Film & Media Studies

The course focuses on the development of the American mass media and how different media, mainly television, convey knowledge about politics and social issues in the USA. The course illuminates media developments from a historical perspective and takes up the question of how various media, primarily television, convey knowledge about politics and social issues in today's US.

This course suggests re-visiting the criticisms often applied to the United Nations (naive idealism, paralysis, bureaucratization, power politics, etc.) not through the lenses of International Relations (IR) theories but from the perceptions of writers and movie directors. Through their professional activity and art, they have shared their representations of the United Nations. This course carefully considers these representations and to what extent they accurately reflect what actually happens within the United Nations and its field of action. Also discussed are how these representations are spread and received and how these works articulate fiction with politics. While priority is given to the analysis of a corpus of selected documents (books and movies), attention is also paid to some theoretical works (in political science, sociology, and history) in order to understand the way in which particular media may influence our own representations of international institutions. Thus, this course aims at bridging the gap between popular representations and academic knowledge, not in a confrontational way but through a better understanding of their respective production mechanisms and goals. This course is open to any student who has an interest for international politics, international organizations, and media studies in general.

This course provides a study of the stages of historical development of Mexican cinema. It also examines the sociocultural context of film productions as they were made.

This course introduces students with little or no background in movie making to the fundamentals of filmmaking from a professional filmmaker’s perspective. The course analyzes the roles of directors, writers, producers, actors, production designers, editors, and sound designers, to provide insight into professional filmmaking practice. The course also analyzes key creative and practical skills such as the application of genre, screenwriting, directing, cinematography, film editing, production aesthetics, and film crew organization.

This course introduces students to the world of photography by examining the works of various artists and selected projects. Students learn the technical aspects of the camera and photographic process, implementing studied techniques and modes of expression by creating their own portfolio on a subject of their choosing. An emphasis is placed on how to judge, outside of one's personal taste and to develop a sense of critical thinking in relation to the medium. Open critiques play an important role in this domain. This class follows the tradition of an atelier by focusing on the practice of making a body of work parallel to an academic context. The structure of the course varies, while several classes are devoted to outside shoots in designated locations others consist of slide lectures, short film clips, and critiques of selected assignments where students view and respond to the work of their peers. These critiques are essential to the progress of the personal projects, to be presented in the final 2 weeks of class. A collective class project culminating in a book concludes the semester.

The Middle Ages produced a formidable reservoir of myths that have many contemporary recreations, particularly in cinema. In this course, a medieval legend (Tristan and Iseult) is chosen and compared with its contemporary cinematic recreations. The purpose is to analyze the modern films' usage of the medieval legend and its application to the contemporary universe.

In this course, the history of the medium of video games is approached as a factual chronology and a process of self-definition, as demonstrated by the rise of retro-gaming. The course also considers the history of video games by the way of contemporary “independent” games and it rewrites this history in order to better to establish their alternative credentials.

The canon of cult cinema has traditionally privileged American cinema, from the low budget B-movies of Ed Wood through to the transgressive early work of John Waters. This course broadens the corpus to explore cult cinema as a global form, bringing popular world cinema into dialogue with cult discourses that have previously been focused on American cinema. The course establishes key debates within the field of cult cinema studies in relation to the American films that inspired them, discussing the politics of taste, subcultural reception, aesthetic relativism, subversion, and transgression. It examines the tensions underpinning the implicit distinction between cult and mainstream, and the ways in which this subcultural formation has been predominantly conceptualized in relation to race and gender. The course investigates a range of national and transnational contexts in order to interrogate the assumed West-centrism of cult discourse, as well as examine the suitability of the term for understanding films and fandoms outside of the U.S. Screenings include films from Asia, Europe, Latin America,and the North American cult canon.