Cinema and Media Studies

What would it mean to say that minstrelsy was a foundational practice in the development of American popular culture, and that the emergence of American cinema must be understood through the lens of its ubiquity? This course therefore investigates the persistence of minstrelsy in American popular culture from the early 19th century to the turn of the 20th century. It traces the development of its tropes, themes, and practices from traveling tent shows to the variety theater of vaudeville and to the emergence of cinema. We will attempt to make legible the functionings of its racist caricatures, account for its popularity and longevity, and explore moments of creative resistance to its dehumanizing portrayals of African Americans. We will look at 19th century performers and composers including T.D. Rice, Billy Kersands, Stephen Foster, Bert Williams and George Walker, Ernest Hogan, May Irwin, Sissieretta Jones. We will also consider later filmmakers working with and against the racialized representations of minstrelsy including D.W. Griffith, Al Jolson, Oscar Micheaux, and Stepin Fetchit, and contemporary reimaginings, confrontations and reckonings, including those of Spike Lee, Dave Chappelle, Christopher Harris, and Edgar Arceneaux. Emphasis will be on methods of primary historical research as well as theories of race, gender and performance.

“Filming the police” as a research topic has been taken up in a range of disciplines and subfields from legal and information studies to surveillance and police studies.  In film and media studies, the 1991 George Holliday video of the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD played an important and controversial role in the formation of documentary studies as a subfield and in debates about indexicality, the nature of photographic evidence, and realism—issues at the core of the discipline. While this course will survey the topic of the filming of police from multiple perspectives, it aims to construct a specifically disciplinary framework for research on police violence.  What can film and media studies bring to research on police?With an eye toward this aim, over the quarter we will pursue the following questions: 1) Given the range of kinds of documentation and data of/on police violence, how should we understand the specificity of audio-visual records of police brutality? 2) How has the significance and uses of photographic documentation of state violence changed across time, context, and across a shifting media landscape? In other words, what are the differences between the uses to which images have been put in lynching photography, in Civil Rights Movement photography, in Holocaust photography, in the Rodney King video, in the Oscar Grant videos, and in the Laquan McDonald dashboard camera video? And how is the photographic documentation of state violence peculiar as compared with other forms of image-based documentation of violence? 3) What is the relation and interpenetration of cultural—especially televisual—representations of police (e.g. COPS, CSI, Law & Order, The Wire, etc.) and the actual organization and practices of law enforcement institutions and agents? 4) What are the political strategies that undergird citizen journalism and sousveillance practices such as “cop watching” and how effective (and for what) are such practices? 5) How have the videos of police violence circulated, and how have debates about the ethics of viewing shaped activism as well as aesthetic responses?Readings by Susan Sontag, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Georges Didi-Huberman, Elizabeth Alexander, Eyal Weizman, Courtney Baker, Jennifer Malkowski, Jamie Kalven, Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty, Alex Vitale—among others. Topics to include dashboard and body cameras; surveillance, sousveillance, and the regime of visibility; citizen and investigative journalism; video storage and archiving; evidence in court proceedings and in the public sphere; police, media, and ideology; the ethics and politics of looking at black suffering; art about police violence; filming the police in an international frame.

This class will examine the history and production of “hard” sound-image relationships through the lens of computational form. Through studying the range of digital and mechanical tools that have sought to couple the senses — from 19th century color organs and dreams of synesthesia, through music videos and contemporary new media installations, to recent advances in “machine listening” — students will complete a series of critical essays and sketches leading towards a final project using custom software developed in and for the class.

This course explores the relationships between theories of the imagination and those of gender and sexuality, with a particular emphasis on the relevance of this exploration to cinema and media studies.

This course will examine closely the recent dramatic advantages in the fields of image analysis and generation in a broad range of contexts: from the lab to their everyday use in social media and government surveillance. Students will be given the opportunity to sharpen their understanding of the possibilities and limits of machine learning by testing contemporary algorithms against datasets of their own design. This course seeks to close the critical and cultural distance between industrial advances in image understanding, the scientific discourses behind this field, and conceptions and uses of the image traditionally available to the humanities.

This seminar will explore the mutual attraction of cinema and opera across the two vast operatic cultures of Europe and China in order to interrogate the many cross-cultural issues that their media encounters produce and accentuate. Such issues include changing relations to myth, ritual, history, and politics; cross-dressing and gender-bending; closed forms or open; stock characters wand plots or narrative fluidity. We will ask why in both China and Europe, opera repeatedly became the conflicted site of nationalist and modernizing aspirations, reiterations of tradition, and attempts at avant-gardism. When the presumed realism of film meets the extravagant hyperperformativity of opera, the encounter produces some extraordinary third kinds-media hybrids. Film repeatedly wrestled with the inherent histrionics of opera through the use of such devices as close-ups, camera angles, shot reverse shot, displacement of sound from sight, acousmatic sound, and trick photography. Such devices were generally meant to suture the supposed improbabilities of the operatic art form, incongruities often based on extravagant and transcendent relationships to realism. Such cinematic renderings of opera are highly revealing of fundamental faultlines in the genres themselves and revealing of the cultures that produced them.

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.

Third- or fourth-year standing. Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing through online form at https://www.franke.uchicago.edu/big-problems-courses; see course description. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Questions:mb31@uchicago.edu.

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)

Focuses on cinematic responses by several leading film directors from East & Central Europe to a central event of 20th century history -- the Holocaust. Nazis began a cinematic documentation of WWII at its onset, positioning cameras in places of actual atrocities. Documentary footage produced was framed by hostile propagandistic schemes; contrary to this ‘method’, Holocaust feature films are all but a representation of Jewish genocide produced after the actual traumatic events. This class aims at discussing the challenge of representing the Jewish genocide which has often been defined as un-representable. Because of this challenge, Holocaust films raise questions of ethical responsibility for cinematic production & a search for relevant artistic means with which to engage post-traumatic representation. Therefore, among major tropes we will analyze voyeuristic evocation of death & suffering; a truthful representation of violence versus purported necessity of its cinematic aesthetization; intertwined notions of chance & hope as conditions of survival versus hagiographic representation of victims. The main goal is to grasp the potential of cinema for deepening our understanding of the Holocaust, the course simultaneously explores extensive & continuous cinematic production of the genre & its historical development in various European countries, to mention the impact of censorship by official ideologies in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, & Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.

Cinema is, unarguably, the medium most apposite for thinking through the complexities of democratic politics, especially so in a place like India. While Indian cinema has recently gained international currency through the song and dance ensembles of Bollywood, there remains much more to be said about that body of films. Moreover, Bollywood is a small (though very important) part of Indian cinema. Through a close analysis of a wide range of films in Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, and Urdu, this course will ask if Indian cinema can be thought of as a form of knowledge of the twentieth century.