Film and Media Studies

This course provides an introduction to comic books in the United States. We will examine various approaches to reading and understanding comics and graphic narratives, the relationship between comics and other forms of media, and the influence of comics in American culture more broadly. Topics include the history of comics, controversies and concerns about the cultural influence of comics, the comics industry and how comics are published and distributed, representation in comics, and the impacts of digital production and distribution on comics. This class will combine lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments. Open to first-years, sophomores, and Film and Media Studies majors; others by consent of instructor.

In an era where the majority of media are produced, distributed, and accessed digitally, how can we understand the influence of digitization on our media landscape? Are digital media “new?” Has digitization fundamentally changed approaches to making or consuming media? How has the Internet affected the cultural role of media? This course introduces historical and theoretical approaches to understanding digital media and digitization. Topics include the history of digital technologies, the impact of digitization on media production in various industries, digital distribution and exhibition of media, and how the rise of the Internet and other digital technologies play a role in our current media landscape. This class will combine lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments. Open to first-years, sophomores, and Film and Media Studies majors; others by consent of instructor.

Topics in Film and Media Studies not generally considered in other courses offered by the department. Materials will vary from semester to semester and may cover subjects, developments, and concepts from early times to the present. Lectures, discussions, tests, papers, and/or weekly screenings. May be repeated for credit. See course schedule for any current offerings.

This course introduces the historical and theoretical fundamentals of film studies. Representative films will be drawn from a variety of different eras, genres, and countries. Lectures, discussions, tests, and required weekly film screenings. Open to first-years, sophomores, and Film and Media Studies majors; others by consent of instructor.

This course explores world culture through an analysis of what is arguably its central medium: television. Tracing the medium from its origins in radio to its digital future, we will investigate television as a site of identity formation, controversy, political power, and artistic experimentation. The course will also consider television in terms of industrial production and audience reception, including the rapidly changing practices associated with television viewing in the 21^st century. Lectures, discussions, tests, and required weekly screenings.

From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Grimm Fairy Tales to contemporary horror films, monsters have always existed to tell us what happens if we don'92t follow the rules. What does a monster do for a film? For society? This class will investigate widely held ideas about race, gender, (dis)ability and other categories of social differentiation through the lens of (post)/colonial horror film. From Zombie flicks to mummy films to space horror, the monster is often found exactly where '93Western Man'94 is attempting to dominate and colonize. A main focus of the class will be to understand complex notions of subjectivity (who AM I, who ARE we) with the recognition that the monster frames a key component of the dialectic of self/other. There is no '91self'92 without a '91not-self'92 and what more instructive not-self could there be than a big ugly monster. But what happens when that monster is coded as female (Ex-Machina) or native (King Kong) or disabled? What kinds of selves are we asked to induce/produce when our monstrous Other is composed of bits of real-world cultural subjects? This class will use cultural studies, post-colonial and psychoanalytic theory to address notions of self/other, human/inhuman, us/them in the media of horror. May be taken for credit toward the Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies major or minor.

This introductory-level class explores the relationship between media and multiple forms of “identity.” By critically exploring and deconstructing normative concepts of gender, we shall open critical space to investigate other kinds of identity produced in and through media such as national, religious, ethnic, and class identities. We will focus on contemporary and historically specific examples such as radio and the construction of national identity in the 1920s; television and the production of the domestic housewife in the 1950s; and contemporary marketing techniques and the construction of impossible female bodies. We will bring feminist thought, critical theory, and cultural studies together with specific examples in order to analyze “identity-talk” in film, radio, television, and the Internet. The ultimate goal of this class is to produce an awareness of the different kinds of techniques that bring power and media together to create politically useful identities. Required weekly screenings. Open to first-years, sophomores, and Film and Media Studies majors; others by consent of instructor. May be taken for credit toward the Gender Studies major or minor.

Although long-derided as genre fiction, pulp, or simple entertainment, analyzing science fiction film and television can yield important clues about shared social anxieties and hopes. In this class, we will critically evaluate utopian and dystopian visual science fiction and fantasy through various lenses including: aesthetics, industrial concerns, politics, gender, and genre. We will screen various examples of science fiction and fantasy film and television (such as Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Avatar, Battlestar Galactica, and Lord of the Rings) and also discuss the use of science fiction and fantasy in video games. Required weekly screenings.

This class will survey the work of these influential auteurs, each of whom is celebrated for their distinctive visual storytelling styles and recurring themes. Though they hail from different parts of the world, work in discrete national film industries, and on the surface appear to be dissimilar artists, through careful scrutiny of their oeuvres we'll investigate the myriad ways in which their films transcend cultural boundaries and connect with each other and viewers from around the world. We'll look at these films through a variety of lenses, including representation, industrial concerns, auteurism, aesthetics, race, gender, and genre. This class features lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments. Required weekly screenings.

This course introduces the fundamentals of the visual language and narrative structures of film. Students will collaboratively make their own short films. Extensive lab time required. Open to Film and Media Studies majors; open to other students with consent of instructor.

Have you ever watched a film or TV show and wondered, “How did this get made?” or “Who is this for?” Media industries produce and circulate important cultural products that influence how we understand the world around us. This course critically examines the history, organization, everyday practices, and cultural influence of media industries. Topics include media industry ownership, regulation of media, how media industries make (or don’t make) money, creative practices and professions within media industries, distribution of media, and the impacts of digitization and globalization on media industries. This class will combine lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments.  

According to Henry Jenkins, media industries are increasingly trying to engage viewers by spreading narratives across a variety of media. He explains that this “transmedia” storytelling “represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, alternate reality or video games, toys, and other commodities […].” This course examines how transmedia franchises and narratives are produced, distributed, and consumed. We will explore issues related to transmedia culture, including how media franchises are developed and sustained, audience perceptions of transmedia narratives, forms of transmedia participation by fans, and the influence of transmedia narratives and media franchises on other forms of media. This class will combine lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments. 

Generation X encompasses those who were born in the period stretching from approximately 1965 to 1980.  The idea of a shared generational experience makes for an easy conversational shorthand, but it belies the complexity of the disparate realities of those who share a common birth era and in many instances not much else.  What defines this supposedly cynical and disaffected generation?  And, more importantly, who is doing (or gets to do) the defining?  Demographers?  Historians?  Sociologists? Cultural producers?  Those who are ostensibly a part of it?  And why does it matter?  Through intensive study of the ways this generation is depicted and contested in film and culture, we will grapple with these questions and others through various lenses including: representation, industrial concerns, auteurism, politics, gender, class, aesthetics, and genre.  The class combines lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments.  Required weekly screenings.

While American superhero movies may currently dominate the global box office, the U.S. is not the only country where comic books are an influential medium. There are long histories of comics publishing and established comics industries in a number of countries throughout Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe; online and digital comics are produced and consumed all over the globe. This course examines the cultural impact of comic books and graphic narratives from Japan, France, Nigeria, Mexico and various other countries and global contexts. Topics include the histories of comics in various countries, how different global comics industries operate, the circulation of comics and comics culture between countries, and representation in comics in different cultural contexts. This class will combine lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments.

This course will engage with philosophy, religious studies, phenomenological theory, post-colonial and cultural studies scholarship in order to critically analyze mediated religion and other parts of social life on a global scale. We will consider the many meanings of mediation, from the larger social level of mass communication to the individual level of the body, in which larger beliefs are individually mediated through ritual and performance. Themes that may receive attention include: the use of electronic fatwas in modern Muslim societies; the rise of American televisual evangelism; the global and local markets for religious cultural products; the representation of religious identities—particularly the rise of Islamophobia—in media; and the prominence of fundamentalist and nationalist religious politics across the globe. Lectures, discussions, and tests. May be elected as Religion 307.  When Film and Media Studies 307 is not offered, Religion 307 may be taken for credit toward the Film and Media Studies major. May be taken for credit toward the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major.

Television, which started out life encased in wood and set in the center of our homes, has leapt out of its box. Those interested in analyzing the various roles that television plays in constructing our social, political and economic realities now find themselves chasing their object of study as it leaps across platforms, national borders and generic borders. If, in the past, television was primarily worthy of study because of its centrality in American social life, if television was the very space where the imperfect American public sphere lived, how do we begin to trace our shared culture when we no longer share television? If the primary strength of what we used to call television was to gather the largest numbers of citizens/consumers using the lowest common denominator of narratives, what are we to make of a situation in which citizen/consumers are increasingly segmented off into smaller and smaller target groups? How was ‘narrowcasting’ transformed what ‘broadcasting’ used to at least appear to hold together? This class will center around the question: what to make of television now that television as we knew it is largely gone. This class will use the theoretical backbones of public sphere theory, network theory and imagined communities to analyze how information is produced, distributed and consumed in a post-tv era. How has the shift from networks to cable and then to the Internet impacted both the industry and its consumers? How have the economics changed? How have politics changed in an age where people can ‘talk back’ to television through their own visual productions on Facebook or YouTube? Is there a relationship between the splintering of audiences, or narrowcasting, and the increasingly fractious political atmosphere in the world? What promises of progress or regress do the new regimes of media production and distribution set the stage for? How have new modes of producing and distributing entertainment and news had an impact on productions of the self? Or on privacy? How, in the contemporary era of mass self-communication, has the relationship between individual and society been transformed? 

Increasingly, forms of popular culture that once were regarded as niche or unsophisticated have become mainstream or even cool. Comic books, science fiction, video games, and other supposedly “geeky” interests generate billions of dollars; popular culture conventions host academic conferences and college and universities offer courses and promote research on everything from superheroes to horror movies to online role-playing games. However, there are still a variety of popular culture genres or objects that are seen as lowbrow, in poor taste, or as “guilty pleasures.” What are the implications of judging popular culture based on perceptions of taste or quality? This course examines popular culture “bad objects,” including how and why certain texts or genres become perceived as “bad,” the production of “bad” popular culture texts, fans and fandom of “bad objects,” and the relationship of “bad objects” to larger questions of race, class, gender/sexuality, and social status. This class will combine lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments. May be taken for credit toward the Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnic Studies major or minor or the Gender Studies major or minor.

Writer/directors Wes and P.T. Anderson both released their first feature films in 1996.  Since that time, they’ve continued to make deeply personal, highly influential films.  They are both meticulous craftspeople, instantly stylistically recognizable, not particularly prolific, and in many ways working increasingly on the margins of mainstream cinema.  How, or is, their work reflective of its time?  What does it have to tell us about the contemporary moments in which it has been made?  How has it evolved over time to reflect broader cultural changes?  Or has it?  Why does one Anderson’s work appeal to an international audience while comparatively the other’s does not?  Why has their work, which itself has been heavily influenced by earlier filmmakers, been so influential on their contemporaries (Greta Gerwig, Sofia Coppola, Noah Baumbach, etc.)?  In this class we will grapple with these questions and others through various lenses including: aesthetics, industrial concerns, auteurism, politics, gender, class, representation, and genre.  The class combines lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments.  Required weekly screenings.

This class will explore the complex, interdependent relationships between media and politics in the articulation of power. Not taking any of our terms for granted, we will question what is meant by politics, how different forms of power are articulated openly or discreetly in public life, and how different forms of media enter the process in different ways. While the bulk of our focus will be on media, power, and politics in the United States, we will also question the tensions between media and power globally by studying patterns of media distribution and military, economic, and political power. Along the way, we shall come into critical acquaintance with the public sphere theories, which have their origin in the work of Jurgen Habermas, cultural identity and representation as expressed by Stuart Hall, and discipline, governmentality, and subjectivity as expressed by Michel Foucault, and the political economic theories of Karl Marx. Required weekly screenings. May be taken for credit toward the Politics major or minor or Rhetoric, Writing and Public Discourse major or minor.

