILM & VISUAL STUDIES 2009-10
Courses offered by faculty associated with Film & Visual Studies
VES 270: Proseminar in Film and Visual Studies: History
Eric Rentschler
Half course (spring term)
M., 2-4 pm and a weekly film screening to be arranged
Considers film history and the relations between film and history as well as pertinent theoretical approaches to historiography. Critical readings of exemplary film historical studies and careful scrutiny of films both in and as history.
Note: Required of all graduate students in Film and Visual Studies, and those intending to declare a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies.
VES 271: Proseminar in Film and Visual Studies: Theory
Giuliana Bruno
Half course (fall term) W. 2-4 pm
An advanced survey of current debates on the place of the moving image in contemporary visual culture and art practice with respect to concepts of space, time, movement, and affect.
Note: Required of all graduate students in Film and Visual Studies, and those intending to declare a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies.
VES 285x: Visual Fabrics: Film, Fashion and Material Culture: Seminar
Giuliana Bruno
Half course (spring term)
W., 2-4 and a weekly film screening Tu. 7-9 pm
Enrollment: Limited to 12
Explores the common language of film and fashion, both powerful image makers and objects of material culture. Film and fashion share a role with architecture and contemporary art creating narratives and atmospheres, conveying identity and shaping visual expression. We explore their common language, particularly the current intersection with contemporary visual arts, treating these elements as part of our cultural "fabric" through a text(ur)al analysis of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.
Note: Offered jointly with the Graduate School of Design as 4354.
Prerequisite: A course in film studies or the equivalent course in cultural studies.
Anthropology 2836r: Sensory Ethnography II: Studio Course
Mary M. Steedly and Alfred Guzzetti
Half course (fall term) M., W. 1-4 pm
Enrollment: Limited to 10
Second half of a year-long sequence in which students apply media anthropological theory and conduct ethnography using film, video, sound, still photography, and/or hypermedia.
Note: Limited to graduate students, who must also attend all VES 158 classes. Emphasis is on pre-production and production in the spring, and on post-production in the fall. Interview with instructors and teaching assistant required for admission.
English 291: Freud, Pyschoanalysis and Literary Study (New Course)
Marjorie Garber
Half course (spring term) Tu. 2-4 pm
The major writings of Sigmund Freud in English translation, together with relevant works of literature and culture. Additional readings from Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Zizek, and Edelman, among others. Psychoanalysis will be considered as a reading practice, a master narrative, an allegorical structure, a theatrical and cinematic mode, and a political intervention. Students will develop their own approach to Freud and psychoanalysis in a final seminar paper.
History of Art and Architecture 279k: Seeing Spectatorship
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Half course (spring term) M. 1-3 pm
Enrollment: Limited to 10
What happens when attention shifts from art object to viewer? When, why, and how does this occur? Graduate seminar mapping recent reception-oriented approaches in art as well as art history, literary, film, and cultural studies.
VES 301. Film Studies Workshop
Catalog Number: 2867
Eric Rentschler
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Courses of Reading and Research
VES 310. Reading and Research
Members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Conducted through regular conferences and assigned writing. Limited to students reading specifically on topics not covered in regular courses. Open only by petition to the Department; petitions should be presented during the term preceding enrollment, and must be signed by the instructor with whom the reading is to be done. All applicants for admission should first confer with the Director of Graduate Studies.
VES320. Directed Study
Members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Other suggested courses
Anthropology 2635: Image/Media/Publics: Seminar
Mary M. Steedly
Half course (fall term) Tu., 1-3 pm
Enrollment: Limited to 15
Explores the relations among technologies of image production and circulation, the nature and intensity of the circulating image, and the generation of publics and counter-publics. Questions of scale, mediation, publicity, and mobilization will be considered.
Note: Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of instructor.
Comparative Literature 256: Archeology of Modernity and Visual Culture (New Course)
Svetlana Boym
Half course (spring term) Th. 2-4 pm
Enrollment: Limited to 15
Explores contradictions of the modern experience in literature, philosophy, arts and architecture. Topics for 2010: nostalgia and modernization, public freedom and cross-cultural memory, archeology and the creative mapping of the urban space, culture and politics. Special attention to the relationship between critical theory and creative practice. Reading from Benjamin, Simmel, Shklovsky, Nabokov, Kafka, Arendt, Certeau, Lyotard, Derrida.
History of Art and Architecture 274k. Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde (New Course)
Maria Elizabeth Gough
Half course (fall term). Th. 1–3 pm
Enrollment: Limited to 12.
