FILM 6050a, Film and Media Studies Certificate Workshop  Francesco Casetti

The workshop is built on students’ needs and orientations. It is aimed at helping the individual trajectories of students and at deepening the topics they have met while attending seminars, conferences, and lectures. Students are required to present a final qualifying paper demonstrating their capacity to do interdisciplinary work. The workshop covers two terms and counts as one regular course credit. Open only to students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Film and Media Studies. Prerequisite: FILM 601.  ½ Course cr
T 5pm-7pm

FILM 6070a / AMST 6663a / HSAR 6770a, Video Art, Guerrilla Television, and Alternative Media  Tom Day

Video art has been an important aspect of contemporary art since the 1960s, born out of the increasing pull of mass media on society and alongside the political unrest of the times. A form of moving image unique to the later half of the twentieth century, video is the embodiment of the heterogeneity and repetition that characterize postmodernism, as noted by theorists like Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson. This course places video art within wider cultural, theoretical, and political contexts. Over the course, we trace video and other moving image media as an alternative ecosystem of production, distribution, and exhibition, observing artists, collectives, and movements that have used the technology to communicate, comprehend, and critique the changing media and lived realties of the second half of the twentieth century. Emphasis is the connections between video and corporately controlled media as we examine artists who attempted to provide an alternative vision of mass media through subversive interventions and utopian alternative programming. We also analyze video’s changing place within recent exhibition practices with the increasing presence of documentary modes and works reacting to an increasingly networked and surveilled society since the 1980s.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

FILM 6170a / CPLT 9004a / FREN 875 / FREN 8750a / GMAN 6004a / SPAN 6205a, Psychoanalysis: Key Conceptual Differences between Freud and Lacan I  Moira Fradinger

This is the first section of a year-long seminar (second section: CPLT 914) designed to introduce the discipline of psychoanalysis through primary sources, mainly from the Freudian and Lacanian corpuses but including late twentieth-century commentators and contemporary interdisciplinary conversations. We rigorously examine key psychoanalytic concepts that students have heard about but never had the chance to study. Students gain proficiency in what has been called “the language of psychoanalysis,” as well as tools for critical practice in disciplines such as literary criticism, political theory, film studies, gender studies, theory of ideology, psychology medical humanities, etc. We study concepts such as the unconscious, identification, the drive, repetition, the imaginary, fantasy, the symbolic, the real, and jouissance. A central goal of the seminar is to disambiguate Freud's corpus from Lacan's reinvention of it. We do not come to the “rescue” of Freud. We revisit essays that are relevant for contemporary conversations within the international psychoanalytic community. We include only a handful of materials from the Anglophone schools of psychoanalysis developed in England and the US. This section pays special attention to Freud's “three” (the ego, superego, and id) in comparison to Lacan's “three” (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). CPLT 914 devotes, depending on the interests expressed by the group, the last six weeks to special psychoanalytic topics such as sexuation, perversion, psychosis, anti-asylum movements, conversations between psychoanalysis and neurosciences and artificial intelligence, the current pharmacological model of mental health, and/or to specific uses of psychoanalysis in disciplines such as film theory, political philosophy, and the critique of ideology. Apart from Freud and Lacan, we will read work by Georges Canguilhem, Roman Jakobson, Victor Tausk, Émile Benveniste, Valentin Volosinov, Guy Le Gaufey, Jean Laplanche, Étienne Balibar, Roberto Esposito, Wilfred Bion, Félix Guattari, Markos Zafiropoulos, Franco Bifo Berardi, Barbara Cassin, Renata Salecl, Maurice Godelier, Alenka Zupančič, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Eric Kandel, and Lera Boroditsky among others. No previous knowledge of psychoanalysis is needed. Starting out from basic questions, we study how psychoanalysis, arguably, changed the way we think of human subjectivity. Graduate students from all departments and schools on campus are welcome. The final assignment is due by the end of the spring term and need not necessarily take the form of a twenty-page paper. Taught in English. Materials can be provided to cover the linguistic range of the group.
T 4pm-5:55pm

FILM 6325a, Cinema and Theories of the Psyche  John MacKay

A comparative inquiry into the main theoretical approaches to the psyche and subjectivity that have been applied to cinema since World War Two, with a focus on psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, and phenomenology. Topics covered include narrative comprehension; concepts of spectatorship and the differences among spectators; affective experience; and the relationships and incompatibilities between these three approaches. We look at writings by Freud, Wallon, Lacan, Piaget, Merleau-Ponty, Souriau, Metz, Mulvey, Deleuze, and Sobchack among others. Open to interested undergraduates. 
T 1:30pm-3:25pm, T 7pm-10pm

FILM 6330a / GMAN 6300a, Voice Imitators: Reading Thomas Bernhard with AI  Fatima Naqvi

This course seeks to situate Thomas Bernhard’s prose miniatures collected in The Voice Imitator (Der Stimmenimitator, 1978) in relations to questions generated by artificial intelligence. We come together to write about and discuss the microstories collected in this volume in light of Bernhard’s other writings, important literary works by other authors, radio programs, films, and contemporary writing on AI. We experiment with various AI models to see what kinds of readings advanced language models might generate. We measure our own multidisciplinary, theoretically nuanced interpretations against those of the “machine”—and see where this “dialogue” with AI might take us. Bernhard’s microstories, which reflect profoundly on contingency, mimesis, imitation, performativity, averageness, and speech acts, offer a rich starting point for such analyses.
F 11:45am-1:40pm

