Film & Media Studies

This course examines the conceptual frameworks and technologies that shape the making of screen-based media and contemporary art practices. Through a series of lectures, seminars, tutorials, and screenings, students explore the evolution of experimental film, video art, and independent filmmaking from the 1960s to the present. Students engage in the production of a self-directed digital film that may be realized in any style or genre. They learn the applied skills and competencies needed to use of studio facilities and equipment.

This course is aimed to allow students to learn about Korean society and culture through digital media. Particular attention is given to the sociocultural impact of new digital technologies, such as KakaoTalk, Instagram, Tiktok, Generative AI, YouTube, webtoons, RPG/MMORPG games, blogs, data visualizations, and the companies that control these technologies. Throughout the semester, we are discussing and reading the many facets of this diverse and dispersed digital ecosphere where just about anyone with access to a computer or mobile device can integrate digital images, social media, recorded audio narration, video clips, and music alongside a range of delivery channels with meta-information (e.g., hashtags, rankings, and comments by users) to tell a story to a broad audience.

This course considers the emergence of the notion of post-modernity in cinema, and more broadly in the field of social sciences, since the end of the 1970s. It considers the multiple labels that have been attached to this movement (cinema of look, attraction, simulacrum, allusion) which bring together different and sometimes contradictory trends and which has experienced several eras over the last four decades. From immersive cinema to a taste for recycling, from pastiche to the revisitation of genres, the course discusses works including those of Sofia Coppola, the Coen brothers, James Cameron, Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Brian De Palma, Quentin Tarantino, and Lana Wachovski.

This course examines and unpicks the memory of Fascism and the Holocaust from the Italian perspective. Through a combination of class lectures and discussions, film screenings and readings, and site visits, students connect decisions taken in Fascist Italy with the end result of forced labor and mechanized killing that occurred principally outside of the country’s borders. The course explores pre-Fascist and Fascist Italy’s relationship with its Jewish population, the repressive nature of the dictatorship, its involvement in the Second World War, and its alliance with Nazi Germany to gain a thorough grounding how scholars have sought to explain Italy’s Holocaust. Having established the history of the Jews in Italy and the processes and practicalities by which they were rounded-up and deported from occupied Italy, the course reflects upon debates surrounding guilt and how this has been used to excuse or deflect responsibility for the deportation and murder of religious and political prisoners. The memory, or otherwise, of the Holocaust in Italy has been heavily influenced by domestic identities, politics, and culture and the course examines this through film. As arguably the most important artistic medium of modernity, cinema allows one to construct and deconstruct many myths and identities. This course analyzes some of the most relevant Italian film productions relating to the memory of Fascism and the Holocaust in Italy, primarily as socio-historical documents. Instruction consists of a series of lectures and class debates around assigned readings and film analysis.

This course examines major nineteenth-and-twentieth centuries European novels in English and their adaptations in the in the countries of their origin and other countries. Students will read and discuss great novels written by major European writers and the way in which they have been put into films by contemporary film directors in the respective countries.

This course analyzes the historical evolution of film, television and video. Topics covered include: silent cinema Golden age; from the studio system to the new Hollywood; neorealism and the crisis of the classical language; the new waves; world cinema; avant-garde cinema; documentary and film; technology and aesthetics; animation in film and tv; television in the United States, Europe, and other countries.

This course examines the world's most powerful film industry. It produces a historical and conceptual map of the institution that dominated the global film industry in the twentieth century, and which continues to do so today. In focusing on cinema as a socio-cultural and economic force, both in the United States and across the globe, it examines how Hollywood has historically produced and distributed a powerful cultural imaginary and devised methods to encourage audiences to consume it. The course considers Hollywood as an early example of a genuinely global industry that initially sustained itself through the implementation of a range of industrial, economic, cultural, legal, quasi-legal, and indeed illegal conventions and practices, i.e., the star system, the production code, the studio system, the genre system, monopolistic practices like vertical integration, and the Classical Hollywood style of film-making.