Film & Media Studies

This course offers an in-depth examination of the various formal dimensions of film such as cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, acting, costume and sound, as well as the stylistic use of these techniques in the filmic form and narration. The course departs from watching and analyzing very recent films and offers glimpses into early cinema, Russian Film Montage, Weimar Cinema, neo realism, film noir, recent European Cinema and various aspects of world cinema. The course examines, among other topics, broader questions of cinema's relation to history, culture, and society. Bordwell and Thompson's introductory film textbook FILM ART. AN INTRODUCTION is used as a handbook. The course provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to film aesthetics, including aspects of film analysis, film history, as well as film theory.

Alfred Hitchcock's work is crucial to the idea of cinema as a popular art form. His development as an artist and entertainer is integral to the progress of the medium itself as the dominant 20th century art form. Hitchcock's films prompted the key movements in film theory, and have fundamentally shaped our understanding of visual and narrative language. This course looks at some of these key theories and considers them in relation to Hitchcock's provocative creativity. Hitchcock was a theorist himself, and this course examines his own engagement with montage, expressionism, auteur theory, psychoanalysis, gender, and spectatorship, as a portal to the different critical approaches he has inspired. From THE LODGER (1926) to FRENZY (1972) Hitchcock's work pushes at stylistic and ethical boundaries, and manipulates audience reaction, within a determinedly commercial aesthetic. He was very happy to describe, explain, and promote his films. Students discuss what they tell us now about how cinema works. The course is accompanied by a short program of full length screenings of key Hitchcock films which cover the British, American, and "later" Hitchcock.

The cinema of action and adventure encompasses a range of genres and incorporates the output and influences of a number of national traditions and industries. Writings about action and adventure likewise address theoretical frames as varied as gender and power, vengeance and manifest destiny, the philosophies of life and death, psychological trauma, and the socio-political positioning of discourses of cinema itself in both the popular and the scholarly context. This course addresses this range of topics examining films and writings from several analytical perspectives under the general banner of film genre and genre theory.

This course provides students with benchmarks to understand the French media system. It also studies the history of the press, the status of journalists, press groups, and press politics. Lastly, it helps students understand the specificities of the media in France in order to be able to make reasoned international comparisons.

This course is an introduction to the central art form in the global media culture of film. This medium has dominated popular culture during the last century and continues to function as a historical frame of reference for understanding the development of other audiovisual media. In this course, the film medium is approached analytically from an interdisciplinary perspective and students are introduced to its many functions as art, documentation, entertainment, political propaganda, and anthropological resource. This international aspect of film is emphasized in this course, where students develop a critical understanding of a range of (trans)national film contexts from Europe, East and Southeast Asia, Hollywood, North Africa, and the Middle East. Film culture aims at engaging the students in several ways. In part, the course focuses on the current historical and political meaning of film and its position as a globalized mass media. In addition, students develop film analytical skills through critical discussions of selected works and the contexts surrounding their production and exhibition. Film culture is developed as an elective that combines the research-based approach of different teachers to create a nuanced overview of the medium's history. Through different subjects, this course develops students' analytical and cultural-historical understanding of diverse film genres like feature film, documentary, and experimental film. The course is structured as traditional university lectures combined with film screenings, student presentations, and a research writing workshop that guides the students through the process of producing a research paper of high quality. The course may include an excursion to a film festival or other film-cultural event.

This course gives students keys to understand the contemporary international pop-culture, its sources, stereotypes, typical scenarios, stories, characters and the role of Europe, USA, and Japan in shaping it. It focuses on the mutual influences between video games, comics, animation, movies, TV shows, and novels. The conceptual background is pragmatic sociology and ethnology. The ethnological conception of culture is key, though the class does not focus on theory. The class first presents a typology of medias and imaginaries of pop-culture. In the second part, it offers a selective history of pop-culture focusing on the emergence of the elements that now form the mainstream pop-culture.

This course is a practical workshop where students create a methodological reading grid to allow them to decode with certainty what news is factual and what can sometimes be used for propaganda purposes. The course covers how to review images, sources, publication dates, itineraries, virality, and context to authenticate the veracity of content.

 

This course explores the theories and methodologies that are used to analyze and understand cinema from an academic perspective. It examines the film industry, film as a discipline, genres of film (documentary, experimental, and fiction), semiotics and structuralism of cinema, reception of films and the culture of fans, realism, Russian formalism, feminism and gender studies.