Film & Media Studies

This course focuses on skills to design and execute communication plans using social media. It explores the social, political, and economic impact of social media on public relations and strategic communication. It also discusses how social media, as part of the internet, affects private companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and people's daily lives.

This is a sequential course of FILM & MEDIA STUDIES 10A. 

Through movies and other visual materials, this course examines important issues in modern society from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Each lecture features guest speakers who work in the field of making films, videos, and broadcasting. The course reviews specific production methods and a future vision of movies in class discussions. 

The media landscape and associated industries are in a constant state of evolvement, repeatedly undergoing transformations in their manner of production and positioning within social and thus market contexts. These dynamic processes of change within the broader field of media products and services are often intertwined with and conditioned by associated innovations in the enabling and underlying technological frameworks employed to produce, distribute and consume them. Innovations in communication technology thus also entail an impact on individual, social and psychological aspects of modern life. While this impact has long been influential, pressures of digitization and digital transformation have been making the need for a scholarly assessment of aforementioned processes ever more apparent. In this seminar we will thus explore current research and theory aiming to shed light on the intricacies of such developments, getting to know different dimensions of innovation and connecting them to practical examples of how these processes take shape within the wider media landscape. The course thus offers a rather broad perspective on what characterizes media innovation, how it develops, and what structural conditions facilitate and shape it.
 

This  course explores the theoretical and practical intersections of filmmaking, social impact, and activism in international relations. It does so with a core focus on how filmmaking has been used to explore phenomena related to humanitarian issues globally, especially those linked to contexts of conflict, migration, and violence. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, the course delves into the rich scholarship of visuality across the social sciences, introducing that work both theoretically and practically in three main ways. First, the course engages with critical interdisciplinary perspectives on the role of visual media within contexts of violence through theoretical literature and audio-visual material. Second, it explores practical skills in visual research methodologies. As such, in this section of the course, students develop a short filmmaking project of their own. Workshop-format sessions are offered to develop the skills necessary to achieve this. Thematically, the course explores how filmmaking can illuminate questions concerning violence, humanitarianism, conflict, and migration in ways that connect local (i.e., Copenhagen) and global contexts. In addition, guest lectures inspire and connect students to experts in the field. Finally, the course reflects on broader questions, debates, and dilemmas that concern the use of filmmaking for social impact, activism, and/or political intervention. This ranges from the critical examination of storytelling techniques, ethical considerations, and the influence of the filmmakers situated gaze (i.e., positionality) on crafting visual narratives. The course engages these issues by collaboratively reflecting on the filmmaking project that each student develops in the preceding section of the course. Overall, this course provides a nuanced understanding of the transformative potential of filmmaking, alongside tools to navigate the many ethical challenges intrinsic to visual research.

This course examines practical elements of studio-based television production.

This course covers the history of Korean and Hollywood cinema of the last 100 years by highlighting key trends, actors, directors and movies. It also outlines the history of world cinema to illustrate their impact and influence on Korean cinema and vice versa. By evaluating selected works that comprise each genre and a certain era, not only do we trace the history of Korean cinema but also Hollywood and its relationship to global popular culture and historical representation. 

This course examines the genre of film as a key medium for the representation of children’s literature.  It will take a number of children’s ‘classics’, as well as three key 21st century novels for young readers, and considers how they have been adapted and interpreted in diverse ways, using varied film technologies, as entertainment objects for children, family and adult audiences. Topics will include: the emergence of cinema as a storytelling tool; development and impact of animation and special effects technologies; the importance of fairy tales in the development of children’s media; theories of adaptation; child-centred storytelling; theories of audiences and spectatorship; genre; fantasy; gender; humor and the grotesque; horror and the uncanny; and contemporary dystopian film and fiction. 
 

This course addresses key developments in contemporary digital culture. It focuses on how still and moving images, and art and visual culture in general change with the triumph of big data analytics and artificial intelligence. The course is structured around concepts key to such developments, such as the user and viewer, body and affect, (social) platform and metrics, interface and interaction, city and infrastructure, ecology and nature. 
 

One of the key features of postmodernist thinking is the assertion of the fuzzy boundaries between reality and fiction: the realization that in everyday lives fictions, projections or hypothesis-building constantly interact with objects and facts of life (you can call this constructivist thinking); the realization that people’s identities are negotiations between social demands and imaginary projects; the realization that people’s senses of reality are heavily influenced by certain hegemonic (dominating) posits in terms of gender, labor (and consumption), media, race and ethnicity. Brian McHale has characterized the resultant tensions, as they are enacted in literature as “worlds in collision.” Cinema, as an art of montage and suturing, seems predetermined to enact these clashes. In this seminar we will explore the fuzzy boundaries discussing postmodern obsessions such as identities, surfaces, worlds, play, parody, high & low, consumer culture, media, gender performances and difference.

This course approaches media and popular culture as a dynamic field of production, consumption, and contestation. After an initial phase of understanding forms of popular culture, the focus is put primarily on case studies from Japan, along with some comparative examples. This coures examines historical and contemporary meaning-making processes in context, introducing academic vocabulary and approaches while providing tools to examine popular culture and media.  There will also be in-class screenings. By the end of the term, students should be able to think cross-culturally, critically, and collaboratively about not only media and popular culture but also everyday life and the world in which we live.