Film & Media Studies

This course introduces students to the pervasive nature of animation by examining key texts in both historic and contemporary culture and to interrogate the significance of the form. Drawing on current discourse in animation studies, the course enables students to think about the connection between animation and other moving image and visual cultural artefacts in a critically engaged way.

This course examines French films from the birth of cinema in 1895 to the more recent creations celebrated at the Cannes Festival. The course studies selected avant-garde and popular films and explores how film narratives can reflect historical and social conditions in France during a given time. The following periods are discussed: Early cinema (the Lumière brothers, Alice Guy, Méliès); the Golden Age of French classical cinema (Renoir); the “New Wave” (Varda, Godard); the “Cinéma du Look” (Besson); “Heritage Cinema” (Claire Denis); and the challenges of Globalization (Sciamma). The course also covers several film genres, from the birth of the fantastique to the influence of the film noir on New Wave cinema. Students explore the cross-cultural interactions between French cinema and foreign films and how French cinema as an art form has had a deep impact on international cinema. Films and readings are supplemented by site visits. Most of the films chosen for this class were shot in Paris and reveal the city's different faces, going from the romanticized version in Agnès Varda's film or Claire Denis' grittier version.

This course introduces its participants to mass media systems and structures in Germany and Europe and provides them with the analytical tools and background knowledge to assess the ways in which the mass media and politics interact and thus shape each other. The course begins with an overview of the different structures of mass media (public/private) in Germany and selected European countries, including how they have historically developed and particularly which political ideas have shaped the frameworks in which media institutions and individuals operate. At the same time, the course takes a critical look at how the media in turn have shaped and are still shaping the ways in which the political process works and presents itself to the public. Historical and current case-studies are utilized to analyze the manifold points of interaction between media and politics. At the end of the course, students also have the opportunity to compare European and American media politics and to ask whether there may be trends and influences across the Atlantic that are shaping today's politics and mass media on both sides.

The course offers an overview of social studies of technologies (science and technologies studies), with particular reference to the social dimensions of digital media and communication technologies, providing a set of historical, conceptual, and methodological tools to analyze the relationship between technologies and society. The course is structured in two parts: a first theoretical part presents some of the main concepts and theories for the study of the social implications of technologies, with particular reference to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS); a second part is dedicated to the deepening of the social and cultural implications that have characterized some of the most important technologies for digital communication and in particular the Internet, the smartphone, and online platforms. More specifically, the topics addressed are: an introduction to the basic concepts and terminology for the study of the relationship between technologies and society; the critique of “technological determinism;” the “social construction of technologies” approach; the role of end users in shaping technologies; the history of the Internet in a social and cultural perspective; the process of innovation of the smartphone and its uses in society; and the social role and technical mechanisms of digital platforms.

This course offers a dynamic approach to the methodologies of thinking in images and visual essay.