Film & Media Studies

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. 

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.