Film & Media Studies

This course examines the study of Australian film and television. Beginning with post-war Australian film and television, it will trace the emergence of the modern entertainment industry in Australia locating it within national and international frameworks and examining the growing debates around what constitutes a national cinema and television industry. The focus will be upon examining specific films and a range of media in television locating products within local and global contexts, analyzing cosmopolitan and nationalist impulses that drive the industry forward. It covers a range of indigenous and non-indigenous products and genres including feature films, video, documentaries, television series, sitcoms and news programs. Road movies, comedy, history films, animation, romance and melodrama are among the genres studied.

Community art involves all arts disciplines and can be found in all corners of the world: in immigrant working-class areas, in prisons, in rural communities, in (former) war zones, etc. In the Netherlands, for example, it is a rapidly expanding field that operates mostly, but not exclusively, outside of the mainstream or avant-garde. Because it challenges traditional notions of (autonomous) artmaking, community art reconfigures existing art theory and criticism in an attempt to validate itself both socially and culturally. This course provides a critical introduction to the practical and theoretical dimensions of community arts. As small, multilingual research teams, students conduct fieldwork in ongoing community arts projects in Utrecht or elsewhere in the Netherlands, film their results, and present this video to the class.

This course offers an introduction to fiction videomaking. Topics include: framing; mise-en-scene and framing; cinematography; digital camera and sound equipment advanced functions and techniques; editing; sound; shot and reserve shot; script; shooting and editing of a final project.

This course explores Spanish cinema from its origins to the present day including viewings of some of the most representative films of each era.

This course discusses the most important trends and movements in the history of Czech cinema, to put the films within their historical, political, and cultural contexts, and to explore how Czech films capture the life of the Czech society during various epochs (1960s - 2010s). It explores how to analyze the film form and style and how to employ various approaches to film criticism. As the course focuses on practical application of concepts and theories on film material, it involves watching selected feature films in their entirety (with English subtitles) as well as short extracts illustrating the topic outside of class.

This course examines how documentary films have both represented and revised the past. From the earliest radical Bolshevik pioneers to the home movies of the forties, to the current use of the phone camera to record emergency and war, and even to the wildlife documentary, this course explores how documentary films interpret history, make history and in some cases, have even changed history.

This course invites students to explore and critically reflect upon the current state of German cinema since the year 2000 in a European context. The course is divided into two segments: the first introduces students to historical, cultural and critical paradigms pertaining to the current situation of European cinema; the second focuses on films produced in Germany. The course addresses film and authorship; art cinema and popular cinema; the concept of national cinema and world cinema; the formation of history, memory, and cultural identity in film; film production; and film culture. Students are introduced to a number of key German and European films from the last two decades. They acquire knowledge of theoretical discourses and critical concepts relevant to understanding and appreciating formal aspects of European cinema, and to examining contemporary German films in relation to their historical and cultural contexts. Film screenings are part of the course.