Film & Media Studies

Advertsing planning and creativity is a basic course for undergraduates majoring in advertising. The teacher will be combined with professional features of the class to design the course, including theoretical lectures, after-school exercises and layout arrangements for the group and guidance from the teacher. Courses using multimedia teaching, guide students study in the unique context of contemporary advertising creativity in China, such as the creative and copy in the advertising practice, advertising and creative industries, creative thinking and its expression, to lead the students to research thinking.

This course is an opportunity to watch, discuss, understand, evaluate, and develop audiovisual narratives around brands. This course entices students to amplify their vision of the advertising film industry, its history, current best practices, and new challenges. From the 30/60-seconds-ads to the social media video content, students work on the storytelling behind campaigns and have the opportunity to produce audiovisual ads for clients chosen by the students. This course covers advertising and cinematographic language; creation, production and evaluations of advertising films; format and content transformations along history; and current audiovisual advertising practices.

This course includes the production of short films created within small groups. It covers adaptation of scripts for filming, casting and rehearsals with the actors; location scouting and choice of sets; technical choices for filming and sound recording; and organization of a shoot. 

This course covers Cuban cinema since the creation of the film institute (ICAIC) in 1959. The course considers films by Cuban directors, and representations of Cuba by foreign filmmakers and Cuban filmmakers in exile, thus focusing on screenings of Cuba and Cuban topics from multiple viewpoints. Specific aesthetics are studied to contextualize applications of Cuban theoretical texts in relation to imperfect cinema, and the viewer's dialectics. Students explore the effects of non-chronological sequencing and distancing in film; black humor, subjectivity, and alterity; allegorical interpretations leading to censorship; the self and the State, with particular attention to gender and sexuality in relation to law; film autobiography as a genre; auteur cinema; revolution and the creation of the "new man"; revolutionary national identity and marginality; and diaspora, exile and inner exile, among other topics. Overall, the course studies film as a political medium across modern and postmodern contexts, using theoretical texts and key films to illustrate pivotal turning points in socio-historical contexts specific to Cuba and the impact of its 1959 revolution on all aspects of public and private life.

This course offers an analysis of films made by authors from different French-speaking areas (sub-Saharan Africa, Maghreb, Middle East, Canada, Belgium, France) dealing with issues of contemporary society (the human in the metropolis, identity, intercultural relations, the intergenerational). It presents the films and cinematographic excerpts in authentic cinematographic conditions. The courses focuses on the theme of vulnerabilities in the face of exclusion and inclusion. There are many films of French-language cinema that highlight the problem of inclusion and exclusion by questioning fragility, normality, identity, otherness and the whole system of values in which contemporary societies evolve with diversity.

This course investigates how the cinematic medium represents, inspires, and shapes our understanding of the human condition. As breakthroughs in digital media and computer science reconfigure our physical and mental parameters, the question of what it means and what is involved to be human presses with increasing urgency. 

Students will watch, read about, and discuss select films across sub-topics that address a spectrum of human forms and conditions including robots, artificial intelligence, cyborgs, clones, etc., paired with critical texts that either offer theoretical conceptualizations of the human or explore the medium-specific qualities of cinema.  

Students will collaborate and present on at least one choice topic and conduct in-class research/discussion, building toward a final paper or creative project on a subject of their choice. 

This course intends to study in an interrelated way the development of Latin American Novel and its adaptations into Latin American and international cinema. It comprises, furthermore, perspectives on the reception of publics, the historical conjunctures, the Nation and State discourses, and critical and democratic counter-discourses.

The course focuses on the new media technologies that have emerged and spread from the time of the Second World War and onwards. A clear emphasis is on digital media and network cultures, as well as the broad influence of television. Highlighted themes are the cultural understanding of technological development, convergence culture and intermedial relations. Different aspects of media and communication as moral panic, paper bureaucracy and tourism are also discussed. Finally, the arguments of some of the most influential late 20th century media theorists such as Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan are analyzed.

This course aims for students to achieve a general knowledge of cinema produced in Latin America and Chile, also generate a critical and informed discussion about the main characteristics, milestones and audiovisual innovations of the region's cinema, understanding the socio-historical and geographical contexts in which they produce their works.