Film & Media Studies

This course offers students an introduction to the terms, ideas and craft, involved in the creation of screenplays. Students explore the conventions of dramatic structure, new narrative forms, and short film variations. They are encouraged to think critically about screenplay writing and have an opportunity to write their own screenplay. The course does not aim to provide vocational training for students wishing to pursue careers in the feature film or television industries.

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.