| Film and Visual Studies |
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In the past quarter century, the study of film has witnessed evolutionary changes in cinematic forms. Current historical and theoretical research addresses the social, aesthetic, and economic importance of cinema for the history of the twentieth century. And at the beginning of a new century, television, video, and the digital arts, as well as new forms of performance, design, and contemporary art, are challenging cinema to adapt and to find new forms of representation. The global reach of the film/media industries challenge us to comprehend how the screen arts are changing our understanding of culture and society, and how cultural knowledge and experience are conveyed through moving images. The impact of new imaging technologies on the history and development of science is equally important, presenting new challenges for the study of image making and reception in the 21st century. Through the power and flexibility of its interdisciplinary approaches, since the 1990s advanced research in film studies has become the foundation for a broader concern with contemporary visual culture. The original vision for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard—which in the 1950s already recognized the inter-relatedness of film, video, mixed media, design, architecture, performance, and installation art in the visual and performing arts—has thus proved to be prescient. The past ten to 15 years have also witnessed a particular and compelling institutional and intellectual convergence between the history and philosophy of art and the cultural study of space on one hand, and film history and theory on the other. This convergence is motivated by an idea of visual culture that embodies three interlocking research perspectives: one object-based (visual media and their interrelationships), one institutional (the emergence of visual studies as an international, cross-disciplinary approach to research), and one theoretical (the philosophical interrogation of the social nature of vision and visuality, especially in its cinematic forms). The first perspective recognizes commonalities between visual media—painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, and video—and the critical theories that accompany them. It concerns itself primarily with spatial media deployed in two- and three-dimensional environments—painting, photography, architecture—as well as time-based spatial arts such as cinema, electronic and digital media (including video, television and the varieties of new media), and installation art. This focus on the arts of vision, however, recognizes that vision is an active, complex process that is rarely engaged in the absence of other perceptual information. Spatial media, along with their histories and theories, cannot be considered independently of literature and the performing arts. Contemporary manifestations of visual culture are also increasingly defined by the interdependence of media. To take one example, the moving image today is not only projected on cinema screens; it is deployed equally in cinema theatres, on home television, portable computers and other types of personal displays, and in public spaces such as airports or on building facades, and worked into installation art and live performance. In each instance, conditions of perception, interpretation, and evaluation shift as the image cycles through different social contexts and technologies of presentation. From the beginning, film studies at Harvard has been conceived as the multidisciplinary foundation for the broader study of visual experience. From Paul Sachs’s incorporation of film into the academic and curatorial focus of the fine arts to Rudolph Arnheim’s consideration of the medium in his investigations of visual thinking, and from Hugo Münsterberg’s forays into the psychological reception of moving images to Stanley Cavell’s groundbreaking philosophical approach to the medium, Harvard maintains a long tradition of engaging cinema through the cultural, visual, spatial, and philosophical questions it raises. This tradition is a source of strength for the department and its resources. It continues today in the various film courses offered through departments of language that investigate cultural and historical aspects of the medium to courses in Visual and Environmental Studies that focus on film’s relationship to spatiality and architecture. In recognition of film’s centrality to contemporary visual culture, the graduate program in Film and Visual Studies seeks to transcend an approach solely fixated on the workings of a single medium and its history. Interdisciplinary in its impetus, the program draws on course offerings both in Visual and Environmental Studies and in other departments of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Broadly influenced by the unique cultural context of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Film Archive, the graduate program fosters an awareness of the interactions between the making of and thinking about film and video, between studio art, performance, and visual culture, and between different arts and pursuits whose objects are aural-visual entities.
