Film & Media Studies

This course examines how architecture and urbanism are represented in film and investigates how film influences and constructs the built environment and vice versa – how the built environment is experienced and perceived through moving images. It looks as the questions: How does architecture use its structure, form, enclosure, floor plans, materials, and lighting to produce effects and backgrounds? How does (built) space provoke emotions and influence everyday lives? Likewise, how does the film use space, architecture, and landscape to situate its characters and create dramatic action and emotions?  In other words, how does it produce narratives and iconic images and shape collective memories? 

This course provides insight into three interconnected fields of inquiry: the study of Scandinavia and the larger Nordic region; the analysis of film and audiovisual media; and an understanding of how film reflects past and present transnational and transcultural relations in a globally interconnected world. The interdisciplinary course relates close readings of films to discussions of the larger socio-political and media-aesthetic context. This context is marked, among others, by the global circulation of ideas and cultural products, by the Scandinavian welfare state and issues of gender equality, migration and diversity, environmental concerns, and decolonization processes. The course responds to contemporary shifts in Nordic self-imagining and closely examine the ways in which film mediates notions of imagined communities at local, national, and regional levels. Students are presented to a variety of audiovisual material, including documentaries, feature films, TV series, web-based series and short films. Apart from internationally renowned Scandinavian film directors, the Nordic screen milieu has in recent years been very successful in producing transnational TV and web-based series that have travelled globally. Another recent development reflected by the course is the strengthened voice of contemporary film from Greenland and Sápmi (the traditional lands of the indigenous Sámi people on the northern Scandinavian peninsula) that has so far not necessarily been marketed or seen as “Nordic” but circulates as “Indigenous cinema.” This diverse internationally circulating body of contemporary film helps to explore and expand the notion of “Norden” to understand better the region’s ethnic and cultural diversity and its transnational connectedness as reflected by contemporary audiovisual media.

This course discusses the means of journalistic reporting on various violent subject matter including: terrorism; war; ethnic and racial conflicts; domestic and gender violence; youth violence. It examines the ethics and obligations journalists have to provide information to the public. The course explores the difference between explaining, interpreting, and opining as well as the importance of providing context to the news events being reported and how these choices influence public perceptions.

This course studies the methodology of film analysis. It develops analysis skills by analyzing shots and sequences.