As registration for Spring 2016 academic courses begins soon, I wanted to provide more information about courses I will begin teaching starting January, 2016. Please see detailed descriptions below. If you have any specific questions that are not answered here, you can contact me directly. I look forward to another rich and engaging semester with both new and familiar faces. **NOTE: New pre-requisites for ARTH 3100 and ARTH 2222 allow for more flexibility in registration for non-Fine Arts students**
ARTH 3100: American New Wave Film
Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Thursdays 7:00-9:50pm, Surrey Campus Fir 128). Prerequisites: 6 credits of ARTH or 18 credits of 1100-level courses or higher, and ENGL 1100.
This course will examine how a new generation of young and creative North American filmmakers in the late 1960s to 1980s sought to revolutionize Hollywood cinema through the “Hollywood Renaissance” or the “American New Wave,” a cinematic movement that defied traditional Hollywood standards and practices of the studio-era in countless ways, creating a more innovative and artistic style of filmmaking that continues to influence today's global cinema. Influenced by the French New Wave and other international film and experimental cinema movements of the 1960’s, the directors, actors, screenwriters, and producers associated with the American New Wave took advantage of a moment in North America's social and cultural history when the advent and popularity of television, significant decrease in movie theater attendance, rising production costs, and changing tastes of American audiences, particularly in the younger generation, provided Hollywood a chance to revitalize the film industry and open pathways to experimentation and more creative control over the filmmaking process.
Film directors such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, Milos Forman, John Schlesinger, and many more will be studied alongside films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Godfather (1972), American Graffiti (1973), Chinatown (1974), Jaws (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), Annie Hall (1977), Star Wars (1977), Grease (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Airplane! (1980) and many others. Several full length film screenings included.
ARTH 2222: Contemporary Art & Visual Culture, 1945-Present
Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Fridays 1:00-3:50pm, Surrey Campus Fir 128). Prerequisites: 6 credits of any 1100-level courses or higher.
Nam June Paik, V-yramid (1982), visited at the new Whitney Museum, New York during this past summer's NYC/Venice Biennale Field School.
ARTH 2222 offers a critical examination of international visual art and culture focusing on the role of art in consumerist society and the emergence of postmodernism. The course concentrates on visual art from the mid-1940s to the present day, with particular regard for historical events, factors of patronage and institutions—as well as changing attitudes to making and approaching art—in modern and postmodern art. We will consider the traditional media of painting and sculpture but must also take into account the addition of innovative media to art practice in recent years.
From photography to video, collage to assemblage, installation to performance, such media have extended notions of what art could materially consist of, but have also affected the anticipation of audiences for that work, having social as well as aesthetic implications. Ultimately, our attention will be on the network where art is made, presented to and reacted to by different parties, and to the ways that portions of the art system―such as art history and cultural criticism―have conceived of and explained the workings of such a system and the society it exists within.
ARTH 1130: Introduction to Film Studies
Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Fridays 4:00-7:50pm, Surrey Campus Fir 128). Prerequisites: none
Films that have been popular in recent years will be put in perspective through the study of film history and film concepts dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century right up to the present day.
Students will study the history and development of world cinema, and the comprehension and theory of film as a visual language and art-making practice from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the critical interpretation of the cinema and the various vocabularies and methods with which one can explore the aesthetic function, together with the social, political, and technological contexts and developments, of moving pictures. The format of this course (as a 4 hour block each class) will normally entail a one hour lecture, the screening of a full-length film, and a focused group discussion. Each film will serve as a starting point and gateway for discussion about the course’s daily theme.