Film, TV, and Media Studies Courses

Course Description  

Aimed at developing a deeper appreciation for film by developing critical thinking and reading skills, this course explores how filmmakers and audiences make meaning from artistic and thematic cinematic strategies. During the first half of the course, we break down the aesthetic components of cinema. In the second half of the course, we use the language and grammar of cinema developed in the course’s first half, to analyze genres, film codes, cultural representations. The course meets twice a week, once for an in-person lecture and screening, and a second day for a 50-minute discussion section. 

Course Description

This course provides an introduction to the diverse ways in which screen media (television, the Internet, smartphones, video games, and emerging media) interact with technology and culture.  Students learn how to read academic and popular writings to analyze the ethics of representation and understand how media shape or reflect cultural values and attitudes about identity and intersectionality.

Course Description

FTVS 2100: World Cinema 1 explores significant artistic and industrial developments in global cinema from 1895 to 1955, focusing on the national cinematic context. This period includes the impact of World Wars on film industries in Europe, Asia, and the rise of Hollywood's global influence. Students will learn about key aesthetic movements and concepts, such as Russian formalism and German Expressionism, while examining how filmmakers innovated despite wartime challenges. By the course's end, students will be able to analyze cinema's evolution in various countries and discuss its cultural impact through exams, discussions, and assignments. 

Course description:

This course surveys global film history from 1955 to 1990, highlighting the influence of post-war art cinema movements, including Italian Neorealism and postcolonial cinemas, the dominance of genre in the global exchange of cinema. Through analyses of a diverse array of films, students will explore the aesthetic, political, transnational, and socio-historical contexts of these works. By course completion, students will be able to identify post-war filmmaking trends, understand their socio-political influences, and enhance their critical thinking and writing skills. 

This course offers a broad overview of the history of American television, from its origins in radio broadcasting to today’s streaming services. We will examine television’ cultural, technological, and aesthetic histories, asking questions about how this medium participates, reflects, and refracts broader national economic, political, and cultural values and interests. The course is designed to help you develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding television, encouraging you to become critically informed television viewers, media scholars, and media makers.

Course description:

Globally, television is one of the strongest forces in culture, reshaping our values, helping to construct our identities (personal, familial, cultural) and our place in the world. It is also one of the greatest triumphs of the art of blending the creative spirit with business acumen. Visual texts include scripted series such as I Love Lucy, Game of Thrones, Squid Games, as well as unscripted, such as 60 Minutes and American Idol.

Engages critical perspectives and discussions of current movies and media, joined frequently by classroom encounters with media creators as well as actors, writers, producers and others engaged in contemporary media creation. Practical discussions of the creative process plus examinations of current professional trends are a focus; aesthetic analysis is a regular weekly feature. Professor Greene is a working TV producer and documentary filmmaker, and will draw on his own professional experience to delve deeply and specifically into the projects presented and the topics raised.

It is the intention of this course to demystify the contemporary media landscape by close conversations with working professionals as well as a free-ranging discussion of the themes and stylistic approaches represented by a wide-ranging slate of works. The course can serve to educate aspiring filmmakers about both professional realities and different creative approaches. For the casual filmgoer, the course is designed to challenge pre-existing viewing assumptions and open up different perspectives on media and how it talks to and about the wider world. There is also a strong writing component intended to focus and intensify our weekly classroom experiences through related prompts, and it is the intention of this course to help every student improve their writing.

Meetings: See PROWL for meeting days/times 

In the contemporary era of real-time production, Unreal Engine, AI-generated art, and multiverse storytelling, one may say that all media are now immersive – their modes of creation and consumption increasingly require a deep sense of commitment. Exposing the theoretical and historical roots of immersive media, this class critically examines the illusory property of “immersion” in storytelling and media technology, from painting to literature, film to video games. We will use a theory-practice approach to survey the tools and techniques of immersive storytelling while foregrounding the theoretical and ethical concerns of an increasingly mediated existence.

How can citizens in a democracy make informed decisions if they are deprived or misinformed of the reality around them? It is difficult to discern the truth today when social media, awash in subjectivity, delivers "facts" unhampered by any critical, ethical or professional standards. Mainstream corporate media also shies away from speaking truth to power. That is why independent documentaries are essential to a healthy and vibrant society. Often they shed light on the truth, challenge the status quo and thus become engines of progress toward social and economic justice. In this course we will examine a number of documentaries that have made a difference.

