Film & Media Studies

The course presents cinema auteurs, with a particular focus on Raymond Depardon, to examine diverse themes and art mediums.

This course examines recent Latin American films, which are critically analyzed in social, political and cultural context. The course enables students to develop their skills of analysis in an audiovisual, rather than purely literary, context, as well as deepening understanding of the Hispanic world through engagement with its cinematic production. 

This course focuses on international security with a constructivist approach. It relates the security sector's response to the 9/11 attacks in the United States and studies the international security framework that has been centered on anti-terrorism against Al Quaeda and Daech, from 2001 to 2011 (ending at the death of Bin Laden), through films and TV shows. The course draws on the theoretical apparatus of the aesthetic turn and recent work on fictional representation and its impact on public space, as well as on security policies themselves. Fiction is not just a matter of a more or less realistic representation of reality, but an increasingly influential and even central element in defining the repository for security policies.

This course examines key concepts and approaches in film and television studies. Central ideas in the development and practices of these disciplines – such as auteurism, genre, national cinema, realism, representation, and ideology – are examined through close readings of scholarly texts, and the analysis of case studies and examples drawn from the history of film and television. In doing so, this introduction to film and television studies engages with questions of the distinctive place of these media – as popular and artistic forms – within culture and society.

In this course, Western ocularcentrism and the modernist segmentation of our sensory functions and sensorial experiences are questioned. Philosophical, artistic, and scientific ideas that question the supremacy of the eye, the modernist hierarchy of the senses, and the division of our sensory functions are reviewed. Through lectures, guest lectures, museum visits, experiments, discussions, and the intensive study of texts participants become more attentive to how our sensorium functions. Students learn to analyze contemporary art, film, fashion, design, consumer goods, and environments from a multisensorial perspective and identify interrelations that exist between the different senses into account in their scientific work.  If there are excursions to museums, cities, or other art institutions, these may incur additional costs.

This course explores issues pertaining to inter-Korean relations through the diverse representations of Korea's national division and the Korean War within film and literature from the mid-1940s to the present. It considers how changes in geo-cultural politics at the local and transnational levels have influenced the cinematic and literary imagination of national division and the Korean War in the South, while also exploring the representation of the divided Korea in North Korea. Through the close reading of selected film and literary texts, it investigates a range of perspectives on inter-Korean relations, and study how hegemonic visions of the two Koreas are reproduced, negotiated, and challenged in these texts. Informed by secondary sources, including critical essays in such fields as film and literary criticism, cultural studies, social science, and history, the course critically interprets the discursive construction of a divided Korea in our primary sources from the perspective of political, social, and cultural history.

This course explores the ways that Hollywood has used film form to create a naturalized style and viewing experience. It studies its conventions as well as the variations and deviations that push the envelope or constitute alternative constructions of the realistic. 

This course examines cinematographic theory. It covers the antecedents of Cinema Theory and the basic notions of related theoretical backgrounds. Students carry out critical reviews of films in text and video, critical film essays and experimental films based on the theoretical concepts covered in the course.

The course introduces a wide range of issues concerning the role of cinema in the British cultural context, as distinct from and in connection with the cinemas of Hollywood and Europe. The course focuses on the following aspects: cinema as an economic system operating within an international audio-visual market; cinema and national identity, particularly representations of London as Metropolis; genre in cinema; and cinema as a formal system, considering questions of authorship, narrative and audience.