Film & Media Studies

This course introduces narrative and storytelling in the context of visual design. It draws on a range of traditional and contemporary examples, including Māori storytelling practices, and examples from film, animation, digital and physical games, and comics. 

Students complete an internship with a local organization or company. Each placement includes oversight and regular check-ins with an internship supervisor from the company or organization. The Internship Methodology Seminar accompanies the internship placement and offers a platform for reflection, enhancement of skills, and development of cultural competence. It focuses on practical skill application, cultural understanding, and adaptability within professional environments to provide a bridge between academic learning and real-world experience.

This course explores the dynamics of social media as a key element of the current media landscape. It discusses mediation processes between audiences and media content, as well as the changes derived from digitalization.

This course takes a thematic approach to significant historical film movements, with attention to the contexts in which they operate and the influence they continue to have on global film culture. It begins by examining the development of narrative, aesthetic, and industrial strategies in the dominant film industry of the twentieth century—Hollywood—and then explores several movements that offer alternative or complementary approaches to filmmaking, including the French New Wave, Third Cinema, Fourth Cinema, Italian Neorealism, German Expressionism, Surrealism, and Soviet Montage. The course provides historical background to these movements and introduces key theoretical and aesthetic concepts related to film history. It fosters critical awareness of the cultural, political, and artistic contexts of these periods and situates them in relation to one another.

This course introduces the fundamental skills required for 3D computer modeling and animation. Students are introduced to industry standard digital tools and gain creative and technical competence with modeling, character design, movement, environment and rendering. Emphasis is placed on learning techniques, principles and strategies to enable on-going independent learning of the specialist 3D software used. A wide variety of processes are reviewed to provide an overall awareness of the complete 3D animation production process. Technical processes include modeling, texturing, simple rigging, keyframe animation, lighting and rendering. By the end of the course, students can produce a short animation.

This course offers a range of approaches to contemporary conversations around embodiment and ideas of normativity. In particular, it familiarizes students with representations of physical and mental difference in film, social media, and literature within and beyond European and North American contexts. Featured themes include disability and identity, health and constructions of the self, mental difference, and the quest for political recognition.

Since the 1990s the term “new media” has become associated with digital media, but throughout the 20th century it was used to refer to any image technology of recent vintage. Thus, during the 1920s, artists would refer to photography or film as “new media.” This seminar picks up this history at a later point, in the late 1960s, when the “electronic” medium of video became available to visual artists. It traces how video was adopted by European and American artists and, in particular, how the medium was defined in relation to more conventional media, such as painting or sculpture, or in relation to television as a mass medium. Certain unique characteristics of video can be highlighted (e.g. liveness or feedback), however not all artists who used video were concerned with establishing a separate “discipline” of video art. Video was also instrumental to a form of “artivism” during the seventies, which mirrors comparable developments in contemporary art. Today, the terms “film” and “video” tend to be used interchangeably, but this is largely due to the introduction of digital video in the 1990s. The seminar pursues a genealogy of digital art, which originates in the 1960s, and trace it into the present, discussing the role of artistic practice within an “algorithmic culture” and the impact of artificial intelligence on the current status of the image.

This course considers how artists, filmmakers, and photographers have reacted against and dealt with the presence of the audience, focusing on post 1960s art, photography, and art film up to our present days. Video and performances of Bruce Nauman, happenings of Allan Kaprow, participatory art of Marina Abramovic, video work by Rineke Dijkstra, photography of Thomas Struth, and relational aesthetics are examined. Theories and ideas that deal with the presence of (mass) audiences, reception aesthetics, and the educational turn are reviewed. The course consists out of lectures, excursions, guest lectures, student experiments on the reception of art and so on. This course includes excursions. This could possibly involve costs (travel expenses and museum admission). Art history students are advised to purchase a museum year card or an ICOM pass (https://icom.nl/nl/lidmaatschap/individueel-lidmaatschap). The latter pass allows you to visit museums at home and abroad free of charge. Other students should take into account that extra costs are possible.