If you would like to add an upper-level CMCL course to your schedule for the fall, please consider C435 Documentary Filmmaking and/or C432 Visual Rhetoric.
C435 has just a few seats left, while there are still many seats available in C432. If more students do not enroll in C432, we may be forced to cancel the class due to low enrollment. This would be a terrible thing, because the class is great!
C435 has a prerequisite: you must have already completed a production course of some kind. Courses that qualify include CMCL-C 360 Motion Picture Production, C335 Production as Criticism, or TEL-T 283 Introduction to Production Techniques and Practices. C435 also requires special permission, so let me know if you are interested in enrolling and I will give you the required permission.
See below for course descriptions for both of these courses. Specific questions about the courses should be directed to the course instructors, whose names and e-mail addresses are listed below.
C432 Visual Rhetoric (3 cr, #16012)
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm (lecture)
M 7:15pm-10:15pm (required film screening)
Instructor: Michael Kaplan
E-Mail: mikaplan@indiana.edu
What does it mean to be a citizen of a democracy? How do we know
what makes a (good) citizen? And what kinds of activities count as
citizenship? What happens when the conception of citizenship we rely
upon begins to appear unjust or unworkable? Most importantly, what
are the consequences for democracy of defining citizenship one way
as opposed to another? Such questions have been debated at length by
scholars, but we have all given them much more thought than we may
even realize. Both the meaning of citizenship and the problems that
beset it have long been important themes of the most familiar forms
of entertainment, such as fiction film. In fact, we learn the most
consequential lessons of good citizenship from movies that feel
nothing like civics class and seem not to be about politics at all.
This course examines the ways we collectively imagine democratic
citizenship by taking a comparative approach: we will read samples
of major debates about citizenship (rights vs. obligations; personal
virtue vs. good institutions; abstraction vs. particularity; the
challenge of multiculturalism; the promise of cosmopolitanism; etc.)
and watch films in which these issues are addressed and/or
imaginatively resolved. The point is to see how watching such films
is in fact our most common way of “doing” our own
citizenship “theory,” and to think about the political implications
of this fact. So, students will analyze the rhetorical strategies of
films in relation to theoretical readings about citizenship—think
High Plains Drifter as a thesis about civic virtue, Die Hard with a
Vengeance as a defense of liberal multiculturalism, Thelma & Louise
as a critique of abstract universalism, or Bulletproof Monk as a
model of hybrid cosmopolitanism.
C435 Documentary Filmmaking: Theory and Practice (4 cr, 8110)
TuTh 3:00pm-5:00pm
Instructor: Robert Clift
E-Mail: raclift@indiana.edu
What makes a documentary a documentary? Its subject matter?
Stylistic or technical features? The fact that it uses real people
and not actors (most of the time, that is)? This course will
explore these and other questions as it traces the history of
documentary film practice. We will study the major American and
European documentary movements through film screenings and readings,
and we will engage the styles discussed in a series of hands-on
exercises. Aside from these exercises, there will be several
quizzes, a midterm, and three short papers/journals.
This will be an intense seminar, involving plenty of reading, film
viewing, writing, and creative work. The goal of the class is to
gain a critical understanding of some fundamental concepts involved
in documentary filmmaking, such as realism, evidence, voice, ethics,
etc. The production exercises will be completed in the miniDV
format, which has become the medium of choice for many documentary
filmmakers.
