Film & Media Studies

This course examines media film and anime (animation) in regards to Japanese social and cultural life. It focuses on the relationship of the media with contemporary Japanese culture, society, and politics, particularly the Pacific War (WW II) and Japanese society afterwards. The course explores various genres and representative films together with critical writings on the works with the objective of training students to relate visual texts with the written texts and to relate features of the films to the specific social, cultural, and political issues under discussion. Students consider the relationship between the films and their audiences, the impact of the dominance of films and anime in contemporary Japan and world wide, and various social and cultural issues that are closely related to the movie industry, such as violence and globalization. 

The course focuses on selected phenomena from contemporary European and US cinema i.e. following 2000, and analyzes their production, distribution, and as esthetic features. The course discusses topics including the dominant tendencies in contemporary western cinema; their economic, social, and cultural background; and the analysis of selected films and their historical/cultural references.

The course introduces students to key arguments about the various ways that economics increasingly underpins the cultural sector and the creative industries. The module outlines broad concepts that provide the students with foundational knowledge about cultural economics, cultural markets, and cultural value. Recent changes, such as the digitization of culture are introduced which help students identify and understand how the economics of culture is subject to change. Students learn about the way cultural labor is valued and often de-valued and the structures of cultural economies which enable inequality. A wide variety of cultural sectors and products are examined including cultural heritage, festivals, and cities of culture. Students consider the impacts of cultural production on the environment and innovative ways to change the footprint of culture, media, and creative industries.

This workshop studies how to read and analyze journalistic content on cultural themes in a professional manner. It provides an opportunity to question journalistic expression by analyzing the facts and data it provides, the credibility of the information transmitted, and the meaning of their publication on certain dates and distribution platforms. The course examines quality, balance, and relevance of the sources; tone, rigor, and atmosphere of the expression; precision of the information; point of view of the narration; identification of the news; typology of the publications; analysis of the formats; and platforms of distribution.

This course studies the ways in which montage sequences create emotions in film and show not only the work of the editor but also the specific film language and philosophy of its director. This course studies excerpts from well-known films that express interestingly extreme and emotional life situations, set moods and themes, and introduce characters. Students choose one typical emotional situation (fight, sex, death, falling in love, loneliness) and shoot and edit the same scene in two different editing methods, resulting in two short sequences expressing the same emotion, each up to three minutes long and each done in a different cinema style.

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.

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.