Film & Media Studies

This is an introductory course to studying screen cultures in their medium specificity by looking at adaptations that make narrative borrowings explicit. Students learn how to diagnostically write about and think with films, which rework popular and literary tales.

In this course, students work with an industry client to develop a project to realization, identifying an area of specialization and consolidating the skills needed to work in the media industries. The main emphasis in this course is practical production, augmented by critical and creative thinking within a range of specializations including Animation, Video Production, Interaction Design or Sound.

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.