Film & Media Studies

This course explores the history of cinema with an emphasis on French cinema and its development since 1945. Students analyze a range of aspects of cinema, including its effects on society and the economy. The course also focuses on the historical context of films, and begins with World War II-era films. The New Wave film style in France and elsewhere is studied, and the course extends into the modern period. Film movements, auteurs, and film techniques are studied, accompanied by relevant clips of the films.

This course covers a variety of audiovisual tools, exploring their history, inventors, and effects on society. The first part of the course covers networks and long-distance communication, focusing specifically on the telegraph, telephone, and telecommunications. The second part covers fixed and animated images, specifically the camera, the photograph, and cinema. The third part of the course explores sounds and image machines: the phonograph, radio, and television. Finally, the fourth part of the course focuses on digital media, primarily the internet. The course utilizes a global lens, but especially explores these topics in France and the United States.

This course examines traditions, perspectives and concepts of media studies. Starting with the familiar and the everyday, this course covers the breadth of contemporary media studies from television and the tradition of mass media studies, to telephony and the study of networked media and communication technologies. With an eye on the way that television and telephony have adapted to changing realities over the decades, this course explains how media and communication technologies have transformed the rhythms of everyday life, the organization of domestic space, the boundaries between private and public, and our sense of involvement with national and public collectivities. In addition, the course examines the concept of mediation by exploring how both television and telephony shape the experience of time, distance, immediacy and liveness.

This course examines the significant theoretical approaches that inform Film Studies. Topics will vary from year to year but may include realism, formalism, semiotics, narratology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and/or postmodernism.

An introduction to Film and Television Studies explores the relationship between film and television and provides students with a range of tools and techniques for analyzing screen texts. The first half of the course examines the conventions of feature film and television production, exploring the impact that technical and aesthetic techniques have on meaning and audience responses. Areas of study include: mise en scène, cinematography, editing, and sound design for film and television. The focus of the second half of the course is on the industrial and institutional history of film and television with emphasis on the Hollywood film and TV industry. Areas of study include: the production, reception, and characteristics of cult media, art film, and of film and television genres; and the historical development of the star system, blockbusters, auteur studies, and the contemporary celebrity industry.

This course exposes students to the challenges of listening critically to music in all styles and media, and expressing a considered argument about its cultural significance, aesthetic quality, and ideological implications using non-specialist, accessible language. By indicating and exemplifying an appropriate scholarly recourse to today's multi-media resources for musical study and research, it lays the groundwork for on-going investigations of music, both as a distinct discipline and an integral component of diverse cultural practices.

Cinema has typically been conceived of as an essentially visual phenomenon – films, it is often said, are essentially moving pictures. Sound has, nevertheless, played an important role from the beginnings of cinema, a fact which has been acknowledged in the detailed historical, theoretical, and critical work on film music, and film sound more generally. This course provides an overview of this field of research, and provides students with a clearer understanding of and greater sensitivity to the soundtrack. The course begins by setting up an introductory framework for the understanding of sound, which considers the relationship between music and other aspects of film sound (speech, ambient sound, sound effects), as well as the nature of the relationship between sound and image. Subsequent sessions consider the evolution of sound technology and its impact on the aural aesthetics of film; the use of classical and popular music in film scores; the emergence of sound designers, in contemporary cinema; and the distinctive and innovative use of sound and music by a number of "sound stylists."