Cinema and Media Studies

This course will be fully remote. 

The course proposes an introduction to audio-visual literacy through the analysis of films, selective readings, and short film exercises focusing on fundamental cinematic elements such as shot, framing, point of view, camera movement, editing, and relations of image and sound. Assignments will consist in in writing review sheets and a formal film analysis, and in creating three 1-3 minute single-shot movies based on the works seen and discussed in class. Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. For nonmajors, any CMST 14400 through 14599 course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

This course will be fully remote. 

This course explores the role of emotions in movies.  Films represent emotions, such as the feelings of a character; and they elicit emotions in viewers, making it part of their cinematic experience.  Cinematic emotions are often constitutive of genre, ranging from the laughter in slapstick comedy to cathartic tears in melodrama. While film has long been scrutinized for the visual representation of emotions (for example with the close-up of a face), sound and music are vital contributors to representing and eliciting emotions. This seminar will focus on a series of films that mix emotions in order to express social dilemmas and dramatic conflict, often connected to issues of gender, sexual, and racial identity. Films discussed range from Stella Dallas (1937) and Imitation of Life (1937) to Moonlight  (2016) and Parasite (2019). Readings will include scholarship in film studies, affect theory, and some empirical research in cognitive and social psychology. Participants will take turns in functioning as "experts" for select class sessions by preparing readings and objects for class discussion.  In weeks 7-10, the seminar will partly focus on objects and research pertinent to participants’ research papers, which will be presented at a mini-conference in Week 11.

Major works of poetry, fiction, drama, and film. In literature, the course ranges from Jonathan Swift and Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney and Anna Burns, and, in cinema, from silent film to Neil Jordan and Lenny Abramson. Literature and cinema are intertwined through all the weeks of the quarter in various connections (including Hitchcock's adaptation of O'Casey's JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK).

This course will be fully remote.

Claire Denis is one of the major artistic voices in contemporary French cinema, and one of the most challenging filmmakers working today. Over the course of 30 years, she has created an impressive body of work from across a wide variety of genres ranging from semi-autobiographical films informed by her own experiences during her childhood in Africa (Chocolat, White Material), allegorical horror films (Trouble Every Day), or science-fiction films (High-Life).  I Can’t Sleep is based on the true story of Thierry Paulin, a gay, black, HIV-positive, transvestite and serial killer. Beau Travail is loosely inspired by Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, and The Intruder by the homonymous autobiographical essay by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. We will also have a look at her lesser-known films for television, her documentaries about dance and music, and her short films. Her films reflect a deep awareness of the complexities of French post-colonialism, as well as mesmerizing and sensual mise-en-scène of desire.

This seminar will be fully remote.

This seminar is intended to take ideas for a film - be they documentary, narrative, or experimental - and develop those ideas into a concrete film treatment. We will focus on researching the subject, plotting the story arc and filmic structure, character development, establishing a sense of place, and timeline. We will also explore the visual, audio, and editorial styles that best tell the story. Students will be expected to screen assigned films before each class, which address different modes of production and filmmaking issues. There will be class visits by working filmmakers who will share their experiences.

Priority registration will be given to students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies. 

This course will be fully remote.

No Future seeks to establish the grounds by which we might examine contemporary theories of the future--and perhaps its negation--through visual media and the production of art in the age of the algorithm. We will use this course as a means to consider new modes of subjectivity that arise as effect and response to mutating forms of control in society—and how we might refuse such mechanisms. Speeding through (art) history with detours at groups like the Futurists–with their violent reimagination of the human as a productive machine–and the Situationists–who vowed never to produce again, we will examine the fluxes and flows of subjectivity through the historical movement from Fordist production to the immaterial labor that powers the economies of today and tomorrow. We will discuss issues of work and non-work, image production and the labor of the artist, subjectivity and identity, the ends of cinema and History, and the state of the spectacle today. But what is left of the future? Is it already over?

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. Films discussed will include works Orson Welles, Sergei Eisenstein, Shirin Neshat, Lucrecia Martel, and Wong Kar Wai. 

This series of workshops—comprised of approximately 10 meetings—will provide support for students working on production theses across the entire academic year. It is taught by a production faculty member and supplemented by regular meetings with a designated preceptor. The workshops are intended to systematically guide students through the necessary steps in the realization of a film project from pre-production to production to post-production.

Enrollment takes place only in Autumn Quarter, but workshop is held throughout the academic year

This series of workshops — comprised of approximately 10 meetings — will provide support for thesis writers across the entire academic year. It is taught by the Director of Undergraduate Studies and supplemented by regular meetings with a designated preceptor. The workshops are intended to guide students through the process of thesis writing from developing a research question to determining the most appropriate research method for its exploration to integrating suitable theoretical insights to writing compellingly about media objects to the nuts and bolts of exposition.

Enrollment takes place only in Autumn Quarter, but workshop is held throughout the academic year.