The last couple days have introduced a bit of levity to our material. As we learned last week, neorealist films focus on real life, everyday experiences of average people – usually the underdog – and often addressed World War II and contemporary social justice issues. Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) is another film by De Sica, …
Category Archives: Courses
Neorealism
In the second half of the week, we shifted our focus to the post-World War II reaction to fascism, exemplified in a cinematic and literary movement known as neorealism. Neorealist directors like Rossellini sought to strip away the artificiality of propagandist films of the previous decades and explore not only the effects of reality – …
Italian Political Cinema
As a Romance Languages major who chose Italian as one of my specialties, I’m lucky that the few upper-level Italian courses we’re offered are so interesting! Many, like this one, are cross-listed courses, so I get to take class with not only Italian students (it’s a pretty small department – the few of us overlap …
Machine Learning: Classifying Films
In the era of netflix, there’s a wide array of available films to watch online. One of the features that made Netflix so successful was its ability to recommend new movies. This ability is equivalent to answering the following questions: If a person likes a particular movie, what are some similar movies? If a person likes a …
Menorcan Excursion #2
Elementary Chinese
好久不见！(Translation: Long time no see!) I’m back blogging for CC, but this time I am not blogging about a grueling 400 level Environmental Science class… This time I’ll be filling you in on a class that is difficult in an entirely different way: Elementary Chinese. And my name is no longer Margo Davis. In this …
Menorcan Excursion #1
On Pottery
I confess to not being a pottery person. What gets my neurons firing are human remains and the stories that these ancient remnants of life can tell about a persons life and environment. Earlier this year in Osteology, where we studied both human and comparative skeletal anatomy and pathologies, I mentally declared myself a bones …
Indiana Jones Wannabe
I would like to set one thing straight immediately: archaeology is nothing like what you have seen in the Indiana Jones movies. Though I would revel in the adventure of outmaneuvering an ancient set of booby traps to rescue a priceless artifact from the inevitable destruct of the temple, I would immediately have several Institutional …
The Site of Sanisera: An Overview
As usual with my first posts, I have been struggling to write the introduction post to the class portion of this blog. If I were to jump into all the thoughts and events without a background, I feel as though no one would be able to understand what the heck I am referring to, as …
