Film & Media Studies

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.

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.