History of Science 257: Post-Human Science Studies
Mario Biagioli
Half course (spring term) M. 2-4 pm
We discuss recent science studies questioning dichotomies between society and nature, human and non-human agency, and between the human and the animal. Readings include Latour, Rheinberger, Rabinow, Haraway, Rotman, Murphy, and Pickering.
History of Science 281: Flat Science: Picturing Knowledge through Print, Photography, and Cinematography
Mario Biagioli
Half course (fall term) W. 2-4
Examines imaging techniques from the Scientific Revolution to the twentieth century in astronomy, physiology, and criminology; interactions between art history (Benjamin, Krauss), philosophy (Bergson, Foucault, Deleuze), and science studies; the epistemological status of pictures.
Music 218r: 20th-Century Music: Seminar
Carol J. Oja
Half course (fall term) Tu. 2-4
Early African American Musical Theatre. Explores the rich history of African American musical theatre from In Dahomey (1898) through Carmen Jones (1943 stage, 1954 film), encompassing shows with all-black performance and creative teams as well as those of mixed-race lineage.
Note: Open to undergraduates with permission of instructor.
Slavic 282: Literature, Film, and Visual Art in Contemporary Russia
Svetlana Boym
Half course (fall term) W., 1-3 pm
Examines Russian culture from socialist realism to post-communism. Topics: Socialist realist film, literature of the Gulag, writers' trials, non-conformist art and rethinking of history, utopia and kitsch. Works by Shalamov, Nabokov, Sinyavsky-Tertz, and others.
Note: Most materials also available in English. Open to qualified undergraduates.
Prerequisite: Reading knowledge of Russian.
Slavic 289: Elegy: The Art of Losing (New Course)
Stephanie Sandler
Half course (spring term) Tu., 2-4
Poems, films, visual artifacts, and music alongside theories of loss. Focuses on non-narrative forms, with examples from Pushkin, Baratynsky, Fet, Brodsky, Shvarts; Tarkovsky, Shemiakin, Sokurov; Silvestrov, Sebald.
Note: Open to qualified undergraduates.
Prerequisite: Reading knowledge of Russian.
Spanish 218: Colonial/Postcolonial Studies
Jose Rabasa (University of California, Berkeley)
Half course (spring term) Tu., 1-3
Is there a history of voice? What is the nature of the materiality of voice recorded by mimetic apparatuses (gramophones, alphabet, iconic scripts, film)? Particular attention will be placed on objects from the indigenous Americas.
Note: Conducted in Spanish.
Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality 2000: Introduction to WGS
Alice Jardine
Half course (fall term) Th.
Enrollment: Limited to 15
An overview of major questions raised by the interdisciplinary study of women, gender, and sexuality and the challenges thus raised to traditional divisions of knowledge. Our approach will be contemporary and our subjects will range across history, science, economics, literature, and film, moving through feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories, towards an examination of how such fields as public health, medicine, education, and law have been forever changed by gender theory since WW II.
Note: Will count as the Graduate Proseminar for the PhD secondary field requirement in WGS.
Courses in the Graduate School of Design
3434: Architecture and Art: From Minimalism to Neuro-phenomenology
Sanford Kwinter
(Fall term) Wed. 3:00 - 6:00, 517 Gund Hall
Since the first pronouncements of the 'death' of painting in the post-Abstract Expressionist era, art consistently sought to radicalize its practice by overturning the traditional metaphysics of expression and meaning through a vigorous engagement with the context of its presentation. This approach came increasingly to center attention on the temporal aspects of experience, and on the adjacent physical environment as an annex of the work itself. In the contemporary context both art and design have increasingly begun to examine and address the physiological aspects of perception as the principal shapers of space. This course will begin with the principle ideas that shaped the new thinking about painting after the second world war, how these ideas found form in the sculpture of the 1960s and '70s and how the legacy of these ideas have continued to mark aesthetic theory from relational aesthetics to neuro-aesthetics.
Nota bene
- If there are courses not on this list that you feel should count toward credit in Film and Visual Studies, do not hesitate to discuss them with the Director of Graduate Studies.
- Courses of interest may also be found at the Graduate School of Design <http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/courses/index.cgi>.
- Harvard has cross-registration agreements with MIT and Brown University. You may find interesting and relevant graduate courses there, especially in Comparative Media Studies <cms.mit.edu/> and Media and Modern Culture < http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/>.
- For a list of undergraduate courses of interest see: www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/courses.html. Many of these courses are available for graduate credit upgrades. For more information, contact the Director of Graduate Studies.
- Both Yale University and Columbia University have important graduate programs in film. GSAS students have the opportunity to study there, and at eight other universities, through the Exchange Scholar Program <www-hugsas.harvard.edu/academic/exchange.html>.