Film & Media Studies

This course provides an overview of key theoretical and practical issues and debates relating to the creation, maintenance, and circulation of film archives, including topics such as collection policies and management, cataloguing access, etc. The course introduces students to a range of seminal writings in relation to the study of archives, with an emphasis on moving image archives, and draws from texts from art history, media and film theory, and archival studies. The course also explores a wide variety of practical and creative engagements with film archives, including its use by researchers, curators, festivals, filmmakers and artists, taking into account relevant practical considerations such as access, ethics, and copyright. 

This course  introduces students to contemporary European cinema. It explores some of the "blockbusters" of recent years against the backdrop of national film industries and develops the distinct and common features of a variety of films made in Europe between 1990 and the present. The following general issues are addressed: what makes a film a blockbuster; what are the dominant themes; what are the implications of filmmaking in Europe; and how does the film language differ from American blockbusters. Films to be studied may include: Boyle: TRAINSPOTTING (1996), Tykwer: RUN LOLA RUN (1998), Noe: IRREVERSIBLE (2002), Hirschbiegel: DOWNFALL (2004), Leigh: VERA DRAKE (2005), Almodovar: JULIETA (2016), Loach: I, DANIEL BLAKE (2016).

The course focuses on close examination of movement of and in the frame. The first part of the course considers the emergence of mobile vision in the 19th century and its adoption by early cinema as well as review theoretical approaches to movement in film. The second part considers narratives of travelling and displacement (travel films, road movies, exilic and diasporic cinema) and the movement of film (as a cultural object and as a commodity) across national borders.

This course offers an introduction into the core concepts of the digital age, drawing on a rich variety of disciplines. Students examine a number of concepts, including, but not limited to: technicity, affective turn, digital subjectivity and extended mind, creative expression and participation in the digital era, amateur production, Free Software, fun and politics, self-organization, media archeology, and sonic architectures. 

This course introduces to students the neglected field of avant-garde film making through a study of its development in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s and its specific relationship to the thought and practice of the modernist avant-garde in other media, especially art and literature. The emphasis is on filmmaking as a personal practice, and its relation to developments in fine art and literary practices within western culture. Content varies depending upon emerging developments in the field.

This course examines genre as applied to the production of fiction and TV entertainment. It discusses types, evolution, and models of television genres: programs, magazines, quiz shows, humor, fiction, and reality shows.

This course explores the mechanisms of the audiovisual script, including the models of dramatic narration that are involved in the creation of scripts. It provides an opportunity to conceive and develop a dramatic narrative model based on observation, analysis, and tradition; as well as create a literary script of a short or medium-length fiction film (treatment or first draft of the script).

This course covers the complete history of cinema. From the Lumière brothers through today, it discusses the full context of the history of cinema, including political climate.

The course introduces students to a wide variety of different films and filmmaking techniques under the category of "animation."  Students view and analyze both drawn animation, "model" animation (stop motion animation) as well as computer generated animation.

Films evoke a variety of feelings and thoughts with the stories they tell and the way in which they tell those stories. How a film looks and shapes our aesthetic experience. This course provides a basic understanding of the form and content of a film and introduces its formal elements such as narrative, design, composition, camera movement and angle, editing, and the like.  It also shows us how to critically engage with these formal elements that construct our cinematic experiences. 

By looking at films more systematically and approaching them more analytically, one can arrive at a better understanding of film as an art form as well as a social, cultural, and political practice that informs, challenges, and interrogates our understanding of self, society, and the world.