Objectives of the PhD Program1) To provide strong and rigorous training in film and visual studies that offers a blend of theoretical, analytical, and historical coverage while drawing on the unique interdisciplinary strengths of the FAS course offerings, the Harvard Film Archives’ vast holdings of films and documents, and the rich resources of Harvard museums, galleries, and libraries. 2) To cultivate perspectives that are particularly attentive to the place of moving images within larger histories and their connections to both traditional and emerging arts, disciplines, and fields of endeavor. 3) To provide a core set of advanced research skills in the history and theory of moving images that builds on and augments the increasing concern with visuality and the visual arts in a broad range of Faculty of Arts and Sciences departments and schools of graduate study including, among others, African and African-American Studies, Anthropology, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, English and American Literature and Language, Germanic Languages and Literatures, History, History of Art and Architecture, History of Science, Literature and Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Romance Languages and Literatures, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Sociology. 4) To develop an advanced research program of study that also profits from the creative context of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and its ongoing conversation among artists, critics, curators, historians, and theorists of the arts and of film, video, and performance.
The CurriculumThe PhD in Film and Visual Studies is a research degree whose core emphasis is the theory and history of moving images in relation to the visual arts. The Program does not admit candidates for a terminal AM degree. Students may apply for a master’s degree after advancing to PhD. candidacy by satisfactorily completing their coursework and exams as indicated below. The expected timetable for completion of the degree is five to six years. Residence and academic standing. Two years of enrollment for full-time study are a minimum requirement, with a minimum of at least 14 courses completed with honor grades (no grade lower than B-).
Courses• A minimum of 14 courses must be completed no later than the end of the second year. Normal progression would include eight courses in the first year and six courses in the second in order to provide time for preparation for the general examination as well as flexibility to pursue course work in neighboring fields of study. • Of these 14 courses, two are required: VES 270, the Proseminar in Film and Visual Studies: History; and VES 271, Proseminar in Film and Visual Studies: Theory. The Proseminars will normally be taken in the first year of study. • At least seven of the 14 courses must be at the 200 (graduate) level. • In addition, at least seven of the courses must be chosen from a list of courses approved for credit by the Film Studies Committee. • The remaining courses (including courses in other departments, or transferred from other schools) may be either the 200 or 100 level. • One of the non-200 level courses may be taken as an independent study with a professor, but not before the second term of residence. Other independent studies courses will be permitted in exceptional circumstances, and with the concurrence of the professor that the work is essential to the student’s program and not covered elsewhere in the existing curriculum.
Language Requirements• A reading knowledge of two languages is required. • Normally, French or German should be one of these two languages. Other languages may be acceptable if deemed relevant and appropriate to the student’s program of study. • Proficiency may be certified either by a grade of B- or better on a proficiency exam administered by the relevant language department or by successful completion (B- or better) of a second-year or higher course taught in a foreign language. (Note: Elementary language courses do not count for course credit.)
(Non-Terminal) Master of Arts (AM)• Students must complete at least eight half-courses in Film and Visual Studies, maintaining a minimum • GPA of 3.5 (B+) in all classes. • Two of these eight courses must be the Proseminars in Film and Visual Studies. • Students are also required to have as many 200-level courses as 100-level courses. • No more than one reading course is allowed for credit. • Students must have fulfilled at least one language requirement.
Advancement to CandidacyAdvancement to candidacy for a PhD in Film and Visual Studies consists of three components: a qualifying paper, a written general examination, and an oral examination. The examinations are designed to test the student’s mastery of their scholarly fields and their ability to proceed to writing a dissertation. These will normally take place together in September at the beginning of the third year of study, and will be supervised by an Examination Committee appointed each year from members of the Standing Committee for the Program in Film and Visual Studies. The timing of the general exam is meant to encourage students to take the exam as a cohort. Individually scheduled exams will be discouraged. Qualifying paper. The qualifying paper is required of all students, even those who have completed a master’s thesis elsewhere. It is ordinarily developed from an existing seminar paper, research paper, or portion of a master’s thesis. It is approximately 5,000-10,000 words in length, including notes. Emphasis is placed upon the student’s independence of thinking and research, ability to use primary source materials, and proficiency in writing and presentation. Following close consultation with their field advisors, students at the beginning of their third term of residence will submit to the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) the proposed topic and a timetable for completion. The paper should be completed and submitted at the time of the general examination. A student may request that a master’s thesis written for another institution be substituted in lieu of a qualifying paper; this must be approved by the DGS and two members of the Film Studies Committee. General examination. The written examination is designed to test students’ mastery of their scholarly fields as well as general knowledge of the history and aesthetics of moving images in relation to the visual and performing arts. The examination consists of two parts, one relating to history and one to theory and aesthetics.
