Film & Media Studies

This course provides a technical and practical knowledge of film and television direction for various audiences and formats. Students manage cameras and other audiovisual equipment. Topics include multi-camera formats, techniques, and content; live and pre-recorded programming; studio and equipment; monitoring and routines; and post-production. Basic knowledge of technical aspects of videomaking is recommended.

This course explores "popular" cinemas of East Asia, in particular Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Students focus on popular genres (crime/policier, family drama, anime, and monster/zombie films) in relation to their production circumstances, distribution, and reception. Further they discuss the film style and individual authorship of such directors as Kurosawa Akira, Johnnie To, Bong Joon-ho, Ozu Yasujiro and Kore-eda Hirokazu. Throughout the course, the cultural aspects of popular cinema are considered, including issues of historical specificity, local identity, and family and gender relations within the popular imagination.

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.