Film & Media Studies

This course sets specific topics for students. Through the specific shooting practice, as well as a large number of specific case analysis and creative guidance for documentary photography, it is hoped that the students who sign up for this course can understand documentary photography and use documentary photography to carry out news reporting practice.

This course provides an analysis of communication and information in the contemporary world. It covers terminology, concepts and main theories, as well as practical implications in the field.

This course examines digital technologies while exploring the motion picture as an artistic medium for creative self-expression, visual experimentation, critical commentary, social engagement, and personal storytelling. It covers lighting, framing, focus, camera positioning, color, movement, editing, sound design, space, time, motion, montage, short treatments, scripts, storyboards, festival publicity material, as well as narrative structure in fiction and nonfiction film. It explores ideas and concepts from other art forms such as fine art, literature, drama, dance, architecture and music in order to effectively communicate meaning on screen.

The first films of the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany and the Lumières in France were documentaries: recordings of circus acts, workers leaving a factory, a train arriving at a station. This course examines the history of ùnon-fiction filmmaking, or what has been termed reality-driven representation, from 1895 to the present. Students concentrate on landmark films from America, Russia, Britain and France to examine the different ways in which documentary filmmakers have engaged with contemporary society and asserted the truth value of cinema. Focusing on Robert Flahertys and Dziga Vertovs pioneering work in the 1920s, British Free Cinema of the 1950s, cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema of the 1960s, the essay film of the 1980s, and concluding with examples of contemporary practices (the recent work of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, for example), political, social, and historical issues are addressed alongside more theoretical concerns. 

This course is designed as introductory lecture on both theoretical and practical topics related to use of sound and music in film. Topics include: basic terminology of soundtrack aesthetics; René Clair and nostalgia in diegesis; Soviet school of montage and conceptual approach to sound; Fritz Lang, acousmatic use of sound, and exploration of diegetic space; classical Hollywood, the way mainstream is built; evolution after WWII, decline of paradigm, and Italian cinema; cinema of the 60s; New Hollywood and cinema of early 70s; restoration of classical paradigm and Hollywood in the late 70s; action in contemporary cinema; postmodern cinema; and the study of digressions: alternate approaches and falsification of previously stated.