Film, TV, and Media Studies Fall 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 offers a general survey of global film history (meaning both international and American film culture) spanning the years 1955 to 1990. Lectures, screenings, readings and discussion will explore the formal diversity of international cinema, including canonical American films and investigate the impact of the global circulation of films, filmmakers, and film culture in response to the complex and contested dominance of the U.S. film industry. This course has been designed to serve as a useful introduction to world cinema and further nurture a love of film in its numerous iterations including as art, as political discourse, as entertainment, and as a transnational commodity and continue to expand and cultivate your knowledge of film language and theory.

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. We also focus on important TV authors such as Norman Lear (All in the Family), Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage) and Shonda Rhimes (Scandal). Visual texts include scripted series such as I Love Lucy, I Claudius, Game of Thrones, 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 

An examination of the history, development, and aesthetics of video games, their relationship to Film and TV, and their status as cultural artifacts.

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

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.

An interdisciplinary undergraduate research and writing intensive seminar that explores key topics concerning the social impacts and ethical intersections of media, sport, and consumer culture. The course explores the increased roles that two mutually reinforcing trends mediatization and sportification have come to play in our cultural milieu, and more specifically, in ethically problematic promotional market logics pervasive in consumer capitalism. The course situates theoretical and conceptual thrusts from three distinct but complementary disciplines sport studies, media studies, and ethics studies to bridge foci on (1) sport from a sociology of sport lens, (2) sport media from a communication of sport lens, and (3) ethics from a commodification of sport lens. The lenses are integrated in assessing the consumer culture intermix of sport and media amidst promotional and marketing logics. Junior or senior standing required for registration. University Core fulfilled: INT: Interdisciplinary Connections.

From the Época de Oro (Golden Age) to the Nuevo Cine Mexicano (New Mexican Cinema) and beyond, this course will explore the storied history of Mexican cinema through a range of analytical lenses and frames. We’ll consider several themes and socio-political issues that have characterized the national cinema of Mexico, including the complicated relationship between Mexico and Hollywood, legacies of colonialism and its ongoing violence, indigeneity and the nation-making project of mestizaje, feminism and machismo, globalization/transnationalism and immigration, and the rise of cartel violence, among others.

Course Description Coming Soon

When we think of a film’s “author,” we most often consider the director or screenwriter, however, producers also leave a significant creative mark on a film. In this course, students will explore case studies of various producers and production companies, examining their creative influence over specific projects and bodies of work. Examples include: independent production-distribution companies like A24; the strategies of genre producers like Jason Blum’s Blumhouse; individuals such as prolific independent producers, prominent studio executives, and creative hybrids; and adapting the voice of preexisting IP from different mediums, like Riot Games. Through lectures, screenings, discussion, and research-based assignments, students will gain a deeper understanding of a producer’s role in the creative process, different forms of creative producing, and how authorship influences their economic power.

With limited funds, limited access to gear, and no formal training, communities of artists and musicians began forming punk rock communities and creating media in all forms on their own terms. Outside of the mainstream industries of music and film these makers produced a breadth of video art, music videos, documentaries, and narrative films rooted in truly independent cinema. Punk Cinema is critical and historical survey of films documenting the visual and musical influences influenced by the punk rock ethos on DIY and no budget filmmaking from the 1970’s to present. We will explore the aesthetics and ideologies of a ‘no rules’ filmmaking practices that often ignore industry standard practices. The class will also explore the social, political, and economic pressures of the times that led to this underground explosion across the world.

Meetings: See PROWL for meeting days/times

Course description coming soon.

This course provides a comprehensive examination of anime, or Japanese animation, today as a popular mass medium that has captured a worldwide audience. The first part of the course will cover the history of anime, from the earliest works of individual artists in the silent period, to the development of the studio system, television anime, and the globalizing industry of today. We will then explore major themes of important works that reflect upon Japan and its connection to a broader transnational cinema culture. Such topics include: tradition vs. modernity, family and gender roles, apocalyptic visions, technology, fan cultures, and the power of myth. 

