Film & Media Studies

This seminar invites participants into a process for deepening their/our understanding of key concepts and practices in the digital mediation of culture, in the interests of a greater shared awareness and agency within the overwhelming, epochal processes referred to generally as digitalization. In lectures, readings, site visits, and group discussion, the course offers useful theoretical bases for approaching digitalization as a/the process at work on culture today. It practices critical skills for exploring and evaluating digital mediations of cultural heritage (both on-site at Berlin museums and online). And it empowers scholars/thinkers/artists/designers as producers of digital culture mediations with practical tools for developing and pitching effective concepts. The course takes Berlin’s cultural landscape as a field and the newly completed Humboldt Forum as a special object of study, drawing on the teacher’s professional experiences from 2015 to 2020 in the development and implementation of the Humboldt Forum digital concept for offer on-site and behind-the-scenes perspectives. The course invites participants to identify the issues, questions, or processes in culture that most concern them and support them in formalizing and refining constructive proposals of their own.

This course introduces students to narrative using the moving image. It encourages students to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to their own work. Students learn key processes and techniques involved in film production: research, scripting, camera, sound, and editing. 

This course provides a study of the elements, systems and construction processes of mise-en-scéne in film and television. Topics covered include: models, styles and movements; art design (lighting, framing, camera movements, artistic direction); dramaturgy and direction of actors; film editing resources; staging and sound space.

This course provides an introduction to script writing including an understanding of the process and challenges involved in finding creative ideas and developing them, as well as developing story structure, acts, plot points, and character arcs. It discusses traditions in the schools of scriptwriting and the scriptwriter's toolbox. Students learn how to analyze professional scripts and how to pitch ideas. Students are expected to have completed previous coursework in film/media studies.

In this course students will study the aesthetic and political aims of South Korean cinema since 1960. By analyzing individual films, considering historical contexts, and reading texts in film theory, we will attempt to understand how cinema proposes new ways of being and relating to others within the context of a rapidly globalizing Korea. Filmmakers to be discussed may include Kim Ki-young, Im Kwon-taek, Park Kwang-su, Hong Sang-soo, Bong Joon-ho, Jeong Jae-eun, Park Chan-wook, and others. Issues to be covered include: the ethics of neoliberal capitalism, the spectacle of cinematic violence, morality and film genre, and the critique of melodrama. Assessment: Quiz(20%), Midterm (30%), Final(50%)