Summer Program

Script and Screen: Hollywood’s Master Storytellers and the Art of Screenwriting 

Thematic Institute with Professors Scott Higgins and Steve Collins

The Summer Institute in Film is a two-credit Summer Session project that marries film studies and filmmaking to provide an intellectually rigorous understanding of cinema. Wesleyan’s Film Department is founded on the idea that analysis and practice must illuminate one another. Good filmmakers know their medium’s history and forms, and good scholars know the craft of visual storytelling. The Summer Institute offers a unique opportunity to blend study and practice with greater depth by focusing on a group of twenty films from two perspectives, a logistical impossibility during the regular semester. This course pairing affords students a truly integrated approach to cinematic art that is grounded in the films themselves.

Feature films from Hollywood’s studio era present the apex of visual storytelling. At their best, these films engage viewers in a complex and elegant play of emotional alignment, the control of information, omission, subtext, and expectation. The strategies refined between 1920 and 1960 remain relevant and extraordinarily powerful to this day. Yet Hollywood films hide their effort, deflecting viewers from the practices and processes of storytelling at work. This institute makes the craft of Hollywood visible so that students gain access to the tools of cinematic storytelling. Studying four of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers reveals the possibilities of narrative cinema and provides models for new creative work.

The studies course uses auteur studies and historical poetics to capture and analyze the way films build worlds and move audiences. We will explore the conventions and norms that artists inherit, and consider how each filmmaker uses them to define a specific kind of cinematic experience. The production course brings out the formal aspects of screenwriting exemplified by our filmmakers in order to help students create on the page, and eventually on the screen.  We will learn the art of visual storytelling from the historic masters of the form. 

Course 1: Visual Storytelling: Cinema according to Hollywood's Masters 

This class explores the productive interplay of convention and creativity in Hollywood cinema by taking up the work of four distinctive auteurs: Frank Borzage, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Vincente Minnelli. Each director labored within popular genres designed for mass entertainment, but they built unique cinematic worlds. We will trace the specific strategies of film style and narration that defined each filmmaker’s approach to cinema.

Together, these films form the bedrock of a visual language for telling stories, shaping perception and engaging viewers. Students will hone their visual sensitivity and develop their understanding of cinema as an audience-centered artistic practice. By adopting the perspective of filmmakers we can understand the art. 

Course 2: Visual Storytelling: Screenwriting

This is a writing course that will start from ground zero: separating the screenplay from other forms, e.g. the play and the novel, and ground students in visual language as the basis of the medium.  How do we write in pictures?

The goal of the course is two-fold: to introduce students to the medium of screenwriting, and to use the study of screenwriting to illuminate the particular stylistic stamp of the four directors. Without a real understanding of the screenplay’s contribution in the creation of a relationship between audience and character, it’s impossible to fully, deeply appreciate these films. The class will explore the fundamentals of screenwriting: omission, ellipsis, control of information, three-act structure, internal and external action, and the use of subtext.   We will also cover basic screenplay format.  The students build to integrating dialogue into their storytelling while preserving a cinematic foundation.

For full course descriptions click: Cinema According to Hollywood's Masters and Screenwriting.

 

Pathologies of the Mind: 
Biological, Historical, and Cultural Perspectives

Thematic institute with Professors Matthew Kurtz and Jill Morawski

Neuroscience and psychopharmacology are generating promising perspectives on psychopathologies, informing new diagnoses, nosologies, and treatments. These advances are using what some have called “brainworld” -- neurochemical understandings of self that transform our conventional notions of personhood.


The Summer Institute in Psychopathologies, a two-credit Summer Session project, aims to introduce current neuroscience models of major psychopathologies and assess their scientific methods and evidence.  With this groundwork the Institute aims as well to examine the broader context in which mental illnesses are lived and identified.  Historical and cultural evidence will be examined to assess how mental illnesses and their treatment have changed, identify political and economic influences on mental health research and reflect on the promises and problems of neurochemical selfhood.

Our contemporary understandings of psychopathologies and mental illness are bicameral: just as neuroscience charts the biological bases of abnormal thought and action, so the human sciences offer cultural and historical explanations of these variants of human action.  This bifurcation, according to one scholar, makes the mental health professions of two minds on the causes and treatment of mental illness. This institute offers students the opportunity to bring together these two disjunctive models of pathologies of the mind.  Students enroll in two courses, Neuroscience Perspectives on Psychopathologies and Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Mental Disorders.  Pairing the two courses in a thematic institute enables students to compare investigative techniques and explanatory models, a comparison exercise rarely afforded during the regular academic year. The course pairing also affords students opportunities to consider more synthetic and integrative theories of psychopathology.

Course I: Neuroscience Perspectives on Psychopathologies

The goal of this component of the institute is to: (1) acquaint students with the signs and symptoms, cognitive sequelae and functional consequences of a range of DSM-IV defined psychiatric categories, e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, attention-deficit disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and introduce standardized methods for describing and quantifying symptoms and cognitive skills in these disorders; (2) begin to critically evaluate links between disordered behavior and disrupted activity in anatomically and neurochemically-defined neural systems based on contemporary structural and functional neuroimaging methodology, as well as links between common features of disordered behavior in psychiatric syndromes and neurological illnesses with well-defined pathophysiology, (3) describe how emerging information regarding neural correlates of disordered behavior aids development of novel treatment technologies, and (4) use information taught in both components of the institute to think critically about methodology for categorization of mental illness. 

Course II: Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Mental Disorders

The goal of this component of the institute is to introduce students to historical and cultural studies of the naming and treatment of disordered or abnormal kinds of persons.  The course surveys the history of observing, categorizing, and treating what are taken to be abnormal persons. It considers the historical development of classification systems and neuroscientific knowledge. Attention is given to theories that explain modern psychopathologies not only with medic-scientific models but also in terms of cultural conditions and practices. The course focuses on a selective set of psychopathologies that represent disorders of thinking, mood, and life experiences.  These exemplary studies enable examination of dynamic relations between cultural conditions, detection and treatment of mental disease, and the self-understandings of those so diagnosed.

For full course descriptions, click Neuroscience Perspectives on Pathologies and Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Mental Disorders.