Cinema and Media Studies

Films presenting trans bodies or “psyches” have historically often othered these as "monstrous," and compelled a sense of the inevitable tragedy of living in sexual fluidity. To fully contemplate such expressions of horror, tragedy, or pity, the course will screen and discuss films such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Dressed to Kill (Brian DePalma, 1980), Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzick, 1983), Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almadovar, 2011), Predestination (Michael and Peter Spierig, 2014) but also considers films of the trans body made ostensibly more calculable, at least in terms of moral and ethical stability, such as Robocop, the Alien films of Ridley Scott, Ghost in the Shell (Sanders, 2017), and the online choice map game Detroit Become Human. The course is dedicated foremost to rupturing binary thinking (as a form of nonage) and the critical theory that will ballast our readings includes selections from Haraway, Halberstam, Garber, Benschoff, Reese’s The Fourth Age, Schelde’s Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters, and Foucault’s Abnormal.

This course counts as a "Problems" course for GNSE majors.

This Gray Center sponsored research practicum is tied to a film project with documentary-maker and Mellon Collaborative Fellow Ric Burns about outsider artist Ralph Blakelock. America’s van Gogh, Blakelock created art far ahead of his time, went mad, and spent nearly twenty years in an asylum before emerging into the glare of flashbulbs as the most sought-after painter of the 1910s, only to end his life as victim of a con game. In between, he sojourned with the Sioux, hobnobbed with Gilded Age millionaires, channeled Longfellow and Mendelsohn in his art, struggled in the emergent New York “art world”, played vaudeville piano, and became one of the first major figures in modern celebrity-driven mass media. How best to capture this kaleidoscopic life and Blakelock’s dizzying art in a documentary is the creative challenge of the seminar. 

Our focus will be on Blakelock’s Ghost Dance/The Vision of Life. Art Institute conservators, assisted by chemistry department Professor Steven Sibener, will use scientific imaging to see inside the painting, whose provenance and context of production and reception need to be researched.

Participants will be assigned to specific topics based on area of expertise. The course should be of particular interest to students in DOVA, Art History, History, English, Psychology, Chemistry, Cinema Studies, and Anthropology.

In the late 1990's and early 00's contemporary art seemed to turn towards design and architecture, leading many critics to claim that the boundaries between the practices of art and design were eroding. This course proposes a different line of inquiry, based on the fact that so many of the artworks in question were in fact hidden media machines, improvisations on a life environment increasingly suffused in the dynamics of networked media technologies and their various modes of time production and -control. Elements of design and architecture were in other words enlisted in the construction of what we may call media atmospheres, everyday sensorial surrounds that addressed the intimate integration of bodies and real-time technologies in the information economy, a new modality of the capture of life forces that Michel Foucault called biopolitics. The course will be oriented around a close study of a select number of artistic positions, in addition to reading theoretical and critical texts that are important to the artists in question as well as to the larger field of discussion. Ultimately, the course is about a form of new media art less invested in technical invention than in new aesthetic techniques of social/environmental production.

The course gives a critical introduction to early video and television art - from the proto-televisual impulses in the historical avant-gardes to the increasing proximity between analog and digital technologies in video art in the late 1970's and early 1980's. We will focus on the various technical aspects of analog video, as well as on artistic practice and early writings on the subject. Topics will include the technics and politics of time; video, feedback systems and ecology; the reconfiguration of the artist's studio; guerilla politics and alternative TV; video and autobiography; the relation between video and painting; the musical history of video; the invention of new machines; and video as a "television viewer".

Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique catapulted the Polish director to the international scene. His subsequent French triptych Blue, White, Red turned out to be his last works that altered his image and legacy to affirm his status as an auteur and a representative of the transnational cinema. We discuss how in his virtual universe of parallel histories and repeated chances, captured with visually and aurally dazzling artistry, the possibility of reconstituting one's identity, triggered by tragic loss and betrayal, reveals an ever-ambiguous reality. By focusing on the filmmaker's dissolution of the thing-world, often portrayed on the verge of vague abstraction of (in)audibility or (un)transparency, this course bridges his cinema with the larger concepts of postmodern subjectivity and possibility of metaphysics. The course concludes with the filmmaker's contribution to world cinema. All along, we read selections from Kieślowski's and Piesiewicz's screen scripts, Kieślowski's own writings and interviews, as well as from the abundant criticism of his French movies. All materials are in English.

In this seminar we explore a series of topics in the semiotics of film as approached through the semiotic theory developed out of linguistic anthropology: topics will include revisiting questions of structuralist film semiology; iconicity, textuality, and the poetic function; indexicality and ontology; deixis and enunciation; voicing and structures of looking; performativity and image-acts; aesthetic style and enregisterment; rigid designation and stardom. The larger aims of the course are two-fold: one, to articulate a pragmaticist account of the evenemential semiotics of cinema as institutional and textual form—as broached both through ethnographic and close textual methods of analysis—and in doing reconceptualize certain key film theoretic issues; two, to expand and rethink linguistic anthropology’s semiotic theory and analysis beyond language/through cinema; in short, to think both film studies and linguistic anthropology with and against each other so as to further a semiotics of moving images.

This studio course playfully explores the methods, tools, and poetics of video games as art. Develop interactive new media art, machinima, and experimental 3D environments by using (and misusing) contemporary game engines. Projects will include hypertext adventures, walking simulators, abstract platformers, and metagames. By hacking, modding, and recontextualizing existing game assets, we will challenge the rules, mechanics, and interfaces of video games. This course counts towards the Media Practice and Design requirement for the MAAD program.

This seminar will continue to focus on how to craft a production thesis in film or video. Works-in-progress will be screened each week, and technical and structural issues relating to the work will be explored. The workshop will also develop the written portion of the production thesis, and help students finish their thesis projects.

This seminar will focus on how to craft a production thesis in film or video. Works-in-progress will be screened each week, and technical and structural issues relating to the work will be explored. The workshop will also develop the written portion of the production thesis. 

A workshop and seminar for both graduate students and undergraduates devoted to reading, writing, and (in the cases of some audiovisual essays and features) watching and listening to various forms of film criticism, including historical, journalistic, academic, and experimentally and artistically shaped examples of this practice. Weekly screenings and readings will help to focus the discussions, along with writing assignments that will be read aloud and critiqued in class. Part of the overall direction of this course will be determined by the particular interests of the students and their willingness to articulate them. A workshop and seminar for both graduate students and undergraduates devoted to reading, writing, and (in the cases of some audiovisual essays and features) watching and listening to various forms of film criticism, including historical, journalistic, academic, and experimentally and artistically shaped examples of this practice. Weekly screenings and readings will help to focus the discussions, along with writing assignments that will be read aloud and critiqued in class. Part of the overall direction of this course will be determined by the particular interests of the students and their willingness to articulate them.