Film & Media Studies

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

This course examines the scope and impact of American media. It looks at the relationship between US media industries and the stories people consume. It surveys multiple forms and formats, including cinema, television, radio, podcasts, literature, and social media. Students will be encouraged to examine their own media habits and practices, as well as understand how the US projects an image of itself through its media industries.

The course surveys the international developments of the film medium and the film industry from the introduction of sound in the late 1920s through WWII and into the postwar era up to the late 1950s, covering key technological, textual and institutional developments and tying these together with the broader cultural and social context in which films were made, exhibited, and understood. Students gain understanding of the style, content, industrial organization, and production and marketing strategies of a range of national cinemas. Special emphasis may be given to questions about realism, technology, the representation of race, formal experimentation, entertainment and politics in filmmaking of this period.

This course examines the history, constraints, and characteristics of British cinema and television since the early 20th century. Topics include gender relations and social issues; actors and performance; popular genres including heritage, comedy, and gangster films; television drama and its hybrid forms; indigenous and exportable qualities of British film and television; audiences; distribution, exhibition, and public service broadcasting; relations between the film and television industries; and the impact of new media in contemporary global contexts.

This course explored and analyzes major institutions, actors, and trends in contemporary French and European Media and attempts to situate them in the larger contexts of “unifying” Europe and “globalized” world-media-scene. Students examine the operational schemes, performances, and internal decisional and power structures of different branches of French media: print national & regional press, specialized magazines, the publishing industry, advertising, radio, television, and the Internet. The course attempts a specific analysis regarding the international and French implications of the growing potential of social networks and “New Media.” Students review aspects of the growing confusion –both in terms of competition and compatibility—between “new” and “old” media and their political, social, and cultural impacts. In the domain of social and political presence students study and question practices of newsgathering, deontological principles and constraints, media performance under pressure of time, context, profit-making-structures, politics, violence, ethics, and ideologies. The course examines forms and styles of “information,” editorial policies and the variety of notions of “Democratic pluralism” and “freedom of expression” across the French and European Media landscapes. We will try to define, decode, and interpret distinctions between “news,” “commentary,” and “analysis” as they are being treated on the French and European media scenes. The course analyzes what all these may mean, encourage, cultivate, or block in terms of politics, society, culture, and media during “high times” of political turmoil, violent crisis, or social unrest. In the domain of entertainment and “services” offered by the Media, students examine different variations of publishing, broadcasting, and “accompanying” practices over the last 20-30 years. We may attempt a parallel analysis of possible interaction between these two domains (News/Entertainment), following political and ideological lines and some study of the dynamics of change along the ambitions, the strategies and the priorities of the media industries alongside “public demand.”

The first objective of the course is to explore and understand the storytelling epic, the symbolic imaginaries, and the ideological architectures of media events, both planned and unplanned. The specific focus on the recent "trauma television," the coverage of dramatic moments in human and medium history will provide students a further direct-experience based occasion to develop a critical and meaning creation oriented approach towards the medium. The final goal is to let students appreciate how television works, how it’s able to take a precise picture of constitutive parameters, problematic conjunctions, practices, moods, and contradictions of society, and why it still plays such a strategic role in social, cultural, and political issues in national and international contexts. The course main subject is essentially the relation of reciprocal influence between television and society. Built on a solid critical basis, mostly linked to cultural studies, sociology and journalism theories, the course is designed under the theoretical umbrella of the most important medium scholars, from McLuhan to Beaudrillard, and from Kellner to Dayan and Katz. The course discusses topics including television communication in general, its main theories, its complex spectrum of meanings, its storytelling processes, and its numerous social implications; the media events field, with ritual planned events (typically contests, conquests, coronations) and disruptive unplanned ones (disaster, terror, and war); and the "trauma television" of the last two years that is putting unexpected events in the television central stage as never before, even in some cases questioning their very notion – specifically the pandemic, the Capitol Hill riots, the various natural disasters caused by the climate change, and the Taliban takeover of Aghanistan – ground-breaking examples of the link between medium, contemporary history and our everyday life.