Film & Media Studies

This course provides a diverse cinematic palette, focusing on films, filmmaking formulations and new aspects of non-Anglophone cinemas from regions outside Europe and America. Course sessions cover multifaceted aspects of cinema creation, burgeoning film movements and industry dynamics whilst also studying established and emerging filmmakers. The broad geographic stretch is combined with a specific focus on the current cinematic terrain of countries including Chile, Argentina, Senegal and South Africa. The course also investigates recent and ongoing transformations, such as the magnified visibility of female filmmakers from the Middle East and the rise of new Indian Indie cinema as a competitor to Bollywood.

This course examines images and photography to understand the role perspective plays in interpretation and meaning.

This course offers a journey through the history of cinema through the prism of the notion of auteurs. It discusses when we start talking about filmmakers and directors, how they have established themselves over time, and when the director becomes an author. The course returns to the texts and films which marked the major stages of this history. Far from accepting this terminology as a fact, it discusses and retracing its history through American and European cinematography, demonstrating to what extent this history has contributed to shaping our contemporary understanding of cinema and cinema categories still widely used by the industry and institutions. Alongside the lecture course, the tutorial sessions focus on author-filmmakers who have favored improvisation work with the actors or alternative ways of considering the classic sequence between writing a script and work of the direction during filming. It examines how everyone finds themselves unique within a true cinematographic tradition inherited from the theater. This perspective makes it possible to go beyond the categories of documentary and fiction. This course notably address the works of Mike Leigh, Lionel Rogosin, Marguerite Duras, John Cassavetes, Maurice Pialat, Nicholas Ray, and Jean-François Stevenin, as well as the contemporary works of Abdelatif Kechiche, Rabah Ameur Zaïmeche, Tariq Teguia, Jean-François Stevenin, and Charles Hue.

The course analyses all aspects of various short films and discusses how to write a short film, how to deal with the dramaturgy of the short film, and how to direct it. The course examines masterpieces created by the best directors in the history of cinema as well as contemporary ones. The course is intended for the students who are preparing their own short films but also for those, who want to understand the short film as a form.

This course offers students the opportunity to study the American commercial film industry since 1945, with an emphasis on the changes to the Hollywood mode of production in Hollywood's "post-classical" period, i.e., the decades since the collapse of the studio system in the 1950s. Individual films and filmmakers are considered in principal relation to the institutional, economic, and stylistic changes occurring at that point on Hollywood's historical evolution. Where appropriate, reference are also made to relevant historical context during this period of enormous social and political upheaval and momentous cultural change in the United States. 

This course focuses on the aesthetic theoretical foundations of image composition. It discusses the parameters for camera use that determine image capture and the principles of scene lighting to achieve a desired aesthetic and narrative result.

This course introduces students to a selection of independent American films which are frequently overlooked by the dominant histories of American cinema. The films selected are chosen from a diverse range of American filmmakers from the 1960s to the present, and the course therefore hopes to provide an account of American film which reaches beyond the dominant Hollywood model. This leads to consideration of the divisions in American society and how these can be perceived through the work of independent filmmakers. 

The course outlines media history with an accent on the 17th, 18th, and the first half of the 19th century. The broad themes are the formation of a mediated public sphere and the emergence of media markets in relation to the growing industrial capitalism. The course takes a closer look at oral and written news media, the freedom of speech and censorship, the postal system, and the popular culture of chapbooks.

The Swiss author Johanna Spyri created one of the world's most famous children's book characters with Heidi's Years of Apprenticeship and Traveling (1880) and Heidi Can Use What She Has Learned (1881). To date, the Heidi novels have been translated into around 50 languages and repeated, among other things. Adapted as a film, (animated) series, comic, musical and radio play. Most recently, in May 2023, the Johanna Spyri Archive and the Heidi Archive were added to the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage, which lists cultural-historical artifacts of global importance. Using the example of auditory adaptations of the first Heidi volume, the seminar provides an insight into the analysis of children's audio media. Audio books and radio plays are available that deal with the story of the cheerful orphan girl and span from the 1950s to the present. The audio media are discussed from aesthetic and narrative points of view as well as with regard to content transformations. The starting point of the seminar is the reading of Spyr'is Heidi's years of teaching and traveling.

This course uses film to examine the cultural translation of famous stories in different times and cultural settings by looking at how shifts in the narrative, images, dialogue, and translation foreground different ideas. The course looks at the expression of cultural translation in movies and the flow of translation; particularly, how a single story changes as times and cultures change. 
 
Why do some stories travel internationally, while others seem less inclined to relocate? What cultural differences are revealed--and what challenges arise--in the process of translating culturally specific texts for new audiences? How does this traffic of ideas, images, narratives and media affect the ways we understand and relate to each other across cultures? 
 
Through the medium of film, this course introduces students to two important aspects of cultural translation: 1) cultural translation as “a way for minority subjects to claim a degree of agency within a majority culture” (Hodgson, 2018), and 2) cultural translation as a process of “negotiating cultural differences” (Bachmann-Medick, 2006) that involves adapting or rewriting texts to foreground issues relevant to their new audiences (see Bahrawi 2016). 
 
Through a series of case studies ranging from Italian adaptations of Japanese Westerns to Disney fairy tales and the gothic excesses of Toho Studios' vampire films, students will discover the extent to which cultural contexts and formal demands affect the translation of a variety of film elements: from images and dialogue to tropes and narratives.