Film & Media Studies

Through the close study of films by great directors, this course explores how film as an artistic medium can be used to engage with significant socio-cultural and existential concerns. The course teaches how to analyze film as an artistic medium and, further, how film directors use the aesthetic elements of film to engage with important subjects. Through films by directors like Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Wong Kar-Wai and Zhang Yimou, students get a chance to reflect on issues like the human condition, the family, the urban condition, love and society, and the nation.

This course examines how engineering is linked to film art. It looks at ethical issues aligned to scientific and technological progress; engineering projects linked to ideological motivations and political powers; and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.

Employing recent theories from gender and postcolonial studies, as well as media studies, this course analyses a wide range of case studies from contemporary visual culture, across a broad scope of genres and technologies. The course requires participants to critically think about concepts such as visuality, visual culture, representation, and technology. A novel approach to art, culture, and technology by challenging the primacy of vision and by mobilizing an intersectional perspective is provided. Visual methodologies and analytic tools from the fields of semiotics and psychoanalysis to be able to critically assess how social and cultural norms are disseminated in visual ways are learned. The course provides a toolkit for thinking through the growing and often overwhelming array of images we are confronted with daily in our media-saturated culture.

This course offers insight into the relationships between Hollywood and Europe. The course adopts a revisionist perspective insomuch as it seeks to challenge five ideas structuring understandings of the relations between the Hollywood and Europe. The course begins by questioning the notion that Hollywood is strictly American, and therefore separate from Europe. Students consider if Hollywood and European cinema are really the binary oppositions they tend to be imagined as being. The course goes on to discuss whether Hollywood's engagement with Eastern Europe in the twentieth century supports its reputation as a staunchly anti-Communist institution. Lastly, the course explores whether Americanization is the most useful explanatory framework for understanding Hollywood's engagement with the continent: first by considering the concessions Hollywood has needed to make to this powerful profit center, then the extent to which Hollywood has used European subject matter to provoke introspection among American audiences. Students work through these topics by employing historical analysis and examining representative films such as NINOTCHKA (1939), ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953), ROCKY IV (1984), TAKEN (2008), and THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014).

This course is dedicated to thinking about film as a physical material. Students explore what "film" (aka celluloid, film stock, or raw stock) is made from and how its materiality has informed the production, distribution, and consumption of the medium. Although often conceived as a medium of light, film is in fact produced from a host of raw ingredients (such as cotton, silver, and gelatin) that imbricate its production within networks of industrial agriculture, extractive mining, weapons manufacture, and the global chemical industry. Throughout this course, students therefore consider how the material demands of making and accessing film stock have informed the aesthetics of cinema and the politics of its consumption. They examine specific films that have been shaped by these material concerns and also look in detail at artists and filmmakers who engage with questions of materiality directly in their work.