Spring

TBD

Ce cours vise à donner une vue d’ensemble du cinéma français et francophone à travers une approche thématique. À l’appui de textes dont nous privilégierons ceux originellement publiés en français, nous examinerons une grande variété de films dont le point commun se situe à leur opposition à la norme, au centre, à la métropole, au mainstream. L’œuvre de cinéastes issus des rives gauche et droite de la Nouvelle Vague, tels que Chabrol, Duras, Godard et Varda, celle de cinéastes africains, et de cinéastes de l’âge classique et moderne comme Alice et Mati Diop, permettra de passer du macro au micro, du personnel à l’autoréférentiel. Nous étudierons ainsi comment ces cinéastes utilisent l’outil cinématographique pour aborder des thèmes tels que la colonisation, la géographie, le genre et la sexualité, et le medium du cinéma lui-même. En mettant en lien l’image et le texte, nous étudierons la tension entre le langage du cinéma et celui de la littérature et leur différente capacité à traiter de ces sujets.
 

This course traces the history of amateur filmmaking on Chicago’s South Side as a robust creative practice and a mode of documentation revealing realms of moving image production and presentation grounded in everyday life. With the rise of scholarship on nontheatrical and “orphan” media, home movies have become a critical area of cinema studies and film archiving. This course centers on the South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP), founded by the instructor and housed at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public initiative/Film Studies Center. The collection contains more than 1,000 reels of small-gauge (8mm, Super-8mm, 16mm) films dating from the 1930s-1970s from a diverse range of South Side residents, containing scenes of family and community gatherings, life milestones, travel and more. We will engage in close readings of films in the SSHMP archive to consider their styles and intended audiences. We will examine the ways they picture the South Side during an era of intense racial segregation, as discussed by writers including Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Richard, Wright, Lorraine Hansberry and Timuel Black. We will also discuss the SSHMP’s approaches to stewarding this footage in relation to developments in film archival praxis, and the tensions that crop up between preservation and access. Lectures and discussions with SSHMP staff, donors and collaborators will cover topics including digitization, cataloguing, oral history, public programming, and engagement with filmmaker families, educators and artists. Students will have opportunities to contribute original research and creative re-use projects to the SSHMP website.

The creation of a TV Pilot is a unique, exciting, and demanding task for a writer. In addition to the responsibility of telling a compelling story, writers are also charged with setting up a “world” and establishing characters and plotlines that will sustain the show over multiple episodes and seasons. In this class, we will delve into the processes required to succeed in this challenging endeavor. This includes creation of pitch materials, plot and character development, outlining, creation of a show bible, and ultimately, writing the pilot episode of an original TV series.

The classroom will function as part development workshop and part informal TV writer’s room. Through weekly reading and writing assignments we will dissect successful entries into the TV space and tap into our artistic inspirations to evolve our show concepts. From there, we would collaborate as a class by actively brainstorming and workshopping our scripts and series. By the end of the quarter, each student will complete a draft of an original pilot script, as well as a short “Series Bible” detailing the broader scope of the show.

What makes a performance unforgettable? How do fleeting acts—onstage, online, or in the streets—spark curiosity, provoke debate, or ripple through memes and memories? In this course, we’ll immerse ourselves in the bold, hybrid world of performance as a tool for upending expectations and crafting the unexpected.

With hands-on projects, critical reflection, and collaborative exploration, we will investigate performance in its many forms, from physical spaces where people move, connect, and gather, to digital platforms where swipes, clicks, and streams define interaction. Together, we’ll uncover how performers outwit algorithms, engineer surprise, and amplify their work in resourceful and unpredictable ways. Visiting artists from theater, media art, and tactical performance will join the course throughout the quarter, bringing unique practices and perspectives into the mix.

This class will read key texts in critical video game studies to consider how race, diaspora, and Indigeneity shape the code and the machines that structure the games we play. In addition to critical readings by scholars in Indigenous studies, Black feminism, settler colonial studies, and video game studies including Joanne Barker, Christine Sharpe, and Chris Patterson, we may also read creative works by Gabrielle Zevin and Elissa Washuta among others to consider how narratives about society and identity transform in relation to video games. Games and/or franchises to be discussed will include Norco, Umurangi Generation, Assassin's Creed, Undertale, and Spiritfarer among others

We live in an age of crisis for liberal democracy, and conspiracy theories are often said to be at the heart of this crisis. While Alex Jones, Infowars, and QAnon have become household names, there is still no consensus on what makes a “conspiracy theory” or how scholars should approach these topics. Are “New World Order”-style conspiracy beliefs irrational or false on their face? Can liberal-democratic regimes which pride themselves on their ability to accommodate diverse religious viewpoints successfully integrate conspiracy believers? In this course, we will approach the subject of conspiracy theory by engaging with theorists in their own words, videos, and images, while sampling a range of academic and public-facing literature on new religious movements, religion and politics, and epistemology. In so doing, we will apply critical lenses of diverse sorts to mixed media, as we collectively develop methodologies for carrying out original research on “low-status” subjects using un-curated archives. No prior acquaintance with conspiracy-oriented materials required.

From hypertext works spanning thousands of nodes to algorithmically-generated animations that unfold slowly over the course of hundreds of years, 21st Century media has leveraged digital technology to approach scales never before conceived. This class examines a broad array of digital artworks and theoretical trends from the past several decades, all circling around issues of endings and infinity. This includes everything from humanistic inquiries into the nature of closure in electronic literature of the 1990s to contemporary dreams of infinite machine-generated content (coinciding with the reciprocal promise of infinite growth via replacing human labor). Course assignments will be a mix of analytical writing and creative projects.

A hands-on studio course exploring how to critically consume, dissect, and create media in response to a fractured and fast-paced media landscape. Students will transform weekly headlines into rapid-response digital art projects, interrogating the urgency of contemporary culture through experimental design and creative critique.

AI Video sits at a collision point: where polished promises meet unexpected errors and infinite slop. In this studio course, we’ll explore the chaotic potentials of AI in video art—its quirks, cultural impact, and untapped possibilities. Using cutting-edge AI tools and techniques like prompt engineering, style transfer, and compositing, we’ll create experimental time-based media projects. With a critical lens and playful approach, we’ll embrace the weird, challenge the hype, and rethink the ethics and aesthetics of this emergent form.