FILM 7720a / GMAN 7720a, Landscape, Film, Architecture  Fatima Naqvi

Movement through post-1945 landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. The use of cameras and other visual-verbal means as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how these places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers (Wenders, Herzog, Ottinger, Geyrhalter, Seidl, Ade, Grisebach), architects and sculptors (e.g. Rudofsky, Neutra, Abraham, Hollein, Pichler, Smithson, Wurm, Kienast), photographers (Sander, B. and H. Becher, Gursky, Höfer), and writers (Bachmann, Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek). Additional readings by Certeau, Freytag, J.B. Jackson, L. Burckhardt.
F 9:25am-11:20am, W 7pm-10pm

FILM 8040a / MUSI 8370a, Opera, Media, Technologies  Gundula Kreuzer

Opera has been assigned—and continues to assume—important roles in genealogies of technical media. This seminar explores both what media archaeology and other recent approaches in media studies and science and technology studies hold for an understanding of the nature of opera, and what opera might in turn contribute to a historically expanded perspective on electronic and digital multimedia. Understanding opera as a technical medium will also help address the latest operatic transformations in the digital age. Topics include theoretical discourses on eventness and mediation, strategies of audiovisual immersion, the development of illusionist stage devices, the function of screens, the orchestra as technology, and Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as well as examinations of the medial configurations in various operatic renditions, from the Baroque picture-frame stage to HD broadcasts, from Florentine intermedi to site-specific experiments, from Bayreuth to Zoom opera. Reading knowledge of Western musical notation is helpful but not required of students from outside the Department of Music.
F 9:25am-11:20am

FILM 8330a, Semiotics  Francesco Casetti

The foundational goal of Semiotics has been to reconstruct how meaning emerges in objects and situations, how it circulates within and across different cultural environments, and how it influences and is influenced by the cultural context. To renew semiotics’ main tasks, this reiteration of the seminar will explore the process of “making meaning” of some of the current AI-powered apps and tools. Specifically, we will analyze the ways these apps and tools engage users in a set of operations that determine their positions, freedom, and trust. These operations, which often look like ‘conversations’, function as discursive interface in Human/Machine interactions. Through this exploration, we will outline the foundation of Semiotics of AI in connection with General Semiotics. The seminar will engage participants in a weekly discussion about case studies, in which we will seek to uncover how these apps and tools become “meaningful,” in the double sense of having meaning and giving meaning. Students from Film and Media Studies and the School of Architecture have priority: they are asked to express their choice by August 25. Students from other departments are asked to send the instructor up to ten lines with the reasons why they want to attend the seminar by August 26. The seminar is aimed at bolstering a dialogue that crosses cultures and disciplines.
W 4pm-5:55pm

FILM 8730b / EALL 5810b / FILM 873, Japanese Cinema and Its Others  Aaron Gerow

Critical inquiry into the myth of a homogeneous Japan through analysis of how Japanese film and media historically represent “others” of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and sexualities, including women, black residents, ethnic Koreans, Okinawans, Ainu, undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ minorities, the disabled, youth, and monstrous others such as ghosts.
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

FILM 9210a / EALL 8060a / EAST 8221a, Research in Japanese Film History  Aaron Gerow

This seminar covers the methods and problems of researching and writing Japanese film history. We review the theoretical issues involved in historiography in general and film historiography in particular, and then consider how these are pertinent to the study of Japanese cinema history. Our approach is critical, as we examine several recent examples of Japanese film historiography, as well as practical, as we explore various methods and strategies for researching Japanese film history. We particularly focus on the Japanese cinema’s historical relation to the nation, especially in terms of how cinema may help us historicize the nation, and vice versa. Students develop their own research project using the unique collections at Yale. Knowledge of Japanese is helpful but not essential.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

FILM 9730a / ENGL 6873a, Modernity and the Time of Literature  John Williams

This course examines transformations in temporality that occurred in the sciences and arts during the twentieth century. From the arrival of Einsteinian relativity to more contemporary proofs on quantum nonlocality, the question of time in the twentieth century threatened to overturn some of our oldest assumptions about cause and effect, duration, history, presentness, and futurity. These new temporalities were as scientifically and philosophically vexing as they were rife with spiritual and aesthetic possibility—a dynamic reflected in the literary and artistic forms that were central to these transformations. Our reading reflects this deeply cross-cultural and interdisciplinary trajectory, including histories of science and technology (Peter Galison, N. Katherine Hayles, David Kaiser), philosophies of time (Heidegger, Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, McLuhan, Luhmann), critical theories of temporal form (Derrida, Adorno, Jameson, Pamela Lee, Kojin Karatani), a wide array of literary texts (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom McCarthy, and others), as well as important cinematic innovations (Jodorowsky, Godard, Kubrick). What is the “time” of literature? of film? How does art transform or reinforce theories of temporal flow? How do new technologies of composition and circulation alter the temporal effects of a given work? What was the “End of History”? Previously ENGL 973.
M 7pm-8:55pm