This course investigates the contemporary Korean drama, a media object that has mesmerized audiences in South Korea and around the world. This course will examine the K-Drama’s various themes, conventions, ideological underpinnings and its masterful modes of address through the use of key theories about media, television, performance and globalization. Lectures, readings, immersive screenings and discussions will also unpack Korean television’s industrial history and structure, genres, producers and stars.  Furthermore, we will explore medium specificity in the age of global streaming, the new parameters of television as a cultural forum, and the K-drama’s historical and essential role in the Korean wave.

For most of the history of moving image media, many obstacles have impeded queer identity and sexuality finding representation on American screens. This course is not just a history of queer media, but rather a specific examination of where and how these representations have been realized in particular contexts, and how audiences have succeeded in finding them. From early Hollywood to home video and film festivals, from broadcast TV to premium cable and digital media, we’ll explore moments of visibility emerging from the invisibility that has defined much of queerness’s history in US media. We’ll examine the changes in politics and culture, the media industries, economics, and technology that have created new venues for representation while perhaps still maintaining limitations on what can be said or shown.

This course provides a comprehensive overview of the cultural, economic, historical, and material significance of archives in cinema and media studies. The semester will begin with an exploration of film archives, their uses, and their users, followed by an examination of how various media forms, from VHS to DNA, contribute to preserving the past and shaping the future. By the end of the course, students will have gained a deeper understanding of key archival practices and major debates within the field.

The “video essay” has emerged in recent years as a new way to express ideas about media of the past and present. This course will blend analysis and practice. We will closely examine the various types of video essays on film, TV, video games, and other online media. We will also make our own video essays, developing our skills with editing software while enhancing our knowledge and perception of audiovisual techniques. As a Capstone class, it is structured so each student is able to develop an individual Portfolio of material showing creativity, originality, and a nuanced understanding of a specific topic or concern in the field of cinema studies.

Meetings: See PROWL for meeting days/times 

This course offers a broad overview of the history of American television, from live television broadcasting to online streaming. We will examine television as an entertainment industry, a technology, a form of cultural communication, and a social practice. This course asks questions about how television presents, challenges, and/or reflects American ideals and values.

Graduate SFTV majors only.

Meetings: See PROWL for meeting days/times 

"Documentary and Dissent" explores the intersection of documentary filmmaking and social and political activism. Students will examine how documentaries have been used throughout history as powerful tools for challenging political norms, exposing injustices, registering outrage and inspiring social change. The course will cover a diverse range of film-work, from classic works of cinema verité to contemporary digital activism, highlighting the evolving role of documentary in an era of global connectivity and information warfare. 

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.

In this is course we will examine the film noir genre looking at issues of its aesthetic influences, industrial underpinnings, socio-political context, gender and ethnic representations, and relationship to auteur theory. Concurrent to the span of the genre, 1941-1960, Hollywood weathered World War II, dramatic labor unrest, corruption scandals, HUAC hearings, blacklisting, the consent decrees, the encroachment of television, and a barrage of new theatrical technologies. Both on and behind the screen, the cynical film noir genre reflected and responded this tumultuous period in Hollywood’s history.

When we think of a film’s “author,” we most often consider the director or screenwriter, however, producers also leave a significant creative mark on a film. In this course, students will explore case studies of various producers and production companies, examining their creative influence over specific projects and bodies of work. Examples include: independent production-distribution companies like A24; the strategies of genre producers like Jason Blum’s Blumhouse; individuals such as prolific independent producers, prominent studio executives, and creative hybrids; and adapting the voice of preexisting IP from different mediums, like Riot Games. Through lectures, screenings, discussion, and research-based assignments, students will gain a deeper understanding of a producer’s role in the creative process, different forms of creative producing, and how authorship influences their economic power.