Cinema and Media Studies

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.

This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV, and includes films that reflect on the impact of global trends in Africa and local responses, as well as changing racial and gender identifications. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), by the “father” of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga, Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno’s Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine 20th and 21st century films such as I am a not a Witch and The wound (both 2017), which show tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the implications of these tensions for women and men, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and fiction film. (20th/21st)

This course traces the development of African American humor in popular culture, and how it draws on and develops Black comic traditions and folk culture dating back to slavery. Focusing on film and television (from silent movies to streaming series), the course considers how Black humor speaks to the complex histories of American race relations and racialized performance. We will look at the relationships that obtain between Black self-representation and stereotyping from the “outside”; between performances for mainstream and for Black audiences; and between verbal and visual styles of Black comedic performance. We will examine Black comic works from the turn of the 20th century to the present by artists including Bert Williams, Josephine Baker, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Dave Chappelle, Issa Rae and Tyler Perry.

New media have changed the way that we tell and process stories. Over the last few decades, writers and designers have experimented with text, video, audio, design, animation, and interactivity in unprecedented ways, producing new types of narratives about a world transformed by computers and communications networks. These artists have explored the cultural dimensions of information culture, the creative possibilities of digital media technologies, and the parameters of human identity in the network era.

This course investigates the ways that new media have changed contemporary society and the cultural narratives that shape it. We will explore narrative theory through a number of digital or digitally-inflected forms, including cyberpunk fictions, text adventure games, interactive dramas, videogames, virtual worlds, transmedia novels, location-based fictions, and alternate reality games. Our critical study will concern issues such as nonlinear narrative, network aesthetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the quarter, our analysis of computational fictions will be haunted by gender, class, race, and other ghosts in the machine.

This course will investigate Latin American documentary by focusing on three important topics in Latin American cultural studies. We will screen recent and historical documentaries about (1) popular culture and folklore, (2) the history and memory of the Southern Cone military dictatorships, and (3) domestic service. These three topics will provide material for an investigation of documentary form. With respect to each topic, we will consider how the resources of documentary filmmaking are employed to frame the same subject matter in different ways. For the first unit, we will study films by Sergio Bravo, Eduardo Coutinho, and Jorge Prelorán; for the second, films by Patricio Guzmán, Albertina Carri, and Andrés Di Tella; and for the third, films by João Moreira Salles, Gabriel Mascaro, and Consuelo Lins.

Games are one of the most prominent and influential media of our time. This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "alternate reality" or "transmedia" gaming. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. These games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of video games, and the team dynamics of sports. Beyond the subject matter, students will design modules of an Alternate Reality Game in small groups. Students need not have a background in media or technology, but a wide-ranging imagination, interest in new media culture, or arts practice will make for a more exciting quarter.

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 Core class will explore  the connection between cinema and ideas of magic, including, the relation of film to magical illusions; the relation of avant-garde films to occult ideas of magic and the portrayal of magic and the occult in films.

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.

In this course, we will look at the history and theory of cinema and media culture in Japan. We will closely examine the Golden Age of the 1950s and its precipitous decline, the rise of the new cinemas in the 1960s, and the postmodern and independent cinemas in the face of global capitalism. The course will also pay attention to topics of contemporary media such as media convergence, the media ecologies of contemporary anime (and manga/comic), and media activism after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. We will proceed through careful analysis of films, anime, and digital media, while also addressing larger questions of historiography, and work to integrate such inquiries into discussions of film style and aesthetics, identity, the nation and other issues.