Another issue is literacy. Since we rely so heavily on audiovisual media to receive information, visual/media literacy has become as important as print literacy. Thus we will also use these films to further our visual literacy. That involves developing our critical analytical abilities: discerning the point of view of the filmmaker, how he/she uses the filmic toolbox to convince the viewer of the justness of their position.

An introduction to the theoretical paradigms that underpin film and/or media studies. The course may be offered as a historical survey or focus on a minimum of two distinct theoretical traditions and the historical developments within them (e.g., psychoanalysis/theories of representation and ontological/realist film theory). Alternately, it may focus on introducing the work of a minimum of four dominant film theorists from different decades. Refer to the specific semester description.

Prerequisites: FTVS 1010, FTVS 1020, FTVS 2100

Course Description  

Genres are defined by their aesthetic and narrative conventions; yet, their story construction shares more similarities than differences. What exactly are the delimitations between genres and how does melodrama - as an expressive mode - underline all of them? This course will focus on the analysis of the aesthetic and narrative underpinnings of genres such as horror, film noir, the western, science fiction, etc.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: 

Benito Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, is breaking musical records, breaking gender stereotypes, and centering his homeland of Puerto Rico in everything he does. What does it mean for an all-Spanish-language act from Puerto Rico to be biggest musical artist in the world? Bad Bunny has been the world’s most-streamed artist on Spotify for two consecutive years, has the longest-running Spanish-language album at the top of the Billboard chart, and in 2022 became the only artist in history to stage two separate $100 million-grossing tours in less than 12 months. As we examine his impact on global popular music and culture, we will consider what Bad Bunny can teach us in Latinx Studies. Through film, popular media, and interdisciplinary academic texts, we will explore his role in the mass 2019 protests in Puerto Rico, what these protests and ongoing struggles in Puerto Rico teach us about U.S. colonialism and Puerto Rican politics, and what Bad Bunny’s increasingly anti-colonial stance says about the current state of resistance in Puerto Rico (particularly among Puerto Rican youth). We will also pay particular attention to the politics of race, gender, and queerness in Bad Bunny’s performance, and how these politics disrupt dominant Latinx media representations. Overall, this course will explore these topics by closely situating Bad Bunny’s work in relation to key texts in Latinx Studies regarding colonialism, race, resistance, gender, and sexuality.

This class will focus on travel and tourism experiences as they are depicted in film and other audiovisual media. By constructing visions of destinations, and the journeys to and from them, media-makers play a powerful role in creating cinematic “elsewheres.” We will take a multi-media approach, considering feature films, documentaries, social media travelogues, and video games that simulate travel experiences. As we explore cinematic journeys and the “tourist’s gaze” in our reading, viewing, and writing, this course can help us reflect on the significance of travel and tourism experiences as mediated, virtual experiences.

Course Description  

This course will cover the basics of how to analyze and write about films. It will introduce the mechanics of close reading as well as consider varying interpretative frames. This course will guide students in how to become proficient at understanding how films construct meaning. The course is open to all majors.

Entertainment Industry Careers was created to serve as the bridge between the world of academia and the business of entertainment.

Along with exploring the wide variety of roles available in entertainment, this class provides the practical, hands-on tools needed to successfully navigate this highly competitive field.

In addition to presentations given by the instructor to assist students in procuring a job/career in entertainment, working industry professionals are featured as guest speakers to share their experience and insights.

Faculty: Stephen Domier

Chilean cinema has exploded over the past two decades, with directors such as Pablo Larraín, Sebastián Lelio, and Sebastián Silva making their mark internationally. This course will look at the rise of Chilean cinema in the aftermath of years of suppression, along with the groundbreaking Chilean filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s who anticipated the current cinematic boom.

This course's purpose is to view and understand the thematic and stylistic issues in propaganda and point of view as seen in films related to the Cuban revolution. It is also to see how film reflected desired social conclusions. The course also deconstructs current perceptions of the Cuban Revolution through film. This course introduces important films—feature and documentary—about the Cuban Revolution. Through film, the course analyzes significant aspects of the Cuban revolution, including the social,historical and aesthetic tensions that have characterized this important event... It also looks at the society that this revolution has created and the different views of those societies in Cuba and in the Cuban diaspora.

Dr. Richard P. Hadley, Jr.  

