Cinema and Media Studies

Due to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of animation in contemporary media ecologies, recent years have seen a surge of interest in animation theory. But animation theory presents a vast and turbulent domain of inquiry, because animation may be narrowly defined as a set of objects or techniques or broadly conceptualized to embrace questions about life and death, about more-than-human animals, artificial life, and animism, for instance. This topics course has two aims. The first aim is to provide an overview of the key problematics of and approaches to animation theory in a global and historical perspective. The second aim is to develop tools for doing animation theory in a more localized manner. To this end, course will highlight theories of character and characterization with an emphasis on how the inherent tension between individual and type in animation affects our understanding race and racism.

How have media technologies changed the way we perceive and understand the world around us? What role have aesthetic strategies played in the production of scientific knowledge? And how have scientific images influenced the development of modern art? In this interdisciplinary course, we will develop our skills in the perception, comprehension, and evaluation of visual media through an investigation of the intersections of art, science, and new imaging techniques from the early modern era to the present. Drawing on objects and texts from the art history, media studies, and the history of science, we will analyze the representational strategies at work in scientific images and discuss their impact on artists and filmmakers of the modern era. Instead of approaching scientific images as mere documents, we will learn to consider them as both aesthetic objects and provocations, spawning speculations about what might still lie waiting beyond the limits of perception.

This course will include a substantial amount of object-based study in the form of weekly site visits or film screenings, which will form the basis of our class discussions. Site visits will include trips to Special Collections at the Regenstein Library, the Smart Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and film screenings will feature a combination of scientific films, popular education films, and experimental cinema.

Bresson's films are known for their minimal and highly original style, the avoidance of any reliance on theatrical conventions, the use of nonprofessional actors ("models," he called them), unusual and "unnatural" editing techniques, distinctive pacing, and for its themes of grace, redemption, fate, moral severity, and several other philosophical and religious issues in the lives of the characters. This course will explore Bresson's innovations as aiming at a new form of contemplative cinema, one in which style is a matter of a kind of poetic thinking (as understood by Martin Heidegger), a reflective interrogation of philosophical issues that for which traditional philosophy is inadequate. We shall watch and discuss his films: Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945); The Diary of a Country Priest (1951); A Man Escaped (1956); Pickpocket (1959); Au hazard Balthasar (1966); Mouchette (;1967); Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) and L'argent (1983). Readings will include, among others, Bresson's Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson; Paul Schrader, The Transcendental Style in Film, selected essays about particular films, and selections from Heidegger.

This course asks one question—“How do (or how should) filmmakers approach the task of shaping cinematic material in time?”—and then approaches that question from the perspective of two different vastly cinematic practices. Half of the class will be devoted to American popular cinema since the 1970s, detailing emerging popularity of the three-act structure, the rise of screenwriting gurus, and the cementing of tried-and-true narrative formulas in an era of industry consolidation. The other half will be devoted to experimental cinema traditions over the same time period, including the rise and fall of structural film, subsequent experimentation in form and duration, new avant-garde practices that arose with video and digital technologies. Although the artists working in these two modes of filmmaking are rarely placed into conversation with one another, in this course we will examine how each of them engages issues in and problems around perception, understanding, and human attention in a shifting mediascape. 

The Hollywood 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 examine these developments in addition to topics including subsequent genre reorientation, 1980s “high concept” style and synergy with the popular music industry, stereo and multi-channel surround sound, computer-generated visual effects, film music, and the rise of the category of “indie film” and its absorption into the larger industry. Our study of modern Hollywood history will inform discussions of the contemporary, post-2007 period (streaming, the transition to digital exhibition, etc.): how Hollywood arrived at the cinema and television of the 2010s, and the industry’s future amidst the dually reinforcing upheavals of the Covid-19 pandemic and the streaming-centric consolidation of the largest media distributors.

Studies of media in recent years have increasingly turned toward questions about ecologies and environments, energy and elemental forces, relational theories and non-discrete objects.  The first aim of this seminar is to introduce some of the key problematics associated with this ‘turn’ in media studies. At the same time, due to the proliferation of turns (elemental, environmental, ecological, energetic), objects (media forms, devices, platforms, networks, infrastructures) and concerns (more-than-human life, settler colonialism, indigenous struggles, migration), this seminar aims to provide a practical focus for doing media ecology or thinking media ecologically. The problematic for fall 2022 is Plant Media or “thinking with plants through media.” Topics includes contemporary research on plant intelligence, which raises questions about intelligence without physical correlates, forcing us to deal with intelligence in terms of the whole plant as an ecology.  We will also consider the mediating role of media, from self-writing plants to time-lapse audio and video to parse movement as intelligence. Finally, this ecological approach encourages a reconsideration of eco-agriculture and alternative paths of cultivation.

The Hollywood 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 examine these developments in addition to topics including subsequent genre reorientation, 1980s “high concept” style and synergy with the popular music industry, stereo and multi-channel surround sound, computer-generated visual effects, film music, and the rise of the category of “indie film” and its absorption into the larger industry. Our study of modern Hollywood history will inform discussions of the contemporary, post-2007 period (streaming, the transition to digital exhibition, etc.): how Hollywood arrived at the cinema and television of the 2010s, and the industry’s future amidst the dually reinforcing upheavals of the Covid-19 pandemic and the streaming-centric consolidation of the largest media distributors.   

Digital and networked media include forms and social phenomena such as memes, social media, live-streaming platforms, video games, virtual worlds, electronic literature, and online communities. What methods taken from the humanities and social sciences enable the study of these digital media forms and cultures? In order to model a series of methods, this course runs one shared media object (this term, the video game Stardew Valley) through a series of research methods, one per week, taken from the humanities (e.g., close reading, critical theory, response theory, and critical making) and social sciences (e.g., interviews, digital ethnography, discourse analysis, and quantitative analysis) methods. At the end of the course, students will compose a research paper or create a digital project that uses one or more of these methods to analyze a digital or networked media case of their choosing.

This course investigates the ways that new media have changed contemporary society and the cultural narratives that shape it. We will explore narrative theory through a number of digital or digitally-inflected forms, including cyberpunk fictions, text adventure games, interactive dramas, videogames, virtual worlds, transmedia novels, location-based fictions, and alternate reality games. Our critical study will concern issues such as nonlinear narrative, network aesthetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the quarter, our analysis of computational fictions will be haunted by gender, class, race, and other ghosts in the machine.

The naming of the current era after the human—Anthropocene—is widely criticized. Scholars such as Donna Haraway bemoan the emphasis on the human being and its control over earthly matters at a moment when non-human entanglements with the world are simultaneously overlooked. Other thinkers point out that the planetary changes of the Anthropocene have occurred mainly due to capitalism and industrialization. In the course of these debates, the role of the human and the understanding of the human as part of the Earth’s ecosystem is discussed again and again. Especially in the arts and design, new figurations of the human and a future outside anthropocentrism are being developed. This course follows fundamental questions around the emergence of this discourse: Which tropes, materials, and concepts do we collectively use to imagine our future? Who gets to participate in these imaginaries and who is thereby excluded? What role do the arts and design play in this process?

In this class, students will gain understanding of an emerging area of interdisciplinary research that reframes the category of the “human” in face of contemporary environmental challenges such as climate change and resource scarcity. Students will become familiar with concepts and theories associated with post-humanism, new materialisms, and environmental humanities and use them to reflect on examples from architecture, design, and the arts.