Film & Media Studies

This course contextualizes digital data to understand its benefits and limitations, particularly with generalizability. Students learn how inequality, institutions, and ideology may influence the transformation of the media, as well as Big Data (and small). The inequality segment examines class, gender, and race intersectionalities in digital data production and impact, such as online harassment. Corporate and civic institutions also influence digital data, so the course unpacks institutional effects, from Facebook to the State. Finally, political ideology shapes how data is created and seen, so political campaigns and movements are analyzed to understand how they produce and distribute digital data. The course interrogates the broader role of technology in society and ties current cases with long-standing sociological debates, methods, and theories.

This course provides an introduction to communication and media studies. Topics include: media studies; digital culture, social media, and AI; mediascapes; the path of cinema and communication theories; building media industries-- cinema, radio, and television; media heritage and archaeology.

This interdisciplinary course practices a critical way of examining contemporary cultural practices. In these practices of production, dissemination, and reception, masculinity and femininity are permanently (re)constructed, just as are concepts of class, race, ethnicity, and geopolitical location. Students study cultural practices manifest through popular culture as well as examine the cultural logic underlying art practice and visual ethnographic research. In all, old and new identities are contested and reconstructed; the interaction between text and image is the main focus.

This course introduces students to the basic concepts, technical analyses, and theories of Film as an art form. Students explore topics such as mise-en-scène; cinematography; framing; editing; narrative; genre, and author, as well as a survey of critical perspectives on film. Students are required to do the assigned reading and view assigned films as noted on the course syllabus prior to each class meeting.

This course traces the development of films in the “young cinema” of the 1960s in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard are studied as well as Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Milos Forman, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Roman Polanski. The course uses various examples to examine how movies can undermine conventions and break with classical cinema. The course considers the notion of modernity with relation to the following: what does modernity count for; what does it mean; can it be categorized as an aesthetic category; is it representative a historical period; and why did it have its renewal in the 1960s.

This class focuses on the process of creating a TV program. By creating an actual TV program in the studio, students learn and practice everything about TV program production.