Film & Media Studies

This course examines the relationship between crime and the media. It encourages students to develop an understanding of how the media help to influence the public views of crime and criminalization. It will do this by focusing on media portrayals of crime and criminal behavior, media effects and theories of media and communication.

This course provides an introduction to the industrial, cultural, and theoretical histories of Chinese/Chinese language/Sinophone cinemas. Since the 1980s, filmmakers such as Ann Hui, Tsai Ming-liang, Ang Lee, Jia Zhangke, and Wong Kar-wai have made Chinese-language films known to the audiences in Europe and North America. This course discusses the historical contexts in which these filmmakers emerged. Also, it introduces lesser-known filmmakers and film practices and suggests new understandings of what Chinese/Chinese language/Sinophone cinemas are.

In the last few decades, the number of film festivals in the world has boomed. Even more recently, film studies researchers have begun to pay attention to this phenomenon, and the sub-field of film festival studies has grown rapidly. This course combines practice and theory. Students form small groups and curate their own evenings in a week-long campus film festival to be held in the final week of the semester. Students also read a wide range of research in film festival studies. 

This course examines North Korean cinema, following its historical trajectory. Through the examination we learn about images of North Koreans, their state and culture and also how these images have changed. We also expect that our understanding of North Korea and its people that will be gained through the course can hopefully lead to perspectives on the unification of the two Koreas. Topics include The Liberation and the Formation of North Korean Cinema, Establishment of Juche Ideology, Shin Sang-ok on the Scene of North Korean Cinema, Action/War Genre of North Korean Cinema, Motif of a Hidden Hero, Changing Scenes of the early 1990s, The Arduous March Era, Image of North Korea on International Screen, and North Korea’s International Film Co-productions.

The course focuses on cultural and artistic interventions in urban spaces and how they actively re-think and reconfigure the city. It investigates how cities can be used as platforms where new notions of citizenship, community, and the public sphere are being performed. Using concepts and theories from performance studies, urban studies, and public sphere theory, the course discusses how power relations are performed in cities daily, and how these can be critically revealed and (temporarily) disturbed through artistic interventions in public space. Next to discussing a variety of specific cases of public space intervention in class, students design and execute a small-scale intervention in public space with a small group., work on a series of assignments, and write a paper on a particular strategy of intervention. 

This course examines the representations, contexts, and politics of gender, sexuality and the media. By interrogating the discourses of gender and sexuality as they are 'mediated' in a variety of forms (including television, film, popular music, social media, advertising), we will examine the construction and disruption of categories of gender and sexual identity, and their intersection with other identity frameworks.

In this course, students view and discuss films that are widely recognized as outstanding or innovative and place them in a European and global context through the framework of manipulating, constructing, and regaining memory. At the same time, the course provides a critical and theoretical introduction to film analysis focusing on narrative form, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound while providing students with analytical tools needed to interpret and write about films by identifying the elements of film art and the terminology to discuss film techniques.

The analysis of communication on social media is rapidly becoming a key-area in (socio)linguistics and discourse studies. This course introduces students to the main methods of data collection and analysis of language and discourse for a variety of social media contexts. The course combines familiarization with frameworks of analysis with practical steps on how to approach data. A variety of case-studies of social media afforded practices (e.g. sharing, tagging, Like & Follow) ranging from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter illustrate the role of a range of language and multimodal resources in presenting ourselves and relating with others online. 

Avant-garde cinema also goes by other names: underground cinema, experimental cinema, and artists’ moving image. It describes, in short, films made by artists. This course examines a wide variety of films made by American and European artists from the 1920s to the 2010s. Students engage with a diverse range of avant-garde films by engaging closely with their formal strategies and techniques. Topics include (but are not limited to): abstract film and music, Dada and surrealist film, city films, psychedelic films, the London Filmmakers’ Cooperative, women’s filmmaking, black/queer histories, found footage remakes, and experimental ethnography.

This course offers students an introduction to the relationship between the media, technology platforms, and politics, and an exploration of how that relationship is changing in the digital age. The course introduces students to general theories of media power and effects, outline the economics of media, shows how the media impacts political campaigning, illustrates how the media can affect public policy, and assesses the negative externalities associated with the new political economy of the media (including monopoly, surveillance and information disorder).