Cinema and Media Studies

This seminar looks at the multiplicity of institutions that preserve, present, and interpret cinema for various audiences.  While cinema studies tends to focus on the entities that create films (i.e., directors, studios) and on the texts themselves, our research and teaching depend heavily upon the institutions that make films and related materials available to us.  We will look at the histories and practices of film archives and libraries, museums, distribution companies, festivals and related organizations to explore how their curatorial and technical work is far from neutral, but shapes scholarly and popular understandings of cinema.  The seminar will feature conversations with professionals in these fields and screenings of works they have archived, preserved, documented and circulated.

Taking advantage of recent developments in the field of sound studies, this course examines issues in film sound (technology, sense experience, histories of listening, sonic space, soundscape construction, the materiality of sound formats, etc.) that speak to broader concerns in the humanities, especially sound-related arts.  While we will focus on a film or films every week, from blockbusters like Gravity to avant-garde and experimental films, the readings and issues will touch on everything from noise pollution, architecture, musical performance and recording, and mp3 files. Students interested in installation and environmental arts, sound in literary studies, music, and other sound-focused fields are welcome.

Consciously or unconsciously, we learn a great deal about the world through moving image media. Programs such as Blue Planet (2001) teach viewers about ocean ecologies; YouTube videos offer knowledge on any number of skills, from changing a tire to cooking; but films like Conclave (2024) or Coco (2017) also seem to offer insight into real world practices, despite their fictional status. In this course, we will interrogate the various ways in which film, television, and video inform our beliefs and when those beliefs may be called knowledge. Key questions we will encounter in this course include: What kinds of knowledge do we gain from moving images? When do we recognize that we’re learning or learned something from moving images? When do we learn “on accident” and how may we come to recognize it?

What makes an artwork “original” today? How do we decide if a food dish is “authentic”? Who is the author of a digital meme? Is there a common metric which can rate the originality and authenticity of a film or a piece of music (Tomato-meter and IMDB ratings notwithstanding)? This course will investigate these and other questions to understand why and how authenticity and originality continue to matter in today’s world of global information and capital flows. Taking three case studies – cultural performance genres like traditional music/dance, cross-cultural film remakes, and digital publics – we will unpack how an ostensibly “foreign” cultural object becomes domiciled in a new cultural location. We will also discuss which practices and objects resist such adaptation.

We will read scholars and writers from a range of disciplines – anthropology, cinema and media studies, history – dealing with the construction of cultural authenticity and circulation. Our readings will be supplemented each week by a class screening where we will encounter materials which will serve as examples to analyze authenticity and authorship in today’s world. For instance, through the screening materials, students will be encouraged to examine if a film remake can ever be original, if the musical traditions of an itinerant community can be claimed as national, and how a globally circulating digital meme can come to acquire different meanings and significances in different places. Students will come out of the course with a better understanding of how the distinction of social and cultural forms is a result of constant negotiation, renewal, and repetition.

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.

AI Video sits at a collision point: where polished promises meet unexpected errors and infinite slop. In this studio course, we'll explore the chaotic potentials of AI in video art-its quirks, cultural impact, and untapped possibilities. Using cutting-edge AI tools and techniques like prompt engineering, style transfer, and compositing, we'll create experimental time-based media projects. With a critical lens and playful approach, we'll embrace the weird, challenge the hype, and rethink the ethics and aesthetics of this emergent form. ✨

City planning simulators. Environmental advocacy projects. Citizen-science research platforms. Whether to engage and communicate with wider publics, as tools for modelling scientific concepts and processes, or as objects of study in their own right, games have been employed by innumerable research communities across the 20th and 21st centuries. This course will explore how a variety of scientific disciplines and research cultures have thought with, about, and through games. Examining and evaluating these connections can teach us about research and communication practices in these fields and about the multifaceted nature of game-based media. Each week we will address a different subfield in the physical, biological, or social sciences, each positioned to draw out a unique aspect of games' connections to scientific research, communication, and knowledge production. Readings will be inter-disciplinary, drawing from game studies, social studies of science, and the various research fields themselves. Many examples considered through our weekly case studies will be video games, but not exclusively, and students will also develop skills to address the material- and medium-specific affordances of different forms of games in both class discussions and through a tabletop game design project.

In this graduate seminar we will investigate theories and historiographic methodologies of approaching problems of evidence in film history, with a particular focus on approaches to nonextant film, film fragments, unidentified film, and other “mysteries” of film history. Some of these problems are about gaps: how has film history grappled with the absence and instability of the film artifact? Others, especially in a newly digital world, involve abundance: how can film history and historiography navigate the polyvalences of meaning brought about by an ever-expanding archive? This course will combine theoretical readings, analyses of case studies, and students’ own research. Topics to be covered include the use of extrafilmic evidence and primary paracinematic evidence, fiction and speculative approaches to history, theories of evidence, and archival theories and practices. We’ll also focus on the possibilities and limits of various historiographic methodologies, touching on the use of oral history, biographic research, and official and unofficial discourses. Cases will be drawn from the silent era to contemporary cinema, and from a range of film practices including avant-garde, Classical Hollywood, African American, European art cinema, and others.

This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren, Godard.