Cinema and Media Studies

How do images compel beliefs, enable knowledge, or encourage experiences of doubt? This course will introduce students to a range of artworks, films and media to explore historical changes in modes of perception, attitudes and responses to visual media. While photographic images are often claimed to hold a privileged relation to what they represent, we will consider historical practices of photographic and digital trickery, as well as the ability of visual representations to conjure, deceive, and maintain illusions. The class will combine critical, historical and philosophical readings with careful analysis of artworks and films from the nineteenth-century to the present, including trompe l’oeil paintings, spirit photographs, early trick films, staged and manipulated images, and works that seek out and entertain uncertainty through technical means such as speed, slowness, blur and glitch. Through close analysis of visual media as engines of belief, we will address their role in shaping or undermining social relations, claims to knowledge, and conceptions of the world, including the capacities of photography to reveal otherwise invisible or unseen phenomena, relationships between media and evidence, and the ways in which traditions of magic have shaped experiences of the cinema.
 

The American cinema underwent dramatic stylistic and industrial change during and after the 1960s, due to an array of factors including the transition to magnetic sound recording, location shooting, the influence of European New Waves, drastic economic changes in the studio system, and many more. This course will broadly examine these developments in addition to topics including subsequent genre reorientation, 1980s “high concept” style and synergy with the popular music industry, multi-channel sound, visual effects, “impact” editing, film music, and the rise of the category of “indie” and its absorption into the diffuse modern Hollywood production system. Our study of American film history will inform discussions and material related to our present moment: the rise of streaming, digital exhibition, and increased cross-pollination between the film and television sectors. We will ask how Hollywood arrived at the cinema and television of the 2010s, and about the industry’s future amidst the dually reinforcing upheavals of Covid-19 and the streaming-centric consolidation of the largest media distributors. Course screenings will vary from landmark American queer cinema to big-budget studio genre pictures. Readings will skew towards histories of change in the American cinema’s industrial workings and dominant audio-visual styles, including popular history and filmmaker interviews. While there will not be a huge amount of dense theory, the quantity of reading in this course is notably large. The Advanced Seminar is intended for third and fourth-year CMS majors, and its capacity is limited. Instructor permission is required for other students, including CMS minors, and will be granted on a case-by-case basis only if space is available and the instructor approves the student, based on their academic experience and/or intellectual and professional interests. Students who are not upper-level CMS majors but hope to take the course should e-mail the instructor directly, before the start of Autumn Quarter.

Open only to upper-year students who have declared a major in Cinema and Media Studies, the ‘Advanced Seminar’ functions as a capstone course. It will allow students the opportunity to explore in more depth key disciplinary and methodological questions related to the study of cinema and media. Particular topics will be determined by the individual faculty instructor, and will vary from quarter to quarter.

The course gives a critical introduction to early video and television art--from the proto-televisual impulses in the historical avant-gardes to the increasing proximity between analog and digital technologies in video art in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We will focus on the various technical aspects of analog video, as well as on artistic practice and early writings on the subject. Topics will include the technics and politics of time; video, feedback systems, and ecology; the reconfiguration of the artist’s studio; guerilla politics and alternative TV; video and autobiography; the relation between video and painting; the musical history of video; the invention of new machines; and video as a “television viewer”.
 

Visual media have become central to activism against state violence. Throughout the past century, activists have deployed new technologies to bear witness to atrocity, record evidence, raise awareness, and promote justice. At the same time, media consistently fail to deliver lasting transformations and can even enable violence rather than counteracting it. In this class, we will explore how media practices support, undermine, and complicate efforts against state violence. How have activists employed documentary evidence?What assumptions have they made about communication, truth, difference, and justice? How do media frame what counts as violence? What are the politics of recording, seeing, and showing harm? What are the possibilities and limitations of emerging digital technologies?We will explore these issues across a range of media—such as photography, documentary film, comics, holograms, satellite and drone imagery, virtual reality experiences, social media platforms, and artificial intelligence—and case studies, including the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, the U.S. War on Terror, the Syrian civil war, the Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous resurgence in North America, and environmental violence in Guatemala. Students will be encouraged to think critically and creatively through assignments involving media analysis and media production.
 

This course addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where, on the other hand, are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain--the problem that some have labeled “medium specificity” in the arts? The second problem has to do more specifically with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in none more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form. Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of “fidelity” as far too limiting in scope. But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the “film based on fact,” especially when the facts derive from a particular source text, as in the recent case of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman? Why has this genre become so popular? What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? How does fictionalization operate on the facts in particular cases?
 

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.
 

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of various modes of documentary production will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the genre, such as the ethics, the politics of representation, and the shifting lines between “the real” and “fiction” will be explored. Story development, pre-production strategies, and production techniques will be our focus, in particular—research, relationships, the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing. Students will work in crews and be expected to purchase a portable hard drive. A five- minute string-out/rough-cut will be screened at the end of the quarter. Students are strongly encouraged to take CMST 23931 Documentary Production II to complete their work.
 

This course introduces students to some key texts in post and decolonial theory. Our goals in this class are three-fold. First, to familiarize students with foundational thinkers who have inspired both decolonial and postcolonial work. We draw attention to the different ways in which their ideas have been deployed in subsequent post and decolonial scholarship. Second, we ask questions oriented towards comparison of postcolonial and decolonial approaches: What, if any, are the points of overlap between decolonial and postcolonial thought? How do both bodies of work critique and contest the legacies of empire? Third, we investigate the present and possible futures of decolonial and postcolonial thought.
 

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 course will allow students to continue working on projects begun in the Intro to 16mm Production course (or developing a new small-scale project), in addition to developing skills with the following: sophisticated approaches to cinematography (comparative and reflective light metering, color negative exposure); varying workflows for post-production editing (analog and digital); and sound recording and design. Students will meet as a group for lectures, technical demonstrations and a shooting workshop. Course meeting time will also be set aside for individual conferences with the instructor to address project development and completion. Students should expect to budget between 120.00-500.00 for their filmstock and processing costs, depending on the project. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies. Instructor permission required.