Cinema and Media Studies

This course asks us to grapple together at the unruly and hybrid forms of the documentary in the first decades of the 21stcentury. As the documentary continues its age-old evolution, spreading into the new realms of the gallery and museum, and diffusing across the cascading and multiplying media forms that define the contemporary internet, what is the continued value of the audiovisual document? What grip does the definition of a the documentary as a mode, genre, or method have on contemporary artmaking practices? What is the nature of the documentary’s current claims on truth? What is a documentary in the contemporary media environment?

In seeking to answer these questions we will largely pursue the course of tracking filmmakers who explore the raw edges of documentary address. Drawn from the fields of experimental cinema, installation based media environments, docu-fiction and essay filmmaking, sensory ethnography, and numerous worlds in between, the makers we will study in this course are unified only by their commitment to experimentation and the pursuit of something that resembles documentary truth. As such we will also the political, social, ethical, and environmental issues that draw in experimental documentarians. What is the relationship between the forms these documentaries take and the subjects they explore?

Throughout this course will we also have the opportunity to ask questions about the role of technology in experimental filmmaking, organized around the persistence of 16mm analog film in the 21st century. How do the makers and authors we consider urge us to rethink commonsensical approaches to the film/digital divide, and how does this rebound into our considerations of issues like truthfulness, accuracy, veracity and documentation?

While videogames’ mix of art, play, and advanced technology gives game studies much of its vitality, the technological and computational aspects of the medium can be daunting for many would-be students and designers. And yet no approach to the study of videogames can be exhaustive without some consideration of the material and technological grounds that make games possible. With this in mind, this course will introduce approaches to videogame studies that emphasize the platforms – the hardware, operating systems, etc. – on which games are played, and is intended for students with all levels of familiarity with the technological side of videogames. How do the various components of game platforms, from computer architecture to controllers to the underlying code, affect how games look, sound, and feel, how they are played, who designs them and how, how they are marketed and to whom, and how they are preserved? How do platforms emerge from particular technological, industrial, social, and cultural contexts, and how do they in turn affect the course of game history and culture?

Classroom lectures and discussions of readings will be accompanied by weekly gameplay sessions at the MADD Center, which will provide close, hands-on engagement with game platforms. Possible objects of study include the Atari 2600 (1977), ColecoVision (1982), Sega Game Gear (1990) and Genesis/CD/32X (1988-94), Panasonic 3DO (1993), Nintendo 64 (1996) and Wii (2006), and PlayStation 4/VR (2013-16).

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 course will begin with a study of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industries, focusing instead on more obscure pictures, such as co-productions, banned films, animation, etc., so as to explore the segment of post-revolutionary Cuban cinema not readily available on the Criterion Collection and test its aptitude as a model for film production for its Caribbean neighbors. We will discuss the influence of major film styles and movements on the fictional and documentary films of the Caribbean, and inquire further as to whether the imitation of dominant filmmaking practices is incongruous with the development of so-called “national” cinemas. We will push the boundaries of the concept of national cinema by including films made in the Caribbean by foreign filmmakers and films made by the Caribbean diasporic community in the United States. In the final four weeks of the course, students will explore the hypothesis that the cinemas of developing nations can rarely be designed and constructed, as was the exceptional case with Cuba in 1959, but are instead assembled from its many, diffuse parts. This course will adopt a determined transnational and non-elitist approach, granting admittance to international film collaborations, the cultural reception of foreign and commercial film, lost or orphan cinema, independent or student filmmaking, and other “ancillary” film artifacts into the broader discourse of the “national.” The goal of the course will be to analyze how canons are created and curated by our discipline, and whether future scholars of so-called “minor cinemas” should strive for inclusion into the canon or resolve to write against it.

What does comedy do to us? What is the nature of our corporeal response of laughter and how does it relate to our intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional responses? What kind of philosophical perspective does the mode of comedy provide on issues of self-knowledge, agency, identity, taste, free will, gender, race, the relation of body to mind? In this course, we will use classic Hollywood film comedies as a field for exploring these questions. From the slapstick acrobatics of Chaplin and Keaton in the silent comedies, to the madcap horseplay of the Marx Brothers and the tapdancing of the Nicholas Brothers in the musical comedies, to the spitfire exchanges on the topic of sex and love in the screwball comedies and the metatheatrical Nazi impersonations in the wartime comedies, these films of the first half of the 20th century offer a wealth of performances, narratives, and gags for philosophical investigation. The course will provide an introduction to the major comedic directors and performers of this period. We will engage closely with the formal construction of individual films as well as on the nature of comedy itself. A major theme will be the contradictory power of the film comedy, its capacity for transgression and its reliance on stereotypes, its utopian transformative potential and its entanglements with death, despair, and violence.

This course will explore how surveillance media distribute power in the United States and across its global connections. Throughout, we will understand surveillance media not only as the specific technologies used for surveillance, but also how these technologies differentially mediate our bodies, behaviors, communities, and political relationships. Beginning with theoretical frameworks of surveillance, this course will track surveillance media across various sites and systems. These include borders, policing, drones, algorithms, and labor. In each, we will examine both contemporary and historical materials in order to consider how our dominant ideas and values about surveillance media are rooted in the ideologies and violences of capitalism, colonialism, and empire. We conclude by exploring modalities of resistance in art and grassroots organizing that imagine more just futures.

In a video produced for InStyle in January 2020, the actress turned movie director Olivia Wilde expressed that “Hollywood used to be dominated by women and then we rolled back the clock and destroyed the evidence. We’re bringing it back to that time and celebrating those ladies. The important, powerful, brilliant positions they held in this industry may have been buried and forgotten. But not by us.” Taking the recent public debate about gender and racial discrimination in Hollywood as its starting place, this class explores—through historical, theoretical, and formal approaches, and close readings of texts and films—women’s involvement in the US film industry, where women have served as actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, costume designers, technicians, and production secretaries since the early days. The focus of discussion will range from gender representation, spectatorship, and feminist film theory, including “the male gaze”; through questions of aesthetics and gender, race, and sexuality in films directed by women-identifying filmmakers; through feminized labor, access, and visibility; to women’s film history, feminist historiography, and archival absences. Films discussed will include works by Dorothy Arzner, Shirley Clarke, Sofia Coppola, Julie Dash, Cheryl Dunye, Zackary Drucker, Patty Jenkins, Claudia Weill, and Olivia Wilde.

Description TBD.

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 focuses on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. We study both his films and a variety of approaches to them. We investigate the enduring power of his movies; his contributions to genre and popular cinema; his storytelling techniques; his stylistic command; his approach to romance, suspense, and action; his status as a master and auteur; and his remarkable control over the audience’s thoughts and feelings. The films discussed include Rear Window, Psycho, and The Birds, and a weekly screening at a designated time is a mandatory part of the course.