CMST

From the birth of African American filmmaking to Spike Lee’s Chiraq; from the Chicago Defender newspaper to Ebony and Jet magazines; from the first broadcasts of Soul Train to Lena Waithe’s The Chi – for more than a century Chicago has produced much of the most visible, controversial and impactful African American media.  We will trace the ways that Chicago, as a center of African American entrepreneurship, journalism, artistic innovation and political organizing, has shaped media works and practices in film, television, publishing, radio.  We will study how Black mediamakers have navigated economic challenges and political threats in their efforts to convene Black publics, resist erasure and misrepresentation in mainstream media, and imagine more equitable futures.

A portal opens: you step into a fictional world. This enduring fantasy of engaging with art involves a number of ideas that often go unaddressed. What is a “world,” and how do movies, games, TV, and books try to offer us one? Focusing primarily on cases from cinema and video games, this class takes a multifaceted and critical approach to fictional worlds. We’ll ask how different media formations and technologies support them, interrogate the theoretical concept of “world” and its cognates (“diegesis,” “worldbuilding”), and consider the politics of making, policing, and breaking worlds, from sci-fi games to art cinema to fan creation. Over the course of the quarter, you’ll undertake an ongoing study of a world of your choosing, delivering your report at our final session—a Worlds Fair.

In this class, we’ll draw on an array of children’s film, television, music, games, and digital cultures to think critically about how media position kids, how kids engage with media, and how kids’ media fashion (and can possibly refashion) our “grown-up” perceptions, desires, and imaginations. This course attends to the aesthetics and affects that shape (and are shaped by) children’s media—ranging from the cute to the curious, the silly to the surreal, the plastic to the ludic, and beyond—and to the ideologies and counterpolitical possibilities embedded in these forms and feelings. Our investigations focus in particular on treating kids’ media as a site for interdisciplinary thought alongside relevant queer and trans, critical race, and feminist theories, where the figure of “the child” has long been a major site of tension. Students will learn to re/encounter children’s media as an often-forgotten space of (potentially radical) experimentation, marked by malleable forms, unruly affects, and unpredictable ways of seeing, hearing, being, and knowing. Designed around experimentation and play, course assignments combine short analytical writing with creative work. Students will collaborate on a final course zine, contributing short manifestos, keyword entries, curated lists, and/or other playful pieces that rethink what children’s media can offer—and imagine what becomes possible when we learn to “watch like a kid” again.

Climate change is one of the most important and challenging problems of our times. How is cinema involved? This course introduces students to environmental cinema and to ecocritical approaches to film studies. Beginning with explicit representations of climate change in eco-documentaries and recent post-apocalyptic fantasies, we will interrogate cinema’s broader relationship to the environment through questions of film materiality, resource extraction, and climate control. Additional topics include extinction, weather, waste, infrastructure, toxicity, nonhuman life, and the Anthropocene. Each week, we will watch and discuss a film – from genres spanning science fiction, documentaries, anime, eco-thrillers, and propaganda – alongside key theoretical debates about energy and natural resources (oil, water, coal, electricity), the politics and ethics of visualization, and the materiality of analog and digital cinema. Filmmakers include Werner Herzog, Jia Zhangke, Bong Joon Ho, and Agnès Varda, while written texts are taken from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Rob Nixon, Anna Tsing, and others.

In this course, we will use a single franchise – Sonic the Hedgehog – as an access point to study media history, aesthetics, social and cultural practice, and the relationships between games, film, and other artforms. Originally released in 1991 for Sega’s Genesis console, the Sonic series has spawned over three decades of games, cartoons, manga, novels, films, music, board games, action figures, fan art, cosplay, and merchandizing. Both the volume and the variety of these texts allow the Sonic corpus to be a focal point for questions with broader stakes for the study of games and media in general. Some of the questions we will be considering in this course include: 

What has been the relationship between particular videogame characters and franchises and the business practices and strategies of entertainment industries? What form does stardom take in the world of digital games, and is it an appropriate concept to apply to a mascot like Sonic? How have established game franchises responded to major technological and aesthetic shifts in the medium? How might we understand the concept and practice of adaptation as applied to the digital games, and what does it reveal about the medium specificity of and the relationship between games, film, comics, novels, and other forms? What can a game franchise that has taken a wide variety of generic forms (platforming, racing, fighting, and pinball, to name just a few) tell us about how genre works as concept and system in digital games?

This course will provide an introduction to genre history and theory in videogame studies through a focus on the “platformer.” Though not a common name outside of videogame culture, the platformer has introduced or popularized some of the medium’s most recognizable figures (Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong) and gameplay mechanics (running, jumping, avoiding enemies, and collecting items). The genre has also been instrumental in and reflective of changes across the videogame medium. This course will cover two decades (roughly 1990 – 2010), emphasizing both historical details and theoretical questions, such as: How have game genres been defined? How do distinct genres emerge and change over time? How do broader trends (technological, formal, industrial, discursive, experiential, etc.) influence individual genres, and what roles do individual genres play in these broader trends? What resources and methodologies exist for studying videogame genres? 

Throughout the course we’ll see the platformer alternate between an emphasis on linear, acrobatic movement across two-dimensional spaces and the free exploration of three-dimensional virtual worlds; between providing mascots for the biggest game companies and becoming a marker of independent, small-team production; and between being hailed as “revolutionary” and epitomizing the retro-nostalgic. Classroom lecture and discussion of readings will be accompanied by weekly gameplay sessions on original hardware at the MADD Center.

This Arts Core course examines the rich and vibrant cultures surrounding cinema in Chicago, from depictions of the city on screen, to film production from the silent era to the present day, to moviegoing culture from movie palaces to microcinemas. Students will study past and current film cultures in Chicago by examining particular films, events, venues, and critics. Topics covered will include the cinematic image of Chicago, film exhibition, audience and fan culture studies (with attention to Chicago’s particular demographic contours), and contemporary television and digital media production in the city.

This course seeks to develop skills in perception, comprehension, and interpretation when dealing with film and other moving image media. It encourages the close analysis of audiovisual forms, their materials and formal attributes, and explores the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given film or moving image text. It also examines the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study and understanding of moving images. Most importantly, the course aims to foster in students the ability to translate this understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written. Texts and films are drawn from the history of narrative, experimental, animated, and documentary or non-fiction cinema. Screenings are a mandatory course component.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which students will discuss through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. We will consider film as an art form, medium, and industry, and cover all the major film types: silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film. We will study the cinematic techniques: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, and learn how filmmakers design their works.

This is a course about how environmental concepts and aesthetics are mediated using interactive technologies, from video games to computer models. The environment has long been imagined as something constituted by interactions. We can think of Charles Darwin’s figuration of a “tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth… dependent upon each other in so complex a manner” to produce new and divergent species over time. Later, such interactions were captured in mathematical and computational models, e.g. of predator-prey dynamics. In this course, we will consider the history and theory of the interactive environment alongside interactive media, a genre that includes entertainment media like video games, ecological modeling software, analog toys/games, and social media platforms. The class explores the interactivity of environments through hands-on play, tinkering, argumentation and experimentation with interactive media. Students will learn to critically analyze popular imaginaries, aesthetic objects, and the tools of scientific knowledge production, and interrogate how each contributes to urgent conversations about how we interact with nature.