Film & Media Studies

This course analyzes the "Hollywood" system of move making and its strict adherence to genre films during its golden age. Additionally, it studies multiple film genres, their repeated formulae, and their global reception through reviews and economic trends.  Along with film viewings, coursework includes theoretical texts and primary source documents.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students only. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on how a conflict as an “event,” along with its representations, is a semiotic and cultural phenomenon. In other words, it is also a conflict on the significance to be attributed to events and to the actors participating in it as, for example, when mediated discourse labels or sanctions one of the concerned parties as “the barbarian,” “the oppressed,” or “the oppressor,” “the victim,” or “the perpetrator,” “the bystander," and “the implicated subject,” thus influencing the effects and the affects that international public opinion lives and feels in confronting and interpreting the conflict itself. The course focuses on how conflicts – their regulation, repression, and particularly their visual representations – constitute privileged loci for a semiotic analysis, arguing how conflicts challenge and rearrange pre-existing systems of cultural control, not only in the first explosive moments of violence or spontaneous civil disobedience, but also, subsequently, when they encounter modes of historicization linked closely to unifying discourses of national identity. Focus is given to the relationship between still and moving images (photograph, cinema) and conflict; on how and to what extent images and icons inspired by the examination of issues of memory and oblivion experienced in the last century respond to the challenges imposed by 21st-century conflicts.

This course explores the interconnectivity between the rapid evolution of media outlets and content, the contemporary “banalization” of terrorist and other types of violence, and their fallout over issues related to social justice in France and Europe. The course examines some recent forms of social confrontation and the way these confrontations are channeled on a grand scale through mass media, both old and new. Students interrogate the political, economic, cultural, and psychological implications, as well as the “spectatorship component,” related to the growing, constant sharing of violence over public platforms, and political agendas. Different cases of social controversies are studied and compared as we probe their relevance to some larger, technological, and globalized frames of analysis. The course examines the adjustments political institutions, social bodies, and media actors have practiced when faced with these forms of protest in moments of crisis. The course attempts to understand how, and to what extent, all these altered notions have impacted national, sectorial, and class-oriented identities.

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 of the field. It's the same course as COMM/FILM 119 BUT TAUGHT IN ENGLISH.

This course provides an overview of the development of film in Germany from World War I through the end of the National Socialist period. The course includes examples of popular, experimental, and documentary filmmaking in addition to close readings of works that belong to the canon of German film. The course introduces students to the fundamental elements of film and analysis; fosters a critical understanding of how film functions, both as entertainment and as an art form; and explores the developments within German film in light of specific historical and cultural frameworks. Students become aware of the complicated issues involved in defining unified national cinema, and the inherent pitfalls in ready conceptions of German cinema.