The Dissertation Prospectus• After the successful completion of the general examinations, a topic for the dissertation should be chosen in consultation with the student’s thesis director and advisers. A committee should be formed and agreed no later than January in the third year of study, consisting of the thesis director and two readers. • Once a student has a topic and advisor to guide his or her dissertation, a formal written dissertation proposal is the next step. Not including the bibliography, the prospectus should be about ten pages in length, but not more. • Students will be expected to have a prospectus approved within five months of passing the general examination in order to be considered to be making satisfactory progress toward the degree. The Thesis. After the thesis prospectus has been approved, candidates work closely with their thesis director and readers. The doctoral thesis is expected to be an original and substantial work of scholarship or criticism, excellent in form and content. The program will accept theses on a great variety of topics involving a broad range of approaches to film and related visual media. It sets no specific page limits, preferring to give students and directors as much freedom as possible. Teaching. Students begin teaching in their third year. Ordinarily they teach discussion sections in courses in Film Studies and in Visual and Environmental Studies. It may also be possible to serve as Teaching Fellows for studio courses. Preparation for a teaching career is a required part of each student’s training, and teaching fellows benefit from the supervision and guidance of department members. Teaching fellows are also encouraged to avail themselves of the facilities at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
Requirements for AdmissionThe following is a set of general guidelines for the application for admission. • The Writing Sample: The writing sample is one of the most important materials in the application. Candidates should submit only one 15–20-page paper, in 12-point type, double-spaced, and with normal margins. The writing sample must be an example of critical writing (rather than creative writing) on a subject directly related to film, performance and/or visual studies. Applicants should not send longer papers with instructions to read an excerpt or excerpts, but should themselves edit the sample so that they submit only up to 20 pages. • Grades: While the overall GPA is important, it is more important to have an average of no lower than A- in courses related to film and visual studies or related fields. In addition, if a candidate has not majored in film studies or a related field, it is important to have sufficient background to enter the graduate program— a matter perhaps best determined by speaking with one’s undergraduate advisor. • Letters of Recommendation: It is important to have three strong letters of recommendation from professors who are familiar with the candidate’s academic work. An applicant who has been out of school for several years should try to reestablish contact with former professors. Additional letters from employers may also be included. • GREs: High scores in the Verbal (700) are positive additions to the application but are by no means the most important aspect of one’s candidacy. (The Quantitative and Analytical scores carry less weight than the Verbal and Subject scores.) Applicants should make timely plans to take these examinations in order to ensure arrival of scores by the January application deadline. Scores received after mid-January may be too late to be considered. • Statement of Purpose: The Statement of Purpose should give the admissions committee a clear sense of one’s individual interests and strengths. Applicants need not indicate at the time of application precisely what their field of specialization will be, but it is helpful to know something about a candidate’s aspirations, and how Film and Visual Studies at Harvard might help in attaining these goals.
The Standing Committee of the Program in Film and Visual Studies Giuliana Bruno, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Professor Giuliana Bruno explores the intersections of film, the visual arts, and architecture. Her seminal work Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History— a prize awarded to “the world’s best book on the moving image”—and has provided new directions for film and visual studies. Atlas was also honored as Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, and named a Book of the Year in 2003 by the Guardian. Its mobility theory has inspired a new journal of visual culture, Aria, published in English and Italian. Her new book on art and film, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, was published by MIT Press in 2007. Bruno has published four other books. Jane and Louise Wilson: A Free and Anonymous Monument (Film and Video Umbrella and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 2004) examines the multi-screen art installation of the Turner Prize nominees. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 2002), a journey through modernity and cultural memory, won the 1995 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for best book in film studies. Off Screen was devoted to women and film in Italy (Routledge, 1988), and Immagini allo schermo (Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991) was named one of the 50 Best Books of the First 100 Years of Film History. Her essays on contemporary art are published in international books, art monographs such as Isaac Julien (Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2005), and exhibition catalogs of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Bruno lectures internationally on visual culture, including, recently, at universities in Europe and Asia, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, the Tate Modern and the Louvre Museum. She is featured in Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers as one of the most influential intellectuals working today in visual studies (Sage, 2008).