This class will examine transnational media (including television, film, electronic networks, and mobile telephony) from aesthetic, economic, political, and critical theoretical perspectives. We will look at the role that media narratives play in enculturating viewers within and across physical, cultural, and linguistic borders. With an eye towards avoiding simplistic binaries such as East/West, Global/Local, or Good/Bad, we will explore the complex and contradictory impulses of global culture and globalization from multiple theoretical perspectives and academic disciplines drawing on cinema studies, postcolonial theory, literary theory, anthropology, political theory, cultural geography, and cultural studies. Required weekly screenings.

This course examines visual texts (primarily film and television) in which the Middle East is represented and represents itself. This class is concerned with how the “Middle East” is represented in the West and also with how the region represents itself in film and media. We will look at issues of representation; religion; nationalism; gender; and ethnic identities. In addition to critically, aesthetically, and culturally analyzing films from the Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Hebraic Middle East, we will also look at the role of media in articulating politics and identity. We will focus on Middle Eastern auteurs and the political economies of the culture industries that frame their work. Along the way, we will be guided by cultural studies and post-colonial theorists. Required weekly screening. May be taken for credit toward the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major or Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies major.

This course explores the representation and participation of Latinxs in American media. We will discuss how racial and ethnic group designations such as “Latino” or “Latinx” are formed and understood in U.S. media contexts, how Latinxs have historically been represented in U.S. media, and contemporary representations of Latinxs across a variety of media including film, television, music, comics, and online media.  We will also examine the production and distribution of media texts created by and aimed at U.S. Latinxs. This class will combine lectures, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments. May be taken for credit toward the Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity studies major or minor.

In this intensive workshop course, students will produce documentary films.. Extensive lab time required. May be repeated for credit as space allows. Priority given to Film and Media Studies majors.

This class will investigate the place of errors, glitches, and jams in today's digital, computational, and screen-saturated media ecology. When something "goes wrong," we routinely look to diagnose its cause, both to right the wrong and prevent its occurrence in the future. Yet those moments also invite us to interrogate what possibilities emerge for changing how things are or could be. Often, errors point to exceptions in our thinking that might free us to live otherwise; glitches surprise us, revealing alternative worlds of experience; and jams impede the wider cultural systems around us, giving us opportunities to establish different ways of going on together. We will read ideas from systems theorists, philosophers of technology, media and game scholars, psychoanalysts, neuroscientists and humorists, whose work elucidates how things "going wrong" is often the site of creative change. We will examine how human processes of reason, speech, and rule-following often "go wrong," and explore how, in the "breaking" of digital and screen media objects (e.g., video games, computer networks, memes), people create new ways to live with technology and each other. And in a media production project, students will produce errors, glitches, and james, discovering in practice what else becomes possible when we override the impulse to "get right," or go along with the world as we know it.

In tracing film history from the demise of the studio, students in this course will study the all too brief era known as the American cinema'92s '93silver age,'94 during which maverick film school directors made deeply personal and remarkably influential films. Texts will likely include works by Coppola, DePalma, Friedkin, Altman, Allen, Polanski, Bogdanovich, Kubrick, Malick, and Scorsese. Lectures, discussions, a big research paper, an oral presentation, and weekly film screenings.

In tracing film history from its late nineteenth century beginnings to the 1950s, students in this course will study the era known as the American cinema's "golden age," during which the Hollywood Studio System dictated virtually all aspects of filmmaking. Texts will likely include works by Ford, Hitchcock, Curtiz, Hawks, Capra, Sturges, and others. Lectures, discussions, papers, and weekly film screenings.

Using a variety of critical theories, this course focuses on the analysis of film and various other media forms. Students give presentations and write papers utilizing these various perspectives. The goal is for students to become more conversant in the many ways they can assess the significant influence media has in our lives. Open to Film and Media Studies majors; open to other students with consent of instructor.

Studies of film and media issues including directed readings and/or approved projects. The student is expected to submit a written proposal to the instructor prior to registration for the course.

In this capstone course, students will explore contemporary issues in FMS through a variety of theoretical lenses, which will culminate in the writing of an article length seminar paper and an accompanying oral presentation. Required of, and open only to, senior Film and Media Studies majors.

Research and writing of a senior honors thesis. Open only to and required of senior honors candidates in Film and Media Studies.