Students will examine the central themes, style, working methods, and approach to Acting of Elia Kazan, one of cinema’s most important maverick auteurs (b. 1909 Constantinople, d. 2003 Manhattan).  Students will examine the works of other New York Filmmakers who were profoundly influenced by Kazan: Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt, Mike Nichols, Ulu Grosbard, and Spike Lee.  The course will also focus on how the city of New York is used as both a location and a living presence in the films screened (East of Eden, On The Waterfront,  America, America, The Front, Splendor in the Grass, and Do The Right Thing).

Students will examine in depth the films and film-making style of Billy Wilder (1906-2002), one of America’s greatest writer/directors.  The class will explore the way that Wilder has both created and expanded the limits of various film genres (screwball comedy, the comedy/drama, black comedy, and film noir) and also explore central Wilder themes and devices (the price of success, buddies, and the disguise).  Students will also analyze and define his visual style.  Screenings will include: Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, Sabrina, Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

This course surveys the Screwball Comedy genre (1934-1950) of American film. We will trace the evolution of the form from its origins in silent slapstick comedy to its close in the post-WWII years. This period in American history saw great social upheavals in the forms of the Great Depression and World War II, during which class and gender roles were radically questioned and reimagined. These shifts were felt within the film industry and its audience, and these films represent a dialogue between the two — a playful but also subversive discussion.

This course provides an overview of the history of animated motion pictures through a Film Studies lens. We will trace the evolution of the form from its origins in the 1890s to the present with emphasis on American animation, but exploring other national and international contexts as well. We will look at the influences of cultural contexts, labor conditions, technology, and fandom on the medium over time. Students will gain a deeper understanding and of the industrial conditions underpinning this beloved popular art form and an appreciation for its distinct position within popular culture.

Course Description

This course examines the intersection of the horror genre and reproductive health. Since the 1970s and 80s, feminist film scholars have drawn upon the tools of psychoanalysis and ideology critique to examine the representation of women’s bodies in mainstream cinema, particularly the increasingly graphic depictions of sex and violence found in the horror genre. Out of this body of work, Barbara Creed developed the concept of the “monstrous feminine” to describe how the genre figures the sexual and reproductive body as monstrous. Since then, the term has been taken up by feminist health scholars to describe both medical and popular understandings of the reproductive body. This course will explore the intersection of these two bodies of work by focusing on how the central affects of the horror genre—disgust, abjection, the fantastic, and uncanny—become attached to critical stages of sexual and reproductive development. Moving through puberty, menstruation, pregnancy, and motherhood, the course will pair films with works of feminist health studies to examine how the genre reinforces gendered understandings of the body, health, and sexuality.

This course satisfies the Interdisciplinary Connections Core requirement.

Content Warning

Horror is a genre that seeks to terrify, disgust, shock, and alarm its viewers. As such, it often features graphic displays of violence, sex, and gore. Throughout the semester we will be interrogating our responses to these film, using the viewing experience as a central entry point into our discussion of health, gender, and sexuality. Many of the films featured on the syllabus are controversial and include content that is too difficult to watch in some cases.

This course looks at the rise in popularity of action cinema across the world through some of its most enduring icons: the Asian stars who shaped the genre. We’ll situate the national and transnational appeal of Bruce Lee and his films alongside those of Takakura Ken, Jackie Chan, and Amitabh Bachchan to better understand action’s investigation of the laboring body, masculinities, and power and our attraction to it.

This course explores the art and history of the music video, from early examples of the pre-MTV era up to the present day. We’ll approach and analyze music videos by considering their formalist qualities (cinematography, editing, mise-en-scene, and sound), along with their narrative and ideological dimensions, paying close attention to their politics of representation in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, and more. To do so, we will draw from a wide variety of theoretical approaches, including film studies, television studies, sound studies, industry studies, and cultural studies.

This course investigates the ways that time-based media (movies, TV shows, and video games) use time to think about time. We examine a variety of media texts through a variety of lenses (philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific) as well as media and disabilities studies in order to think through the question of what it means to be time beings.

The course brings together the disciplines of religious studies and media theory (specifically animation and video game studies) to introduce students to new approaches in thinking about the contemplative experience and notions of play. In this way, the course offers a space to play games, watch TV series and films, through the lens of contemplative practices.

