Film & Media Studies

This course engages students in discussions on multiculturalism as portrayed in the media and how this has been vital to shaping and reshaping the discourse on identity within Korean society. The following are addressed in the course: race; racism; representation; stereotype; identity; assimilation; nationalism; tolerance; citizenship, and right.

The Internship Workforce course provides students with an overview of working in the United Kingdom. The course looks at the changing organizational structures of work in Britain. It examines the social and economic changes that affect the workplace in the UK. Topics covered include: sociology of work, trade unions, oppression at work, generational changes at work, and the future of work. An internship while studying in London provides an opportunity to experience a “hands on” working situation and a different perspective on the workplace and working practices, while developing professional skills.

The course allows students to develop their natural gift for creative thinking.  To this end, students make films of poems - film poems. These cinematic works usually exceed the likely intentions of the poet, becoming something new; one creative work is used as a springboard for another. In this course, students are shown how to make film poems using a combination of mobile phone technology and analysis of style, enabling them to produce novel cinematic interpretations of poetry.  Students learn how to conduct an authoritative stylistic analysis of a poem, using this as the basis for creating a screenplay which they film on their mobile phone (or other device), editing, and enhancing through their employment of freely available apps.  

Paris inscribes on every street corner a page of France's history. Its cobblestone streets record centuries of struggle, offering a narrative of this history. Writers, chroniclers, and later filmmakers have picked up these narratives and turned them into eternal works of art. The historian of today, retracing this past, has turned them into sites of memory. This course uses literary texts and films as well as historical texts to search for and reconstruct these sites of memory. From the French Revolution to the student revolt of May 1968, this course follows Parisians, exploring the ways in which cinematic representations and literary texts shape collective memory and are a particular historical/political representation of France. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach and compares and contrasts works of fiction with works of non-fiction, the written word with the visual representation, and includes site visits. Classes are broken up into specific themes each pertaining to a major event in the life of France.

This course follows the discussions, the topics, and the paradigm changes concerning film music from a historical point of view. The course studies context and content of the most prominent functions of music within (most importantly) narrative feature film. At the same time, the course provides a historical tour d’horizon on technology, aesthetics, and implications of film sound and film music, using several theoretical approaches. A HISTORY OF FILM MUSIC by Mervyn Cooke provides the historical framework. Students of this class practice various theoretical approaches and coinciding audio-visual analyses in a series of weekly assignments. A weekly film viewing is part and parcel of the course. This course requires students to have intermediate to advanced knowledge of Western music history, and elementary to intermediate knowledge of music theory, as a prerequisite.

The course focuses on the relationship between literature and film and the connections between the two languages through the in-depth study of a selection of historically relevant and exemplary works. A section of the course is devoted to the question of the historical adaptation of literary texts to the screen–from early works to the present. The course focuses in particular on the construction of the fictional movie character through a comparative approach between literary studies and film studies that places emphasis on the peculiarly cinematic element: the human factor linked to the role of the actor. The course focuses on the construction of a particular cinematic character, the history of Hollywood production (divas and audience) and the cultural role played by Hollywood in its historical context through its role in the production of film adaptations of literary works. Required film screenings: QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933), CITY LIGHTS (1931), GONE WITH THE WIND, (1939), CITIZEN KANE (1941), NOW VOYAGER (1942), WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939), A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951), REAR WINDOW (1954), WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956), THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL (1957). Assessment is based on a written exam that covers the required readings, the critical analysis presented in class and the required film screenings.