Film & Media Studies

This transdisciplinary course covers utopian and dystopian visions in literature, painting, film, television, and political discourse, both past and present. It successively covers the main themes and concerns of various schools of utopia (alotopias, primitivism, Robinsonades, blueprint utopias, etc.) and dystopia (far-right and far-left politics, populism and demagoguery, fear of new technologies, fear of government censorship, dark anti-feminist visions of the future, fear of the growing need for conformity and political correctness, fear of growing crime and violence, etc.). The course broadens the vision of dystopian art, typically considered a Western phenomenon, to include key names from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. It includes student presentations of themes related to dystopia as presented in works from various cultures and countries of origin.

This course, divided into two parts, studies a British novel and an American novel and their cinematic adaptations. It provides a close reading of FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy, and then introduces the basics of film theory to understand each movie. The main objective of this to familiarize students with the joint study of a literary work and one or more film adaptations by relying on several case studies.

This course offers a study of film and literature. Topics include: film and its relationship with other art forms; film writing; adaptation; construction of the film narrative; film in debates of the artistic avant-garde; theories and poetics of realism; the crisis of reality and its fictions; the film essay.

Course exploring a range of films (popular genre movies and art cinema) from South Korea, in relation to their historical background (national and international). It examines in particular the international circulation and understanding of South Korean cinema since the 1980s.

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.