Cinema and Media Studies

This course proposes an overview of Francophone cinema of the last decade. It will reflect the diversity and the richness of contemporary auteur cinema through various genres and genre-defying works. We will screen a selection of recent internationally acclaimed movies from renowned filmmakers such as Agnès Varda, Claire Denis, Leos Carax, as well as from a new generation of filmmakers such as Céline Sciamma, Ladj Ly, or Mati Diop. We will also discuss the controversy surrounding the film Cuties (Mignonnes) by Maïmouna Doucouré.

There is generally a division in cinema and media studies between filmmakers on the one hand and critics and theorists on the other: the first group makes the films that the other groups write about. In this seminar, we’ll look at filmmakers who were also critics and theorists, who wrote about other films and filmmakers, and, most of all, about their own work. We’ll thus examine films by a number of key filmmakers in light of what they said they were trying to make, and their ideas of what their medium is, using the dissonance between idea and result to take a fresh look basic terms and concepts in film studies: montage, perception, narrative, genre, authorship, realism, race, gender, documentary, and so on. 

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.  

All films are horror films. Film’s spectrality had been a given since the earliest days of its existence, as it exists as the captured shadows of people and things no longer present. Joining photographs, the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph, film  immediately presented itself as a kind of sense-memory that could present the traces of those not present, and even, traces of the dead. Nipper’s perch on the coffin of his owner, reacting to his very live voice, sets the stage for Edison to announce the kinetograph, which “would do for the eye what the phonograph had done for the ear.” That is, it would bring us into the uncanny presence of a world beyond the reach of our unaided senses. In this context, horror would seem to lay claim to being a “cine-genre,” as defined by Pitorofsky – a genre that deals with fundamental properties of the medium. Throughout its history, and even its pre-history horror films have mediated our encounters with the non-human: technology, the dead, the world of creatures, and our bodies, to the extent that they do not belong to us. Terror, disgust, shock, trauma, and the uncanny all find their expression in horror films, and this course aims to explore how the horror film has explored the uncanny, animism, “primitive” thought, evil, the mind and the body’s relationship to technology, climate change, and the world considered as excluding humans. As Benjamin once said, “It is a different nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye.”

• One in-person seminar weekly + one in-person screening weekly

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which students will discuss through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. Along with questions of film technique and style, students will examine the cinema as an institution that comprises an industrial system of production, social and aesthetic norms and codes, and particular modes of reception. Films discussed will include works by Dorothy Arzner, Vera Chytilová, Julie Dash, Alfred Hitchcock, Barry Jenkins, Wanuri Kahiu, Akira Kurosawa, and Agnès Varda.

The ‘Advanced Seminar’ functions as a capstone course for CMST majors. 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 the Autumn to Spring Quarters and from instructor to instructor.

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. Along with questions of film technique and style, students will examine the cinema as an institution that comprises an industrial system of production, social and aesthetic norms and codes, and particular modes of reception. Films discussed will include works by Dorothy Arzner, Vera Chytilová, Julie Dash, Alfred Hitchcock, Barry Jenkins, Wanuri Kahiu, Akira Kurosawa, and Agnès Varda.

The goal of this intensive laboratory course is to give its students a working knowledge of film production using the 16mm gauge. The course will emphasize how students can use 16mm technology towards successful cinematography and image design (for use in both analog and digital postproduction scenarios) and how to develop their ideas towards constructing meaning through moving pictures. Through a series of group exercises, students will put their hands-on equipment and solve technical and aesthetic problems, learning to operate and care for the 16mm Bolex film camera; prime lenses; Sekonic light meter; Sachtler tripod; and Arri light kit and accessories. For a final project, students will plan and produce footage for an individual or small group short film. The first half the course will be highly structured, with demonstrations, in-class shoots, and lectures. As the semester continues, class time will open up to more of a workshop format to address the specific concerns and issues that arise in the production of the final projects. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies.

Students will need written permission to enroll in the course. To bid for entry into the class, please email tcomerford@uchicago.edu with your name, major and year -- and please list any other media production or photography experience. Enrollment priority will be given to graduate and undergraduate CMS students, beginning with seniors, then to DoVA graduates and undergraduates, then to students in other departments.