Film & Media Studies

This course analyzes a range of the most recent work from contemporary film directors from American, European, and world cinema. Students examine the films from a number of critical and theoretical perspectives and engage with key concepts and concerns such as nationalism and cinema, transnationalism, postmodernism, and audience reception.

Students are introduced to theories and practices in film and screen media industries. Historical and cultural contexts of a variety of creative industries are examined. Detailed case studies of specific productions, from inception and funding/development to production and promotion, are analyzed. Practitioners from the film/screen media industry and from creative culture industries deliver a series of workshops to illuminate contemporary approaches and practices during the course.

This course examines the medium of comics both as a visual language and as a means of communication. Beginning with a history of comics, the course considers a variety of storytelling techniques, ranging from comics journalism to graphic medicine, from activism to indigeneity, as well as superheroes, the underground, and manga.

Through an exploration of the complex and contradictory relationships between the global, local, regional, and national, this course focuses on the key issues and scholarly debates in the field of global media studies. Students explore a broad range of media as case studies to understand the relationship between location, culture, and identity. This course equips students with a broad-ranging and comparative understanding of the many ways in which media are produced, consumed, distributed, and circulated across the globe and their impact on our imaginations of a global world.

This course provides a hands-on study of directors' pre-visualization and mise-en-scene, the art of adaptation, experimental filmmaking, animation, writing the documentary and working with actors. 

This course builds on the formal analysis skills introduced in FS10010 Introduction to Film and Media. Students are introduced to key theoretical ideas about film and media and a variety of approaches to interpreting and understanding film, television, and digital media in context. Topics may include gender, race, sexuality, industry, and audiences, among others. The course includes case studies in film, television, and other media forms.

This course examines the ways in which contemporary practices of visual communication are being reshaped by digital media. It provides an overview of the digitization of key visual media such as photography, cinema and video, and addresses the social and political implications of the growing use of digital networks as primary forms for the distribution and consumption of images. Students will engage with key issues for 21st century media industries including: how professional organizations such as news media and institutions such as courts deal with the changing ground for claims to truth and realism by media such as photography, film and video; the implications of photo-sharing and social networking websites as new cultural forms for the circulation of images; the blurring of lines between amateur and professional media production, and the growing use of visual communication by activists and NGOs.

Students learn to express knowledge, understanding and critical appreciation of the practice of film writing. Students describe the different approaches to writing about film and the respective purpose, audiences, and outlets for them shows the development of original thought. They demonstrate independence of thought and creative expression in the synthesis of research and ideas in seminar debates and through assessments. The course teaches students how to use critical thinking to produce a piece of film writing that investigates or reflects contemporary culture. 

This course explores the relationship between cinema and literature based on a comparative analysis between the two systems of meaning. It discusses strategies for adapting literature to film. Additionally, it focuses on the basics of cinematographic language in relation to the films studied in this course.
 

This course examines digital humanities. It will introduce the resources available at CUHK for digital humanities (DS Lab, VR Studio, 3-Printing space, etc.). It will also involve the study of some exciting applications of tools, like VR, text analysis, 3-D modelling and printing, historical mapping, etc.