Reading and composition course based on works of Russian and other Slavic writers, either written in English or translated into English. As students develop strategies of writing and interpretation, they will become acquainted with a particular theme in Russian and/or Slavic literatures and their major voices. R5A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement, and R5B satisfies the second half.

Does cinema merely capture and project the world in motion, or can cinema actually change the world as we know it? From its inception, cinema as a medium has been hailed for its ability to capture and mechanically reproduce the movement of real life. In its early days, the cinematic medium shocked spectators for this reason. The early spectators of the Lumière brothers’ first short, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896), supposedly perceived the train projected on the screen as moving toward them. Over two decades after the Lumière’s first films, spectators in Russia would marvel at new innovations in the medium that brought to life the events of the 1917 October Revolution. In the oft-cited words attributed to Lenin, cinema became for the Soviets “the most important of all the arts,” making the medium a technology at the forefront of social revolution for the first time. Decades after the innovations of the Soviets, cinema would enter its modern period through the new waves of the 1960s that disrupted all the conventions of narrative and documentary film form across the globe, often in an explicit effort to revolutionize the whole world. Here, we will pay specific attention to Jean-Luc Godard’s famous distinction between making political films and making films politically. What does it mean in the modern, global world to make films politically? How do different types of filmmaking (documentary, narrative, experimental) impact a film’s social function and the methods for politically making films? This is a class about how the history of cinema became enmeshed in the history of 20th century social revolutions. We will focus on the three different periods of cinema mentioned above—early cinema, Soviet revolutionary cinema, post-WWII new wave(s)—to look at and understand the different types of revolution in film. In the latter half of the course, we will expand our geographic scope by drawing on films from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Japan, and Mauritania. Over the course of the whole semester, we will consider films and shorts by the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Edwin Porter, Evgenii Bauer, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub, Shūji Terayama, Želimir Žilinik, Dušan Makavejev, Med Hondo, Agnès Varda, Věra Chytilová, Jean-Luc Godard, and Santiago Álvarez. While this course will focus on 20 th -century cinema, we will also consider early cinema alongside contemporary social media practices (as a modern form of “cinema of attractions”) and our revolutionary films alongside ongoing liberation struggles in the world today. We will occasionally draw from theoretical texts to help ground our study of film and will discuss throughout the course the different elements of reading movement within and across shots in film (mise-en-scène, blocking, camera angles, camera movement, montage). In this course, students will be guided through the various elements and stages in the writing process—drafting outlines, developing close reading skills, learning how to structure an argument, using stylized and analytical language in papers, and constructing a coherent thesis. This course satisfies the first half, or the “A” portion, of the Reading and Composition requirement. No prior knowledge of East European, Russian, or Eurasian languages, literatures or cultures is required.

Requisites

• Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing Requirement.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills