This course provides a broad overview and introduction to media. We will cover histories of different types of media (internet, radio, audio recordings, television, cable, film, journalism, magazines, advertising, public relations, etc.) as well as various theories and approaches to studying media. No prior knowledge is necessary, but a real interest and willingness to explore a variety of media will come in handy. Occasional outside screenings will be required (but if you cannot attend the scheduled screenings, you may watch the films on your own time through the Multimedia Center reserves.) Students will be evaluated based on assigned writing, classroom discussion leading, participation, short quizzes, midterm exam and final exam.

Location

Meliora Room 203 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course introduces the basic aesthetic and technical elements of video production. Emphasis is on the creative use and understanding of the video medium while learning to use the video camera, video editing processes and the fundamental procedures of planning video projects. Strategies for the use of video as an art-making tool will be explored. Works by artists and directors critically exploring media of film and video will be viewed and discussed. Video techniques will be studied through screenings, group discussions, readings, practice sessions and presentations of original video projects made during the course. Sophomores and Juniors with officially declared FMS and SA majors are given priority registration; followed by sophomores and juniors with officially declared FMS and SA minors. Studio arts supplies fee: $75. To be added to the rolling waiting list contact Jason Middleton.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (MW 10:25AM - 1:05PM)

This course will survey the way in which Jewish music and film engaged the issues of Jewish history, memory, and identity. The first half of the course will focus on the cultural and religious role of song and music in Judaism from their Biblical origins to contemporary Klezmer. The second part of the course will explore the medium of film for the portrayal of Jews, the gendered dimensions of Jewish religious and daily life, as well as formative events in Jewish history. Our discussions of both music and film will aim to contextualise Jewish life and culture in broader discourses of the surrounding society. We will also reflect on geographical and ethnic differences, such as the Sephardi-Ashkenazi divide, cultural influences on the Jews in Yemen and North Africa, Europe and North America. We will also trace enduring themes such as spirituality, suffering, redemption, and personal/world repair (tiqqun) that have played an important role in the development of Jewish culture.

Location

Hylan Building Room 101 (T 3:25PM - 6:05PM)

Narrative is fundamental to many areas of inquiry, including literary studies, film and media studies, history, anthropology, psychology, law, and political science, to name just a few. This course studies narrative from various perspectives, including historiography (Hayden White’s Metahistory), philosophy (Aristotle’s Poetics; Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative), narratology (Mieke Bal’s Introduction to the Theory of Narrative; Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov), film studies (Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film). The course will enable the student to develop the necessary analytical tools for understanding both literary and non-literary, textual and non-textual narratives. Conducted in English.

Location

Morey Room 502 (W 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

This course merges contemporary art production with technologies and social interventions. Students will combine historical, inter-media approaches with new, evolving trends in social practice. This course offering uses cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, as a framework for examining contemporary art and media production in both theory and practice. Students will deploy introductory level techniques to create new works at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Not open to seniors. Studio Art lab fee applied.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 102 (MW 10:25AM - 1:05PM)

Lorraine Hansberry, on March 1, 1959, delivered the closing address of the American Society of African Culture's “First Conference of Negro Writers.” Hansberry advocated for transnational black solidarity, rooted in her belief “that the ultimate destiny and aspirations of the African people and twenty million American Negroes are inextricably and magnificently bound up together forever.” On October 25, 1963, Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana, in a speech at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, called for the study of Africa to be African-centered and be concerned with peoples of African descent in the Americas and the Caribbean. Nkrumah was mandating the African scholar with duty of becoming an active agent in the production of knowledge about the Black Diaspora of the Americas and the Caribbean. Shortly before his death, Malcom X articulated the “importance of realizing the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people in the world”. Representing African Americans in the African Imagination invites the student to be attentive to the forces that are shaping global black studies, a field that encompasses a wider scope of expression of Africans and people of African descent arising out of shared historical determinants such as the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and other racialized oppressive ideologies. Representing African Americans in the African Imagination acknowledges the centrality of the African American experience in the construction of a global blackness shaped shared experiences of oppression struggle, and emancipation. Representing African Americans in the African Imagination focuses on the representation of the Black American experience in the literary and cultural productions of Africans, Antilleans, and Black Europe. Taught in English.

Location

Lechase Room 163 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

This course examines developments and innovations in Russian cinema from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present day as the Russian film industry struggled to move from a command to a market economy and adapt to new challenges. We will consider these films as works of cinematic art, as cultural/historical artifacts, tools of propaganda and nation building, aesthetic manifestations of political dissent, and (most importantly) how these ways of "thinking about film" relate to one another and reflect the cultural and ideological complexities of post-Soviet modernity. Spring 2024 subtheme: Depicting War. In English.

Location

Hylan Building Room 305 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

The objective of this course is to provide the necessary tools to enable critical reflection on the respective values and mutual relationships of comics, art and film. The first weeks will be spent acquiring the technical and historical context that will enable us to begin to recognize the breadth and depth of word/image narrative practices. After developing a core vocabulary for thinking about comics as a medium we will then look at how artists and directors have drawn on that vocabulary in a range of different contexts. Retaining a sense of the specificity of both comics and film as artistic mediums, we will closely consider topics ranging from cross-cultural translation, ontologies of otherness, and modes of mediated history. Course requirements include class participation, an autobiographical comic, weekly wordless posts, a vocabulary quiz and a final paper/project.  