Eileen Cheng-yon Chow, Assistant Professor of Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies. Chow is assistant professor of Chinese literary and cultural studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her teaching and research center around three principal areas: modern Chinese literature and culture (extending back to the mid-nineteenth century and forward to the contemporary moment, including the literature of Taiwan); more comparatively defined film and visual culture studies; and diaspora studies, both in its theoretical aspects as well as in the formations and lived histories of such communities. Chow is currently completing two book projects: the first, “Spectacular Novelties: Urban Entertainments, Zhang Henshui, and ‘News’ Culture in Republican China,” is a study of the vast, thriving commercial culture of popular publishing and visual entertainment in urban China (in particular, Beijing and Shanghai) during the Republican era (1911–1949). “Hollywood’s China/China’s Hao-lai-wu,” on the other hand, takes as its specific point of departure the imbricated relationship of Chinese and Hollywood film cultures—from the inception of cinema to the 1930s–40s “golden era” of the Shanghai and Hollywood film industries to the present moment. The book is a study of the intense, sustained, and creatively productive engagement on both sides with real and imagined “Chinas” and “Hollywoods,” as well as of the repeated material circulations of technologies, film style, and individual talent. A series of linked essays explore, among other topics, early cinema’s fascination with Chinese beheadings; “Chaplins” East and West; Anna May Wong’s momentous visit to Shanghai (where she was both revered and reviled as Hollywood’s leading Dragon Lady); the female impersonator Mei Lanfang’s triumphant US tour and the subsequent, enduring cinematic fascination with Peking Opera as spectacle; as well as the continual reshaping of Hollywood film grammar via “China,” from Broken Blossoms to Hong Kong action choreography, to Ang Lee’s latest reinvention of “flight” and Chinese cosmopolitanism for a global market. Chow has worked in both Hollywood and Chinese film industries (Warner Brothers, Beijing Film Studios, Taiwan’s Central Motion Pictures) as well as on independent and documentary film productions. Most recently, she is embarking on a documentary film project that traces generations of migrants from a community in China to various areas of Europe over the course of the past century. Chow received her AB in literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University, and has also studied at universities in Paris, Taipei, Perugia, and Shanghai. In 2002, she was one of two recipients in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence in teaching undergraduates.
Tom Conley, Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. In 2003–04 (thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship) he finished a book titled Cartographic Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which was accompanied by a new edition of Film Hieroglyphs (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). He and his spouse are co-masters of Kirkland House. In the summer of 2003 he taught a seminar on space and writing at the School of Critical Theory at Cornell University; in 2004, at the Institut d’études françaises d’Avignon he taught on the presence of Petrarch in 16th-century French lyric.
Alfred Guzzetti, Osgood Hooker Professor of Arts. Guzzetti has made both documentary and experimental films and tapes. With the feature-length Family Portrait Sittings (1975) he began an autobiographical cycle that continued with Scenes from Childhood (1979) and Beginning Pieces (1986). He collaborated with Susan Meiselas and Richard Rogers on the documentaries Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1985) and the feature-length Pictures from a Revolution (1991), and with anthropologists Ákos Östör and Lina Fruzzetti on Seed and Earth (1994) and Khalfan and Zanzibar (2000). He has also worked in more experimental modes, making the short films Air (1971) and Evidence (1972) and more recently a series of videotapes, including The Tower of Industrial Life (2000), Calcutta Intersection (2003), History of the Sea (2004), Night Vision (2005) and Still Point (2008). In collaboration with composer Kurt Stallmann he created an acoustical-video installation entitled Breaking Earth (2008), shown at the DiverseWorks Art Space in Houston. He is the author of Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard (Harvard University Press, 1981).
Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Assistant Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and History of Art and Architecture. Lambert-Beatty is an art historian whose research focuses on art since 1960, especially performance and video. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2002. She served for two years as managing editor of October magazine and has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and the Getty Research Institute. Her writing on performance art, postmodern dance, and minimalism has appeared in journals such as Trans, October, and Art Journal, and in the catalogs for the exhibitions A Minimal Future?: Art as Object, 1958–1968 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and Radical Juxtapositions: Yvonne Rainer, 1961–2002 (Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of The Arts, Philadelphia). She is currently at work on a book about spectatorship in US art of the 1960s, focusing on the performance career of Yvonne Rainer.
Eric Rentschler, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of German; Chair, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Rentschler is professor of German and chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. He received his academic training in European literary and intellectual history, studying in Stuttgart, Bonn, and Prague, before taking his doctoral degree at the University of Washington. He has been a recipient of Guggenheim, Humboldt, American Council of Learned Societies, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and Fulbright fellowships; in 2001 he won the Levenson Teaching Prize for Harvard Senior Faculty and in 2003 the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship. His publications have concentrated on film history, theory, and criticism, with particular emphasis on German cinema during the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the postwar and the postwall eras. His numerous articles have appeared in collections and periodicals. His books include West German Film in the Course of Time (Redgrave, 1984), German Film and Literature (Routledge, 1986), West German Filmmakers on Film (Holmes and Meier, 1988), Augenzeugen (Frankfurt am Main, 1988, 2nd revised edition 2001), The Films of G.W. Pabst (Rutgers University Press, 1990), and The Ministry of Illusion (Harvard University Press, 1996). He is currently finishing two books: Courses in Time: Film in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1962–1989 and The Continuing Allure of Nazi Attractions.
D.N. Rodowick, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies; Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Visual Studies. Rodowick is the author of numerous essays as well as five books: The Virtual Life of Film (Harvard University Press, 2007); Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Duke University Press, 2001); Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Duke University Press, 1997); The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory (Routledge, 1991); and 4 (University of Illinois Press, 1989; 2nd edition, University of California Press, 1994). He has also edited AfterimageS of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2009). Having taught at Yale University until 1991, Rodowick began the film studies program there. After studying cinema and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and Université de Paris 3, he obtained a PhD at the University of Iowa in 1983. Rodowick subsequently taught at the University of Rochester and at King’s College, University of London, where he founded the film studies program and the Film Study Center. Special research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical approaches to visual media and cultural theory, AND the impact of new technologies on contemporary culture. Rodowick has also been an award-winning experimental filmmaker and video artist. In 2002, he was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Amie Siegel, Assistant Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. The American artist and filmmaker received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA from Bard College. Amie Siegel works variously in 16mm and 35mm film, video, sound and writing. Siegel uses the cinematic image as material means to a conceptual end. Her work mines the voyeuristic gaze, direct address and interview, investigating how these repetitions form cultural memory. Her multi-channel video and film installations reformulate cinematic enterprises — the establishing shot, the remake & the tracking shot — as uncanny reflections on absence, historical disorientation and nostalgia. Longer single-channel videos and feature films (The Sleepers, Empathy, DDR/DDR) move between scripted and spontaneous spaces; truth and fiction, shifting performance from identification to parody and estrangement. Exhibitions and screenings include The Russian Linesman, The Hayward Gallery, London; 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; Forum Expanded, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Austrian Film Museum, Berlin International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Andy Warhol Museum, BFI Southbank, London; Frankfurt Film Museum and Film Forum in New York. Her first book of poetry, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA) was published in 1999. Siegel has been an artist-in-residence of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Justin Weir, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Weir received his BA in 1991 from the University of Minnesota and his PhD in 1997 from Northwestern University. His interests include: 19th- and 20th-century Russian prose, 20th-century Russian film, and literary theory. His publications include: The Author as Hero (2002), Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays, ed. and trans. with Timothy Langen (2000). Work in progress: Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative. |