Film, TV, and Media Studies Spring Courses

This course explores how film communicates information and meaning to its audiences. Cinema is a key component of our cultural landscape and part of how we understand ourselves and the world. In this course we will develop a deeper appreciation for film by developing critical thinking and reading skills. We will explore how audiences make meaning from artistic and thematic cinematic expression by examining film’s core communication elements. Moreover, we will examine how changes in the film industry, technology, and culture have influenced how film has developed as a medium.

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. 

This course offers a general survey of global film history spanning the years 1955 to 1990 and beyond. Lectures, screenings, readings, and discussion will explore the formal, economic, and ideological diversity of global filmmaking, as well as analyzing the part United States filmmaking plays in international cinema. We’ll focus on some central themes, movements, and national cinemas, as well as questioning the idea of “national cinema” and how scholars and critics come to understand and discuss global cinema.

This course offers a broad overview of the history of American television, from broadcast radio to the streaming era. Throughout, we will examine television as an industry, technology,  cultural exchange, and a social practice. 

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.

This course explores what happens when cinema moves out of the movie theater and into a museum gallery. The class offers a practical introduction to the role of the film curator, guiding students through the creative process of planning and developing film exhibitions and media installations for art museums. Through regular sessions with guest speakers (curators, museum educators, project managers, etc.) students will get a behind-the-scenes look at how major institutions bring moving images to life in physical spaces.

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.

Throughout the semester, we will use readings from video game studies, disabilities studies, narrative theory, queer and neuroqueer theory to inform our playing and analyzing of video games as well as game adaptations with the aim of exploring a series of questions:

• What is a video game? What makes a video game different from other forms of media?
• How do we analyze video games? What assumptions and expectations do we bring to our game playing?
• What can a game express that films, novels, or television cannot?
• What can we learn by comparing a game to its adaptation?
• Are games primarily art, entertainment, systems, or something else?
• How does interactivity change the way stories are told?
• How do gameplay mechanics communicate ideas?
• How do rules shape player behavior and interpretation?
• How do level design, interface, sound, music, and visual style influence interpretation?
• How do challenge, failure, and reward create meaning?
• How do different genres invite different kinds of play?
• What makes a game accessible or inaccessible to different players?
• Who creates the meaning of a game—the designer or the player or a combination of both?
• How does player choice affect interpretation?
• What role do emotion, identification, and immersion play in gameplay?
• Can players resist or reinterpret a game’s intended meanings?
• How are race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and nationality represented in games?
• How do customizable avatars shape identify and self-expression?
• What responsibilities do game designers have in representing diverse communities? In creating ethical games or games ethically?
• Can games make arguments? In what ways can games help us develop intellectual virtues?
• How do mechanics encourage particular values or ethical choices?
• What moral assumptions are embedded in a game’s systems?• Can games change how players think about real-world issues?
• How do games reflect the societies that produce them?
• How do historical and political contexts influence game design?
• What do popular games reveal about contemporary culture?
• What roles do streaming, esports, modding, and fan communities play in gaming culture? How do they influence the meaning of games or the role that games play in public conversations about games?
• How do players extend or transform games beyond their original design?
• How can our work in this class help us develop our intellectual virtues, that is, our habits of mind that enable us to be lifelong learners as well as critically creative thinkers?

This course meets LMU Core Interdisciplinary connections

This course asks how feminism--as analytic, positionality, and movement—has intervened in and shaped global cinema cultures. Because feminism has most prominently interfaced with film as a reading methodology, the world cinema that we'll watch across the course may not always itself be feminist, but will help us to understand what feminism offers film. The course will serve as a critical introduction to a range of feminist film theory (including, for instance: women of color feminisms, feminist phenomenology, post-colonial feminism, marxist feminism and eco-feminism) to illustrate its multiplicities.

This course explores how film programming and film festivals reflect the values of a
particular community, nation, organization, or industry. Film programming is not
neutral. From the Venice Film Festival, which began in 1936 as a tool to spread
Fascism throughout Italy, to contemporary identity-based festivals, like LA’s
Outfest, film festivals and screening series have served as mechanisms to promote
political agendas and ideologies. As collective screenings that gather people from
across communities and the world, film festivals function as epicenters for ideas,
conversation, and even political action. Students will examine how both filmmakers
and curators use the film festival as a site of political address. The course will begin
with the history of international film festivals, analyzing curatorial agendas, and
studying filmmakers who use the international film festival market to make political
statements and address global audiences. Students will then use these skills to
analyze an LA-based screening. The rest of the class will then be dedicated to
researching a community and proposing a film or screening series that addresses,
supports, challenges, or expands the cultural or political message for their target
market. By engaging in the act of critical curation, students reflect on the ethics of
festivals and programming. Questions they will encounter include: What does it
mean to create a viewing experience for a specific community? How can curation
serve as a tool for political, social, cultural, or aesthetic change or return to the
canon?

