Film & Media Studies

This course includes the following topics:

Image Editing Overview

The time and space structure of the video works

Time and Space Structure of Video Works

Where is the "good" of a non fiction video work

Montage

Workshop on Non Fictional Video Works

Meaning of Pictures

Image aesthetics and fashion of the times

Basic Principles of Video Editing

Narrative Editing

The Role of Sound in Video Editing

Media affects how we perceive the world and people. With media becoming so prevalent and powerful in our society, and with student access to computers and the Internet expanding so fast in homes and schools, "media literacy" is becoming the basic form of literacy to provide lifelong empowerment to both the student and the citizen. This course provides students with the opportunity to learn a variety of analytical approaches they can use to understand and interpret media, including traditional media (e.g., TV, radio, print, billboard, etc.) and social media (e.g.,video sharing platforms), in the context of education. Your products may be shared to a certain audience for feedback. Participation in class such as asserting your ideas and presenting in English in front of the class is mandatory.

The labor migration from Southern European countries to Germany, which started in the mid-1950s, had an important socio-economic and socio-cultural impact on the countries’ societies and influenced their film culture. German filmmakers began to feature the difficult lives of ‘guestworkers’ in films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969). In the 1990s, second - and third – generation Turkish-German directors such as Fatih Akın and Thomas Arslan marked the end of the so-called ‘guestworker cinema’ and started to create a transnational and diasporic cinema featuring a culturally hybrid Germany. Berlin (especially Kreuzberg) has always been one of the favorite settings in all of these migration movies. The transformation of Berlin’s first ‘guestworker ghettos’ to culturally hybrid urban districts over the course of 60 years is very well reflected in all of these cinema cultures. This interdisciplinary course crosses and connects the academic fields of migration studies, film studies, and cultural studies. In the first part of the course, we will explore how migration, immigrants, and diasporas are represented in cinema. The second part of the course then gets more specific and we approach the representation of Berlin in these migration movies.

This is an introductory course for media and communication studies. It provides an overview of major theories concerning media and communication in order to analyze our everyday communications. Theories of interpersonal communication, persuasion, and mediated communication will be included.

Utilizing Irish films, this course looks at the culture, history, and society of Ireland.  Various Irish films, including "The Quiet Man," "The Fight of the Doves," and "Bloody Sunday" will be reviewed and discussed in class.

This course provides a study of cinema from a sociological perspective. It examines different film genres and challenges related to film representation. Themes, films, and topics may vary by semester and instructor.

This course explores key texts and themes in developing an understanding and appreciation of European film practices from 1940 to the present day. Using a series of case studies, students learn to situate a range of film texts according to historical, cultural, and social contexts, in addition to relevant theoretical debates.

This course provides a panoramic view of the relationship between the media and modern Brazilian popular music, from the 1950s to the present day. Topics include Bossa Nova, Tropicália, Jovem Guarda, song festivals, national rock, and other important MPB movements.

Globalization and Japan is usually connected with the oft researched policy of “Cool Japan, ” which emphasizes popular culture, particularly anime and manga. Courses on anime and manga tend to focus on an analysis of the object, whether it is a particular anime or manga title. This course aims to fill the gap, by shifting the focus to the industries as popular culture cannot exist without the complex structures of business, form and application of anime and manga.

The course aims: 

1. To introduce the student to the “behind-the-scenes” aspects of anime and manga.
2. To introduce the student to research on anime and manga from a case study.
3. To engage students in critical approaches towards familiar topics.
4. To encourage students in think critically through their own projects of a chosen case study.

This course focuses on the emergence of the literary tale, both the scholarly and popular aspects, and the way in which its great models, particularly Giovanni Boccaccio’s THE DECAMERON and Giambattista Basile’s STRAPAROLA, depict the oral origins of the genre. As they relate to a corpus of classic literary tales (Perrault, Grimm), the course studies contemporary cinematic adaptations to examine the plasticity of the genre, including the emphasis of fairy tale in popular culture. It examines how these stories are appropriated and adapted to fit the current social and political discourse and discusses whether these adaptations are part of scholarly or popular culture. Films studied include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s LE DECAMERON (1971), Jacques Demy’s PEAU D’ANE (1970), and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES (2012).