Location

Gavett Hall Room 301 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course explores three of Italy’s mostprominent postwar directors, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani, who developed distinct cinemas and contributed radical representations to key cultural debates. 
Students will examine each filmmaker’s specific formal and thematic innovations, such as Fellini’s 
carnivalesque and dreamlike states, Antonioni’s use of space and color, and Cavani’s marginal 
figures and use of flashback. Students will also compare how their works address three of postwar 
Italy’s and the West’s most critical questions: modernization, the 1968 student protests and the 
legacy of Fascism. Films include: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Amarcord; Antonioni’s Red Desert and 
Zabriskie Point; Cavani’s The Cannibals and The Night Porter. Assignments include: historical, 
biographical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will 
be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles

Location

Hylan Building Room 105 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course considers the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and the state of film conservation and preservation worldwide. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at film preservation in action, allowing us to consider analog film as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is art, entertainment, evidentiary document, and historical artifact. Weekly film assignments. Class meets on River Campus and at George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave, no admission fee but students provide their own transportation). No audits, no pre-requisites. Enrollment limited by hands-on nature of course.

Location

Wegmans Room 1009 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

"It’s not climate change—it’s everything change," novelist Margaret Atwood has said. This course uses video and moving image to examine the deep intertwined and intersectional roots of the Ecological crisis, from viral pandemics and racial justice to the disruption of our climate and all the other apocalyptic scenarios we currently find ourselves in. To guide our development of Eco cinematic consciousness, we will study French philosopher Félix Guattari's foundational text, “The Three Ecologies”, to understand how ecologies of mind, media, and environment are interrelated and to complicate our understandings of "nature." Student Projects will involve installation, single channel, sound, and networked-based approaches. Works will be examined within a critical environmental arts framework through readings, critiques, viewings and discussions. Permission of instructor. Studio Art lab fee applied.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (MW 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

An introduction to the three-act film structure. Students will read and view numerous screenplays and films, and develop their own film treatment into a full-length script. 

Location

Lechase Room 182 (W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course will trace the history of music in film from the inception of silent motion pictures in the late 19th century to present-day productions. Will consider how the aural and visual aspects of the medium interact dramatically and how the music can enhance or otherwise influence interpretation of what is happening on the screen.

Location

Dewey Room 1305 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

An intensive study of the films of Akira Kurosawa, Japans most durable and visible auteur. Thanks to Kurosawa's prolific output during his fifty-year directing career (from the 1940s to the 1990s), an analysis of his films also offers the opportunity to examine major cultural, political, and social issues and events that left an imprint on the theory and production of Japanese cinema. We also consider the work of individuals (e.g., the screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto) who made important contributions to the Kurosawa opus, and whose careers are closely associated with him. Screenings include both Kurosawa's well-known period films and less familiar contemporary dramas. Students are responsible for assigned readings in addition to weekly films.

Location

Morey Room 205 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Are we experiencing the end of the world? Popular culture and the media broadcast endless news suggesting the end of human civilization: infertility crises, weather disasters, GMO monsters, class warfare, mass extinction, infectious diseases, even zombies. This course investigates representations of environmental apocalypse and the new geological era of the Anthropocene in order to understand the cultural politics and history of anxiety about end-times and the meaning of nature, planet, and ecology in our lives.

Location

Hylan Building Room 105 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Apart from his infamous cameos, Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker who wanted his presence—seen or unseen—felt by his audience. When you watch a Hitchcock film, you are meant to be acutely aware that it is Hitchcock’s film. This course examines how exactly that works. More than a proper noun, “Hitchcock” implies a formal style, a dramatic genre and a paradigm of postwar Auteurism and influence. This course revolves around a close examination of fifteen out of the director’s fifty films, as well as samples from his television series. Without pardoning his socially insensitive shortcomings (i.e. misogynist “heroes,” mistreatment of leading ladies, use of blackface, etc.) we will unpack just what constitutes the “Hitchcock” touch. From his British silents to his Hollywood “masterpieces” to his final works, this course considers the ways in which Hitchcock devised a relation among narrative, spectator and character point of view, so as to yield his singular configuration of suspense, sensation and perception. 

Location

Goergen Hall Room 108 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course provides a detailed examination of the French filmmakers of the New Wave, from

1959 to 1967. We will examine the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol, Francois

Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Rivette. We will also explore

the films' historical context and influence through some attention to their predecessors and

successors. Knowledge of French helpful, but not necessary.

Location

Morey Room 504 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Narrative is fundamental to many areas of inquiry, including literary studies, film and media studies, history, anthropology, psychology, law, and political science, to name just a few. This course studies narrative from various perspectives, including historiography (Hayden White’s Metahistory), philosophy (Aristotle’s Poetics; Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative), narratology (Mieke Bal’s Introduction to the Theory of Narrative; Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov), film studies (Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film). The course will enable the student to develop the necessary analytical tools for understanding both literary and non-literary, textual and non-textual narratives. Conducted in English.

Location

Morey Room 502 (W 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

An intensive study of the films of Akira Kurosawa, Japans most durable and visible auteur. Thanks to Kurosawas prolific output during his fifty-year career, from his debut in the 1940s to his recent work in the 1990s, an analysis of his films also offers the opportunity to examine some of the major cultural, political, and social issues and events that have left an imprint on the theory and production of film in Japan. We will also consider the work of many individuals (for example, the screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto) who made important contributions to creating the Kurosawa opus, and whose careers are closely associated with Kurosawa.

Location

Morey Room 205 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course provides a detailed examination of the French filmmakers of the New Wave, from

1959 to 1967. We will examine the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol, Francois

Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Rivette. We will also explore

the films' historical context and influence through some attention to their predecessors and

successors. Knowledge of French helpful, but not necessary.

Location

Morey Room 504 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)