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: 

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 course examines contemporary media industries—including but not limited to film, television, video games, sports, and animation—and including but not limited to Hollywood. Every week we will focus on contemporary structures, hierarchies, or issues and examine Artificial Intelligence’s impact. Topics include: creativity and copyright, data and privacy, labor and working conditions, the environmental impact of media technologies, and audience/user experience. Please note: this course will be reading intensive, as we will be reading and examining some of the best scholarship and analysis of media and AI currently circulating.

FTVS 3800.01 - Entertainment Industry Careers
Mondays 6:40p – 10p
Steve Domier

Course description
In an ever-tightening job market worsened by the threat of AI, it becomes crucial to acquire the skills necessary to secure a meaningful role.

This course provides the practical, hands-on tools needed to successfully navigate the highly competitive field of entertainment, while exploring the wide variety of roles available in the industry.

Open to upper division students of all majors, Entertainment Industry Careers was created to serve as the bridge between the world of academia and the world of business.

Taught by an industry professional, this course introduces students to the principles of time management, networking, public speaking, negotiation, pitching yourself (and your projects) in order for students to make the contribution to the world they’re meant to.

Each week students are afforded guest speakers who are working professionals, many of whom are former students of the course.

Student learning outcomes
By taking this course, students will:

• Find out what jobs in entertainment are available and what it takes to get them;
• Create the marketing tools to make themselves more attractive to hiring managers;
• Hone their time management and public speaking skills;
• Engage in classroom discussions with their peers to expand their perspectives;
• Make connections with others who can assist with their careers;
• Discover more about themselves along the way.

Work expectations:
As Entertainment Industry Careers is an elective, it was created to conflict as little as possible with other courses—as a result, there is no midterm, and no final exam. Instead, there are two quizzes designed to ensure students are staying current with the reading material, and a “Semester Takeaways” paper, due at the end of the semester.

The workload also includes:

• Reading of weekly handouts, along with our two textbooks;
• Preparation of three questions for each week’s guest speaker;
• Two oral presentations; • The creation of a cover letter, resume, and LinkedIn profile;
• Conducting an informational interview with an important industry professional, with a resulting 3-page paper.

Students will examine in depth American Film from the silent era to the
present, a period of momentous change. The course will examine the American
Experience as explored by significant directors. Particular emphasis will be placed on
changes in Romantic Comedy, the Family Melodrama, the Black Experience, and the
New Hollywood. With the decline of the old studio system, the 60’s and 70’s was
arguably the period of greatest innovation and experimentation in American Film. The
class will examine the way in which the social upheaval of the times influenced the
groundbreaking films of this period. 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. Finally, the course will explore the waning of this period of experimentation and the rise of the blockbuster Star Wars (1977) and digital cinema. We will examine ways that modern directors continue to explore the American Experience Outside of the Blockbuster.

This course will take a critical and historical look at Irish cinema from the 1950s to the
present. While its focus will be on recent films, we will also be considering earlier works made by and about the Irish. We will be covering topics such as the relationship between Irish cinema and other modes of cultural expression, the social background to the films, issues of government policy, the representation of violence, the Troubles and Northern Ireland, history, gender, the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath.

This course will be offered as a critical survey of Japanese cinema. In it, you’ll be
introduced to the major directors, genres, institutions, and structures that have shaped Japanese cinema in the world. Across this we will also consider how the world imagines Japan through cinema from a number of different vantage points. By course’s end you should expect to have a strong foundation in Japanese cinema across its history that will include everything from some of the most iconic films from Japan to less familiar independent, experimental, documentary and marginal works.

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.

Using films that helped inspire and make up the ever-expanding canon of New Korean
Cinema, this class will examine topics including the dynamic iterations of auteurship,
national and transnational modes of filmic address, genre innovations and hybridity,
contemporary art cinema, postmodernism as a mode of production, and the new idioms of globalized entertainment films.

This course explores the career and artistic vision of filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, tracing the evolution of his work from his early independent films in Quebec to his acclaimed blockbuster films such as Arrival and the Dune trilogy. Students will examine key questions of national cinema, genre, adaptation, and collaboration while investigating the distinctive stylistic and thematic concerns that define Villeneuve’s work. By situating his films within broader cinematic and cultural contexts, students will consider how Villeneuve has emerged as one of contemporary cinema’s most influential filmmakers. The course will culminate in a collaborative final project: the creation of a comprehensive guide to Villeneuve’s cinema.

This course will focus on reality dating television to examine how romantic scripts regulate sexuality and gender. From The Bachelor’s “marriage plot” structure to testing whether “Love is Blind,” reality dating television transforms the narratives and idioms of romance into competitions where contestants compete to find love. Much of the drama results from individuals struggling against the rigid structures that confine who one can love, how one can find love, and how many people a person can love at one time. By examining this genre of television, we will analyze how romance configures gender norms, sexuality, and monogamy. At the same time, we will question whether the moments when reality breaks through the highly-produced artifice of television can expose the contradictions, harm, and fallacies of the romantic norms they seek to perpetuate. Possible shows include: The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Love is Blind, F Boy Island, Married at First Sight, 90 Day Fiancé, Love Island, Too Hot To Handle, Perfect Match, Couple to Throuple, and The Ultimatum. Please note this is a reading-intensive course. Students should expect to read substantial theoretical texts each week.

