Film & Media Studies

This course offers a study of film and tv in Spain including basic concepts, approaches, and methodologies of analysis. Topics include: historical periods and social, cultural, and aesthetic keys; film and tv canon-- authorship and popular cinema; issues, questions, and cases of film and tv in Spain. Prior academic-level knowledge of Spanish history from 1940-1992 is strongly recommended.

The contemporary era shows a proliferation of film production from all over the African continent, and in this course, students become familiar with some of the most significant developments in narrative styles, genres, themes, and aesthetics in contemporary African cinemas. The course also includes discussions of suitable theoretical and critical frameworks in which to analyze and interpret these new films and film movements.

This course awakens for the active spectator, in terms of aesthetics, cultural capital, and politics, new utopian ways of being, dreaming, interpreting, looking, and thinking as so many forms of “labor” and of “movement”. Combining these promotes an ecology of dialectical questioning and thinking about new, utopian post-capitalist forms of beauty, equality, and freedom for the twenty-first century. These movement and labor forms are dialectically subject within the space of the cinematic frame and institution to both regressive-capitalist and progressive-emancipatory-post-capitalist forms, in relation to the world system, of affective, cognitive and monetary circulation. The seminar thus draws on and explores egalitarian and novel non-hegemonic ways of engaging gestures, ideas, images, and scenes in films from a range of postmodernist/postwar global films and world-auteurs: Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), Agnès Varda (France), and Orson Welles (USA). Cinema as the art of forms of movement thus is evaluated anew. Attention is given to those cinematic moments and scenes that teach and that train us in new non-dominatory and emancipated viewing strategies of movement and circulation as so many utopian forms of thinking, looking, and individual/collective being. In so doing, it considers arts and forms of movement and circulation as not only subject to capitalist commodification, but also as modes of active engagement, interpretation, and thinking that take place precisely in a shared space for post-capitalist common content, creation, and thought in post-capitalist and emancipated utopian forms of circulation. The role of cinematic silence and of the unconscious in film culture is also given critical coverage.

In this course, students explore and develop their sense of visual narrative in a wider context. The course begins with an overview of some of the key theories of visual narrative and looks at a broad range of examples from within design and screen cultures to help consider how images and spaces can tell stories with or without accompanying words. Narrative perspectives of the maker, the audience, and visual form itself are examined to aid students understanding of the visual culture around them, and their role as a maker in its creation. Topics include the moving image (film, animation, television), illustrated narrative (graphic novels, picture books), interactive narratives, authorship and audience, genres and narrative spaces, music videos, and factual narratives.

This course provides a study of the major movements, schools, genres, styles, writers and works in the history of cinema. It takes an in-depth look at the meaning of the language of cinema and how it relates to the humanities. NOTE: This course is the same as FILM 104 but taught in the UC3M International School.

This course is a historical overview of Japanese cinema from its origins in 1898 to the present day. Screenings are comprised of films by Japan's most prominent directors such as Ozu Yasujirō, Kurosawa Akira, and Mizoguchi Kenji, alongside examples that reflect important trends in contemporary Japanese film. While the course addresses questions regarding genre, style, and authorship, students also work to situate these categories within the broader cultural, social, and historical currents of Japanese cinema. Topics include but are not limited to, the impact of WWII and occupation on Japanese filmmaking, the studio system, and the Japanese New Wave. 

Despite its apparent proximity to the history of cinema, this course is in fact a "History and Cinema" course. It looks at both fiction and non-fiction cinema and considers questions posed by Michèle Lagny and Marc Ferro on how film allows us to rethink the historicity of history and whether cinema and television modify our vision of history.

This course considers the relationship between philosophical reflection and aesthetic practice through the lens of cinema, with the purpose of engaging students of both philosophy and film theory in a cross-disciplinary investigation into cinema. The course draws both from philosophical texts on film, and classical and contemporary film theory. Topics may include epistemological, ontological, and ethical questions about film; the role of memory, subjectivity, identity, and desire in cinema; time, space, and the nature of the image; perspectives on sexuality, gender, and race in film; psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial film theory; and analytic and continental approaches to film and philosophy. This course is offered to both graduate and undergraduate students with distinct assessment requirements for each; this represents the graduate version of the course. 

This course will first lead students to be familiar with mainstream English media from home and abroad, such as China Daily, CGTN, Xinhua News Agency, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, South China Morning Post, etc. Social media such as popular English-language or bilingual video programs on Douyin (TikTok), Bilibili, Little Red Book and YouTube will be included. Students can not only understand the latest developments of global news, but also can form their own critical views on the world media and compare the similarities and differences between Chinese media and Western media. Secondly, this course will also select typical or hot cases to explain news production and news reporting skills. Finally, the course will take students majoring in different foreign languages through extensive practice in news making. This course is a practical course for reporting China and the world in English, bilingual or multilingual. The learning effect is based on the international news works produced through the semester.

This course explores the evolution of classic French cinema in all its diversity from the 1930s to the 1950s, while highlighting its aesthetic, ideological, and cultural characteristics through the genres, major directors, actresses/actors, and currents representative of production at the time. It looks at the technical, practical, and financial changes brought about by the transition to talkies, and the cultural repercussions on production. The Occupation sheds light on the genesis of the institutional foundations of today's cinema, with government involvement in the organization of the film industry. The post-war period also provides an opportunity to grasp the subtext of the cultural policy issues that are still relevant today, linked to cultural exception or diversity, of which the Blum-Byrnes agreements are the crucible from which subsidized cinema was born.