Film & Media Studies

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).

The course offers practice in digital film making. It is a practice-based film making course teaching narrative fiction.

This course introduces the craft and theory of documentary storytelling. Students learn how to create powerful 5-minute documentary films that respond creatively to a set brief. Students develop their own narrative and filmmaking approach through practical and theoretical instruction in the tools and techniques of digital film production. These include principles of camera and sound, interviews and narration, multi-media archival research and use, editing with Adobe Premiere and lo-fi graphics and animation. These practical creative skills are developed alongside a critical investigation of documentary technique and the art and ethics of storytelling.

This course explores key concepts and theories in media, communication, and cultural studies to connect them to matters of cultural politics and power. It focuses on language and how it is used to represent the world we live in. The course covers semiotics, discourse, power/knowledge, speech act theory, performativity, and queer theory. Using these theoretical/methodological perspectives, it critically examines media representations of gender, sexuality, race, and nation.  

This course focuses on understanding how photojournalism contributes to the news landscape and how images shape our comprehension of current affairs and history. The course looks at images from contemporary events as well as studying the history of photojournalism and its different fields of engagement in order to give context for its role today. The course also focuses on how Artificial Intelligence is changing the game for the viewers as well as the professional photographers. It discusses questions such as what makes us an ethical photojournalist? Are there ways we should act while covering stories worldwide? Is it always appropriate to make an image or are there times when a conversation needs to happen first? What messages are we trying to convey through our photographs? How do we remain transparent and inclusive as photographers while working in the field?

The course explores the relationships between cinematographic language and new digital technologies, investigates trends and iconographic recurrences of contemporary cinema, and creates awareness of the many ways which we read cinematic images. Students may pitch and create an audiovisual work, while developing critiquing skills. The course deepens the links between cinema and new technologies starting from the narrative, theoretical, and aesthetic modalities of contemporary digital cinema. The course also observes the historical context in which digital cinema fits. A part of the course is dedicated to the analysis of some specific symbolic orders of contemporary digital cinema and their film representation. The most significant correlations include: the film narrative and the forms of contemporary realism; the rediscovery of autobiographism; archive images and recycled cinema; the forms of hybridization and the aesthetics of video-art; the relationships between cinema space and museum space; the relationship between visible items and invisible items; the relationship between cinematic images and authenticity; and cinematic strategies used in different modes of production. The course includes the possibility to create a short audiovisual work. The course is aimed toward students studying communication and recommends a knowledge of basic topics in film and media history as a prerequisite.

This course explores and enjoys how film makers across the globe have adapted short stories into remarkable and compelling films that stand apart from the sources as works of art themselves. We will start with the stories but look at how the films go beyond fidelity to the original to create works with their own aesthetics and integrity. Films will include Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast, the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami's heart-warming Where is the Friend's House?, the sci-fi thriller Total Recall, and the Korean hit film Burning. All films will be viewed during class, so attendance is mandatory. 

This course analyzes key practical and theoretical elements in the cinematographic representation of the LGBTQI+ collective, in its different manifestations throughout the history of cinema. It examines the ethical and aesthetic universe of so-called queer cinema in search of its own Latin American identity.

This course offers an in-depth study of Irish cinema and television from historical, cultural, social, and economic perspectives. Spanning different cinematic and televisual genres from documentary to political thriller, and from the sitcom to reality television, students learn how Irish people and society both shape and are shaped by screen culture through an analysis of key texts. Eschewing unhelpfully narrow definitions of Irishness, this course examines the Irish experience both at home and abroad, looking at how these films and television programs shape the conception of national identity at a time of increased cultural and migration flows both into and out of Ireland (both North and South).