Cinema and Media Studies

This course examines the ways that women-identifying documentary makers have given cinematic form to feminist thought. Drawing from film and media theory and history, we will focus on the formal and narrative techniques that have been employed by filmmakers to reflect on questions pertaining to gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on the specific ways that non-fiction filmmaking expanded feminist theoretical frameworks and research methodologies. Considering topics such as cinematic realism, film spectatorship, viewing pleasure, counter-cinema, and theories of intersectionality and diaspora, we will ask questions such as: What are the stylistic devices that feminist documentary films have mobilized, and for what purposes and ends? What is documentary’s relation to the history of fiction film, particularly of Hollywood cinema? How have women documentary makers understood cinema’s role in social processes of transformation? What are the possibilities and limitations of collaborative methods, appropriation strategies, and oppositional techniques? We will watch films with a critical eye and engage closely with academic and popular writings to survey the aesthetic, social, and political genealogies operating in the history of feminist documentary production. In this discussion-based course, we will cover a variety of non-fiction film and media forms: film diaries, docu-fictions, home-movies, video essays, auto-ethnographies, ethno-fictions, collage, and found-footage films. These will be works from different historical periods and geographical contexts by filmmakers such as Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Jocelyne Saab, T. Minh-ha Trinh, Barbara Hammer, Michelle Citron, Su Friedrich, Anuradha Chandra, Lorna Simpson, Yang Ming Ming, Salomé Lamas, and Akosua Adoma Owusu.

This seminar stages a sustained dialogue between theories of queer, trans, and media, exploring how each of these disciplines animate and challenge one another. This course explores the possibilities of an expanded understanding of queerness, following queer scholar Eve Sedgwick's claim that “work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all.” More recently, queer scholars like David Eng have read “queerness as a critical methodology based not on content but rather on form and style” while trans scholars like Toby Beauchamp similarly engage “the transgender of transgender studies as a mode of critique” and “not as a predetermined category into which identities or bodies are slotted.” What might it mean to consider “queer” and “trans” not as a field with a delimited object of study (sexuality or gender), but as an analytic, a methodology, a critical sensibility, a conceptual strategy, a reading practice, a politics, an aesthetic, etc. Throughout the course, we explore often-unconventional pairings of media objects and scholarly readings to work through these challenging questions. Ultimately, this course is designed to help students read for the similarities within the aesthetic forms of film/media and queer/trans theories to understand their force of expression.
 

In an oft-cited statistic, the Library of Congress has estimated that over 70% of the films produced between 1912 and 1929, are now lost forever. The outcomes for black film during this period are even more stark. This course takes on the challenge of narrating a history dominated by absence, pairing careful historiographic methods with creative and speculative approaches to construct the life and afterlife of early black filmmaking. In this class, we will explore the historical development of black film and black film performance throughout the silent era and its boundaries, from the earliest fragments to the beginnings of the sound era. We will explore key figures such as Oscar Micheaux, Richard E. Norman, and William D. Foster, as well as key performers like Paul Robeson, Bert Williams, Evelyn Preer and Josephine Baker. In addition to watching and engaging with the films themselves, we will explore the contexts of their production, the theatrical and musical traditions that informed them, and material life of the celluloid that carries them. We will also attend to the films now “lost forever.” What can we know about a film we cannot watch, and how? We will consider partial film material, news reporting and other ephemera in an attempt to peer into the space left behind in the absence of a surviving film print. Lastly, we will study the citation, sampling, remixing, and reimagining of this material from this era in contemporary work.
 

The proliferation of straight lines in 20th Century art and architecture is generally associated with rational and universalist procedures and perspectives, and closely associated with the rise of industrial society. This course will look at straight lines in modern art from a very different perspective. We will study a hidden genealogy of straight lines that all seem to evoke the vagaries of sensory realities and capacities and that are aesthetic through and through. These type of straight lines are all, in their various ways, related to the close interaction between bodies and media technologies - one of the major themes in modern art. The question, of course, is how and why straight lines comes to express this relationship. To look at this question, we will study artworks and ideas that extend from the mid 19th-century to 21st century art and that includes a wide range of media and expressions, including architecture, painting, drawing, film, video and computer art.

What do we mean when we talk about participatory culture in Japan? This course will explore this question through the lenses of film, television, and fan studies, focusing on the participatory nature of each medium. Material will build on itself both thematically and chronologically throughout the quarter, and include readings that explore participatory/fan culture in both Japan-specific and broader global contexts. Students will be introduced to multiple theories and reading practices for each media form, and encouraged to reflect on their own consumption habits.

This course explores global film histories by surveying the contributions of women directors and screenwriters, actresses, and movie workers from the silent era to the 1990s. It also addresses historiographical questions about women’s erasure, feminist recovery, and the archive. Films discussed will include works by Chantal Akerman, Dorothy Arzner, Jacqueline Audry, Maya Deren, Alice Guy Blaché, Sarah Maldoror, Esfir Shub, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Mai Zetterling.

This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.

This class is only offered through the Study Abroad Program in Paris.

This course offers tools for understanding and theorizing media by attending to technology. Students will learn to think about the materiality of media, asking how media technologies—such as television, the mp3 format, or a mobile phone app—influence the contents or meanings they transmit, as well as the ways in which discourses and practices shape the nature of media and its technical infrastructures. What forms have culture and knowledge taken as the emergence of new media has reconfigured lived experience, social life, and power relations? We will consider the ways in which technology extends beyond the realm of machinery—how practices, regulations, beliefs and environments become part of the systematic deployment of media from content moderation to the cooling of servers. Examples of media discussed in class will include student-curated collections of social media content, videogames and television by French creators, and even infrastructural systems, including a failed project to create an automated train system in Paris.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of work by experimental filmmakers that imaginatively engages with absences in the historical record, especially around the visual history of African Americans. How might scholarship adapt methodologies from these creative practices? How can scholarly methods, in turn, inform art making (as the formation of another kind of history)? Engaging theory and practice, this course investigates these questions through—and against—African American media history’s precarious archival condition.