Faculty: Robert DeMaio

This class is a critical survey of special and visual effects in cinema from its origins to the present day. As perhaps the most valued yet least theorized cinematic form, effects is the primary means by which movies create their truths, manifest their fictions, and achieve the impossible. This seminar examines how in-camera, optical, practical, and digital effects not only contribute to cinema’s aesthetic evolution and shifting realisms, but to its expanded cultural and technological influence. Highlighting the ingenuity of individual effects artists, effects houses, and filmmakers such as Melies, Murnau, Cameron, and the Wachowskis, we will bravely navigate mechanical spaces, cinematic bodies, bullet-temporality, and virtual visual fields.

The Iconicity and Cinema of Elizabeth Taylor

This course investigates the formidable iconicity of Elizabeth Taylor often considered the greatest star of Hollywood’s last golden age and the most beautiful woman in American cinema.  Through a historically situated and theoretically grounded examination of Taylor’s most important films and her various off screen images and work, this course unpacks the pivotal roles that she played for a burgeoning globalized visual and popular culture during the era of massive decolonialization and at the height of American Empire, from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Lectures, screenings, readings and discussion will explore the evolution of Elizabeth Taylor as a professional beautiful woman, movie star, celebrity at large, activist and icon of American Empire that properly frames her various iterations as one of most significant figures in popular culture in the 20^th century.

This course will offer a critical overview of Japanese cinema from the silent era to the 21st century. Students will learn about key aspects of the nation’s film history, including live benshi narrators before synchronized sound, the classical studio system, and the Japanese New Wave. Screened films, both live-action and animated, will include a wide range of genres and styles: period dramas (jidaigeki), contemporary family dramas, kaiju, horror, crime films, and more. Ultimately, the class is designed to theorize Japanese cinema and national cinemas more broadly not as singular monoliths but as diverse, contested sites for engaging media and culture.

This course explores the history of animated films from around the world in their various guises: short- and feature-length; hand-drawn, stop-motion, and CGI; mainstream and avant-garde. We will focus on understanding animation in its cultural, economic, and political contexts. 

Students will examine in depth American Film from 1960 to 1977, a period of great change and experimentation. The course will examine in detail the key film movements of this period: the waning of the studio system and the classical style, the influence of European film, the rise of the live television directors, the new film school generation, the rise of realism and location shooting, and  the loosening of restrictions on language and adult content The class will also explore the way that political and social movements (civil rights, the cold war, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, rock music, the new frontier of space, black power, the women’s movement, Watergate) influenced the content, mood, and style of these films. 

This class will examine several creative applications of cinematic technologies from the medium’s inception to its present. Although the course will chart changes over time, discussions will hopefully steer clear of essentialist, progressionist narratives, instead focusing on various technologies in their original historical contexts. We will focus on some broader categories that are now considered standard (synchronized sound, color film), as well as more specific niche (puppetry, rotoscope) or even “failed” (Cinerama) examples. Finally, students will learn about some of the key below-the-line workers behind the screened films, offering a broader picture of how creative laborers mobilize different tools to tell their stories.

This course will examine the history of “queer film” in the United States, spanning through the silent era, censorship, the gay liberation movement, HIV/AIDS, mainstreaming, and digital media to bring us to present representations of queerness in American film. Through historical, political, economic, and formal analysis we’ll interrogate the category of “queer film” itself, track why and how queerness’s place has changed throughout American film history, and examine recent trends in American film addressing queerness.

This course is a historically-situated investigation of New Korean Cinema, a transnational film culture that begins in the late 1990s and whose phenomenal success can in part be explained because it is according to scholar Chris Berry, a “full-service cinema”, excelling in the production of not only art films and documentaries, but popular genre films, action blockbusters and other commercial entertainment fare.

From Georges Melies’ Trip to the Moon to Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz to Scheinert’s and Kwan’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, cinema has been building worlds that shape our collective imagination. New media offer even more diverse platforms for story worlds; the timing could not be better since diverse audiences are demanding stories that reflect their experience in a time of rapid change on our planet. The goal of this course is to expand student understanding of the fundamental role worldbuilding plays in making visible the portrayal of the transformational arc of a character. Through a variety of academic readings on the topic, as well as close analysis of story worlds in film and TV, this class will consider the role of modelling situations in allowing divergent story experiences to emerge. Students will gain insight into conceptualizing innovative stories through analysis of design principle, and advanced screen narrative forms as they have been modelled in film and TV. By analyzing theories of genre in film and TV, global story forms, and the contraction and expansion of time in constructing story worlds, students will elasticize their sense of what is possible, potentially inspiring the development of an original world that is essential to a character’s growth and applicable to transmedia storytelling across multiple media platforms.