Film & Media Studies

This course examines trends in the depiction of European cities in literature and film from the 1980s to the present. It explores the relationship between aesthetic representations and social-cultural contexts, paying attention to traditions of literary and cinematic urbanism while also engaging with contemporary questions concerning urban identity and culture. The course provides students with the opportunity to pursue a substantial research project of their choosing, focusing either on one author's representation of more than one city, or on one city's representation by more than one author (/film-maker etc).

This course focuses on the impact of the AIDS crisis on American and European artists and activists, from the first census of cases of the disease in 1981 to the therapeutic revolution in 1997. Based on numerous visual representations inhabited by all that was at work in societies at the time of the epidemic, the course constructs a political, economic, and social history of this era haunted by the catastrophe. In doing so, it mobilizes and crosses disciplines, and develops questions and issues specific to the history of art by calling on the human and social sciences.

This course examines filmic representations of key social, political, and historical events in Portugal and Brazil, focusing on efforts by directors and producers in both countries to articulate history, memory, and national identity. Key concepts students engage with are race, gender, colonialism/post-colonialism, social inequality, memory, identity, among others.

This course examines in depth the critical legacies of and debates surrounding film authorship. The course surveys key theoretical texts and explores them in themselves as well as through comparative case studies of two directors-Robert Bresson and Takeshi Kitano-who have both produced a significant body of work and given rise to substantial attention to their respective careers in film. Students consider how Bresson and Kitano fit into and/or defy the "auteur theory" and its variants through close attention to both the films themselves and the critical discourses (aesthetic, historical, national, generic) they have generated. The course invites students to consider what "film directing" is, as artistic, and cultural practice.

This course examines the politicization manifested in works of fiction and the political effects of the creation and the use of artwork. Incorporating an international and comparative dimension, it explores censorship, politics, mobilization, and conflicts within the art world. The course studies several aesthetic registers including cinema, television, literature, and painting to examine the tension present in various worlds of art, between artistic recognition and the politicization of works and creators. It explores the mechanisms of this tension as well as the practices and forms of action and creation through which artists engage and see their creations become objects of disruption.