Cinema and Media Studies

This course traces the history of home movies on Chicago's South Side as a robust creative, documentation, and screening film practice grounded in everyday life.  The course centers on the South Side Home Movie Project, founded by the instructor here at UChicago, which holds more than 1,200 reels from the 1930s-1970s shot by a diverse range of South Side residents.  We will look at their scenes of family and community life through the lenses of amateur filmmaking, the South Side’s intense racial segregation, and the rise of a Black middle class.  Lectures and discussions with SSHMP staff, donors and collaborators will cover digitization, cataloguing, oral history, public programming, and engagement with filmmaker families, educators, and artists. Students will have opportunities to contribute original research and creative re-use projects to the SSHMP website.

Documentary Production II focuses on the shaping and crafting of a non-fiction video. Enrollment will be limited to those students who have taken CMST 23930 Documentary Production I. The class will discuss issues of ethics, power, and representation in this most philosophical and problematic of genres. Students will be expected to write a treatment outline detailing their project and learn about granting agencies and budgeting. Production techniques will concentrate on the language of handheld camera versus tripod, interview methodologies, microphone placement including working with wireless systems and mixers, and lighting for the interview. Post-production will cover editing techniques including color correction and audio sweetening, how to prepare for exhibition, and distribution strategies.

What is comedy, where is comedy, and to what end? This course foregrounds the function of comedy as a critical lens on and political catalyst for social change. We will explore how comedy and laughter emerge across both media and location, centering on Mainland Chinese moving image history. Rather than studying “China” and “comedy” as pre-established entities that then interact, the course investigates how area, genre, and media each come into being through their dynamic relations.
Each week centers on theoretical readings that conceptualize the functional definition of comedy and/or media. These readings are paired with primary texts ranging from films and animation to television shows and Internet shorts, organized chronologically from the early 20th century onwards. By the end of the course, students will have learned to (1) identify and engage a genealogy of Chinese comedy in moving image media, (2) articulate intricate relationships among area, genre, and media, and (3) produce their own critical position on the global-situated sociopolitical functions of comedy.

Virtual Reality (VR) as a storytelling medium is often discussed in terms of immersion and presence and how these media specificities tend to instill greater empathy. The common argument suggests that VR allows participants to experience someone else’s lived reality as if it were their own. This capacity of VR to increase empathy has been contested by scholars in various fields. In light of this critique, we will examine the potential of VR to tell stories of illness and debility beyond empathy. Using concepts from critical disability studies, phenomenology, narrative medicine, and media theory, we will learn to distinguish the roles that VR narratives offer their participants, ranging from being a witness to becoming the first-person experiencer of non-normative embodiments. Exemplary questions are: what are the limitations of empathy in VR illness narratives? How can illness narratives in VR critically reflect on binaries between healthy/ill?

Each week, we will focus on particular health issues as they are taken up by VR artists. We will delve into the ways VR enables experiences of pain in the absence of tissue damage or offer multisensory and nonlinear stories to give a sense of the ups and downs of living with bipolar disorder. The literature provided will help guide us through the exploration of these VR experiences. We will also try out some of these VR experiences ourselves.

Producers, Audiences, Films: This Advanced Seminar explores the history and development of Chicago film cultures from the silent era to the present day. We will begin with the emergence of film producers at the turn of the twentieth century, looking at the development of comedy shorts and the activities of Black film producers on the South Side in the silent era. We will then look at documentary film production through the case of Kartemquin and the engagement of local filmmakers with the practice of chronicling the city. Following film production, we will examine Chicago as a site of film festivals and contemporary film production, including the mission of the Chicago Film Office. The second part of the course will turn to moviegoing culture across the city, from movie palaces to microcinemas, examining moviegoing audiences in Chicago’s neighborhoods. The last part of the course will focus on the city on screen through four themes: the migrant city, the gangster and Noir city, the working and union city, and the youthful city. Through the case of Chicago, we will examine methods of doing local film history, approaches to reception, and questions of cinema and the urbanscape.

This course focusing on “world cinema” from Latin America, Africa, and South Asia, includes an array of cinematic forms—films and other moving-image media, cultural artifacts, viewing practices, even theories themselves— that took shape amongst and between these areas. Combining viewings and readings, archival research and theoretical translations, we will explore the vibrant forms and circulation of cinema outside its imperial nodes. The course focuses on three historical moments in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa: the “global sixties” and its revolutionary ambitions; the politics of domestic spaces in the 1980s and early 1990s; and contemporary negotiations of gender, sexuality, and migration.

This course will continue the study of cinema around the world from the 1960s to the 2000s. The continued development of film style and form over this period — one of seismic changes in audio-visual aesthetics — will be one of the primary themes of the course. Additionally, lectures and discussions will wrestle with the rise of global film cultures, technological innovations and their effects on style (such as post-magnetic sound, and visual effects techniques), major international directors and the solidification of auteurism as both a commercial and aesthetic imperative, the increasing internationalization of Hollywood, and post-1970s genre reorientation elevating horror, science-fiction, and other genres to the highest levels of mainstream respectability, critical appraisal, and/or commercial success. Screenings are mandatory and include work by filmmakers including Pedro Almodovar, Michael Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis, Federico Fellini, Hollis Frampton, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Djibril Diop Mambety, Cristian Mungiu, and more, in addition to a selection of music videos.

Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of virtual reality, this course will explore and interrogate each stage of production for VR. By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical experiences, students will design, construct, and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new strategies and interactive logics for placing images into virtual spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection, and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging VR "canon" that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative "VR cinema."

This class introduces students to the popular forms of Sinophone cinema though the aperture of the New Year Film (hesuipian). The first movies advertised as New Year films date to the 1930s, when cinema-going became a part of the Chinese urban holiday routine in commercial port cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong. Today, the popular movies that top Chinese domestic box office are almost always released in January or February as Spring Festival offerings. The New Year Film is thus both a holiday marketing category in Sinophone territories and a mass cultural phenomenon that vividly illustrates the cinematic organization of space and time. Over the nine-week winter quarter, we will launch a comprehensive inquiry into the kind of experiences—globalization, urbanization, migration, and diaspora—that mediate the transformations of the Chinese New Year Film, while enjoying a number of its incarnations together over the course of the Lunar New Year holidays. Open to upper-level CMS students: Instructor consent required for all other students.

This class will introduce a toolkit for thinking about and researching media, mediation, and new media cultures. We will begin with questions of technology. These will include the tension between technological determinism and the social construction of technology, as well as methods for investigating the historical evolution of media technologies. To explore how power operates within and through media, we will engage concepts and theoretical frameworks including algorithmic bias, transmedia, fan studies, platform studies, and media infrastructures. Students will develop critical and aesthetic perspectives on digital media, with special attention to games, participatory media, and code.