Film & Media Studies

This course is about methods of script-writing. The purposes of the course includes enhance the students’ understanding of playwriting and screenwriting both in theory and in practice; improve students’ comprehensive and aesthetic abilities on film narratology; master the basic skills and methods of script-writing; grasp the fundamental skills of dramaturgy; comprehend the classical interpretation of representative scripts; master the writing methods of typical genres; be familiar with cinematic narrative techniques.

This course offers an introduction to key aspects of film history and film cultures in Spain from the Transition years to democracy (1973-1982) to the present day. Drawing on methodological topics such as film style, authorship, genre, and gender, the course has a dual focus: on the one hand, it looks at the challenges to the idea of nation that shaped film history after the Civil War and during the Transition in order to contextualize the transformations that Spanish cinema undergoes in the 1990s; on the other, the course explores the new configurations (digital, transnational) that have come to shape the label "Spanish cinema" in the 21st century, in the context of the global image markets.

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.