Film & Media Studies

This course considers the unique aspects of Italian media and how it impacts and influences everything from cultural heritage to politics. Students explore Italy's eccentric media characters, from right-wing Matteo Salvini and chauvinistic Silvio Berlusconi to the tweeting, headline-making Pope, and consider how seriously Italians take what they get from the press. This course explores the historical development of Italian media from the "Acta Diurna" bulletins sent from the Roman Forum through phases of Fascism and national terrorism, all the way to the digital age. Students play documentarian by following the media treatment of an Italian news topic of their choice, ranging from culture, fashion, or food to gay rights, climate change, politics, or the economy, in order to fully understand how the media shapes public perception and vice versa. Topics include the media treatment of the Vatican, the Mafia, gender issues and sexism, fashion, food, cultural heritage, and the economy. Students also consider how Italy stacks up against media in the United States and the United Kingdom in terms of press freedom, transparency, and infotainment (the melding of news and entertainment).

This course provides conceptual and analytical tools for students to be able to systematize their experience as viewers and spectators of a range of visual representations across the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. Students are introduced to the broad field of Visual Culture in order to be able to engage critically with various forms of expression such as painting, printmaking, photography, and film (including genres such as portraiture, comics and documentary). It also considers the visual image within literary texts. Students examine selected samples from a range of visual and, where relevant, verbal material produced in relation to the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds, as well as relevant theoretical and critical literature. Sessions focus on the ways in which images are part of the production of meaning and how vision and visuality might be culturally constructed. 

This course examines narratives in French-speaking films. It looks at the historical context of the emergence and evolution of cinema in formerly colonized French-speaking countries, and explains how this context reveals postcolonial practices that question geopolitical dominations, new radicalisms, globalized cultures and local traditional constraints. It also looks at the institutional context and the aesthetics of French-speaking cinema, as well as its thematic convergences with French-speaking literature.

Film has the complex characteristics of art, entertainment, industry, and science, and is a total medium of expression that conveys ideas and emotions at the same time. In order to properly understand the artificial product of film beyond the level of simple entertainment, it is necessary to learn the basics of film language, film aesthetics, film history, film production, and the film industry. This course introduces a systematic understanding of film media, focusing on how film can give people the kind of aesthetic experience offered by art such as music, art, theater, etc.

This course analyzes the media’s construction of historical discourses and their representations according to the type of media. This interdisciplinary workshop analyzes historical content from a semi-discursive approach.