Cinema and Media Studies

We live in a franchise era where popular narratives unfold across multiple different media platforms: cinema, television, games, comics, novels, theme park rides, and more. This course explores the cultural, industrial, and technological factors driving this situation, as well as the opportunities and challenges that it presents for media creators. As our main example, we will delve into the Alien franchise, launched by the science fiction-horror film Alien (1979) and continuing across an increasing number of extensions, including a new film (Alien: Romulus[2024]), television series (Alien: Earth [2025]), and VR video game (Alien: Rogue Incursion [2024]). Each week, we will watch one of the Alien feature films, analyze its visual and narrative style, situate it in the historical development of transmedia strategies, and connect it to related works in other media. Screenings will be complemented by game play sessions at the Weston Game Lab. Readings will survey the vast literature on the Alien franchise while also introducing key theoretical concepts (e.g. transmedia, remediation, intertextuality, subcreation, convergence etc.). Therefore, although it is organized around Alien media, by the end of this course students will be prepared to think critically and creatively about the many franchises that structure our media environment.

This course is designed to help the emerging writer focus their creativity into a viable feature film project and screenplay. This includes structure, format, exposition, characterization, dialogue, voice-over, and other aspects of visual storytelling for the screen. Weekly meetings include a brief lecture period, screenings of scenes from selected films, extended discussion, assorted readings and writing assignments. Because this is primarily a writing class, students should expect to deliver four to five pages of written material-including story development materials or screenplay pages-each week.

This course will explore the reciprocal relationships between war and media. At the core of this class we will ask: how is war itself a medium? In doing so, we will consider not only the technologies used to wage war, but also how war operates as a material and conditioning substrate for experiences of time, space, and power. Indeed, war is not simply a state of armed conflict, but a mode of aesthetic and political communication that shapes modern sensoria. Beginning with key frameworks for war in media studies, we will proceed by examining a range of medial sites used to wage war, as well as documentary and entertainment practices that represent war for the public. Along the way, we will interrogate how the mediating processes of war conflate civilian and soldier, violence and entertainment, weapon and communication device. With historical references, this course will focus primarily on global experiences of armed conflict in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to specific war technologies like drones, we will also analyze key media forms like photography, cinema, television, computers, and video games.

This course is intended as an overview of Mexican cinema, from its famed “Golden Age” in the 1940s and 1950s, up to contemporary productions. The aim is to reflect simultaneously on Mexican culture, history, and society, and on the language of film and its interpretation. Our goal is to expand what we know about Mexico through the way its cinema has tackled questions of difference (class, gender, regional, and race-based), modernization, political unrest, inequality, violence, and love. Crucial to our academic setting, we will ask what films offer as objects of knowledge in their own right, and not merely as illustrations. What does it mean to analyze a film? What are the tools we use to read and write about them as cultural products? We will consider classic fiction features along short, experimental, and documentary films. Works discussed include Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953), Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960), Canoa (Felipe Cazals, 1975), Perfume de violetas (Marisa Sistach, 2001), Tempestad (Tatiana Huezo, 2016), among others. 

From terrorists to "good Muslims," standards in the racial, cultural, and religious representations surrounding Islam have fluctuated across U.S. media. How do we conceptualize the nature of visual perception and reception? The history of colonialism, secular modernity, gender, patriarchy, and the blurred distinctions between religion and racialization have all contributed to a milieu of visual cultures that stage visions of and arguments about Islam. Hostility towards Muslims has not abated as we venture well into the 21st century, and many remain quick to blame an amorphous media for fomenting animosity towards the “real” Islam. We use these terms of engagement as the start of our inquiry: what is the promise of a meaningful image? What processes of secular translation are at work in its creation and consumption? Is there room for resistance, legibility, and representation in U.S. popular culture, and what does representation buy you in this age? We will pair theoretical methods for thinking about imagery, optics, perception, and perspective alongside case studies from film, stage, comedy, streaming content, and television shows, among others. Students will critically engage and analyze these theories in the contexts from which these works emerge and meld into a mobile and diasporic U.S. context. Together, we will reflect on the moral, political, and categorical commitments vested in different forms of media against historical trends of the 20th and 21st century.

From reality shows like Indian Matchmaking and Made in Heaven to the meme of the "Big Fat Indian Wedding" to the preoccupations of Bollywood films like DDLJ and Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani and crossover ones such as Monsoon Wedding, marriage is an obsession in South Asian culture. Focusing on Hindi cinema, this course will explore the socio-political dynamics of this cultural focus on marriage and couple formation. With examples ranging from classical Hindi films from the 1950s-60s to the star-studded melodramas of 1970s and 1980s and the “new Bollywood” era (post-1991), this cinema exhibited and analyzed the central dynamics of marriage: sexual compatibility, fidelity, reproductive futures, and so on. Debates around class, caste, diaspora, and sexuality are equally anchored in issues of marriage and couple formation. In this course, we ask why it is that marriage—its success and failure—has been so central to Indian on-screen identities. Even as screens multiply—on computers, cell phones, and in the multiplex—marriage continues to dominate. No prior knowledge of Indian languages is required, but you must enjoy watching and talking about movies and popular culture.

The rockumentary, concert, or popular music film remains an enduring object across the 20th and 21st centuries. From Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back to Wattstax to Taylor Swift: The Era's Tour, these films stage an essential encounter between two key forms of mass media: popular music and cinema. Starting with this relationship, this class asks, "What can popular music and cinema teach us about each other?" Across readings borrowed from cultural studies, music, and cinema—in addition to weekly film screenings—this course will help students develop a robust understanding of the common ground the popular music film constructs. We will explore how this genre exposes a network of concepts relating to media technology, race, and music culture through close reading and focused film analysis.

While this class expects participants to have a basic awareness of the language of film analysis, this class does not assume its students to have formal musical training. Instead, this course encourages and teaches to develop basic skills in competently writing about music on film from a cultural studies perspective. Beginning with common theoretical and cultural concerns shared between film and music, we will learn to describe on-screen music and sound using focused, meaningful, and accurate language. As an extension of this project, we will also learn approaches to incorporating discussions of media culture that reflect and embrace an enduring legacy of popular writing on music.

This course provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge on how human minds and brains engage with and respond to film and media. Using such interdisciplinary approaches as neuroscience, experimental psychology, linguistics, analytical philosophy, film theory, and cognitive film studies, we will try to understand why we like to watch movies; how we process what we see and hear on the screen; why some movies attract more than others; how identity, politics, and culture may affect the viewer response; and what the nature of the mind’s engagement with art might be. 

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This course will provide students with an introduction to the objects and theories of animation.