Throughout the semester, we will use readings from queer theory, neuroqueer theory, and TV studies to inform our viewing of TV shows with the aim of exploring a series of questions:

• How do we watch and analyze TV? What assumptions and expectations do we bring to our viewing? 
• What is the relationship between text, subtext, context, and paratext? How do these relationships impact our viewing? How can they be used to “queer” TV?
• What does it mean to “queer TV”? To think of “queer” as a verb?
• What about camp? What role does camp play in queering TV?
• How has television shaped cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, queer, and neuroqueer identities (what we will explore as the pedagogical aspects of TV)? How have these changed (or not changed) over time?
• What is the relationship between queer, heteronormativity, and homonormativity? Between neurotypical and neuroqueer?
• Does a TV series require queer characters, creators, audiences and fans, and/or queer ways of telling stories to be considered “queer”, or is there something else that makes a TV series “queer?” Can a TV series be “queer” even if it lacks queer characters and/or creators?
• Is there such a thing as a “queer aesthetic”? Is there such a thing as a “neuroqueer aesthetic?” If so, what would these look like?
• How do we queer our own assumptions and expectations about the shows we watch, the way we discuss and analyze them, the lenses through which we watch them?
• How do we queer and neuroqueer our own learning and teaching? 
• Is there a way to queer and neuroqueer the traditional teacher/student, expert/novice binaries? 
• How can our work in this class help us develop our intellectual virtues, that is, our habits of mind that enable us to be lifelong learners as well as critically creative thinkers?

Course meets LMU Core Interdisciplinary Connections

This class puts cinema, melodrama and stardom into conversation with each other to do a deep dive into film aesthetics, industry, technology and business as intertwined concepts. Course topics focus on larger-than-life film performances to understand drama as a cinematic style rather than a genre. How the film star shapes narrative and defines film style will be a guiding question in each class.

Turning to cinema as a melodramatic medium par excellence, we will ask how stars amplify cinematic expression and meaning. How do stars interact with the audience through musical performance, editing, setting, and mise-en-scene? How does melodrama push the boundaries of realism as it moves across history through high and low culture? We will explore both melodrama and stardom as global phenomena for expressing feelings through the grand fusion of music (melos) and décor with mise-en-scene (drama).

This course will examine how the great Asian directors Ang Lee and Bong Joon-ho are two of contemporary cinema’s exemplary global auteurs who are setting new standards for film form, style and technical innovation through their manipulation of genre, art cinema and great entertainment fare. More importantly, their direct address to audiences both in the U.S. and beyond it pointedly acknowledges that there is a world outside Hollywood; while their work illuminates the ways in which cinema is both a global language and multinational industry it still imbricates Hollywood as part of a global formation that is an essential participant in the circulation of cinema and cinema culture across borders. As the singular national cinema model continues to fall away, Ang Lee and Bong Joon-ho demonstrate how films must be transnational to thrive in today’s global marketplace.

While their discernible styles and themes have helped build their artistic legacies, secure their commercial success and even allowed them to make persuasive political interventions, you will learn the ways and reasons why “auteur” is a practical categorical designation as well as a mythology that still looms over cinema itself.

The course examines the history of The Walt Disney Company from its arrival in Hollywood as a small animation company, through its evolution into a 21st-century media juggernaut. We will trace its early innovations and successes, its dramatic role in unionizing animation, its transition into television production and theme park operation, its post-Walt slump and renaissance, and its contemporary era of aggressive acquisition and diversification. From this historic “backbone,” we will look into specific topics using different media studies methodologies: film aesthetics, cultural studies, feminist film theory, race and representation studies, and more.

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 with diverse audiences 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 and creative essays, 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 worlds 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. Assignments will consist of short analysis essays and opportunities to compose the opening scenes of a story world woven from the
fabric of your main protagonist’s emotional journey.

This course charts the rich history and development of film production in former French colonies across Sub-Saharan Africa. The class investigates the distinct creative strategies, funding models, and narrative forms that Francophone African filmmakers have used to shape and define their cinema. By studying key works from nations such as Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Cameroon, Chad, Mauritania, Côte d’Ivoire, students will examine how a complex colonial legacy, shared language, and indigenous traditions have shaped unique regional aesthetics.

Students will examine in depth the films and film-making styles of Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, and Stanley Kubrick. The course will examine how all three pushed the limits of various film genres (the Black Comedy, the Period Film, Film Noir, the War Film, and the Musical) to create works that were both highly visual and personal. Focus will be on Ashby’s approach to editing and cross-cutting, Altman’ s revisionist approach to genres and his revolutionary use of sound, and Kubrick’s mastery of design and
story structure.

This course provides a historical survey of film noir, both in the United States and
transnationally. We will examine the foundations of noir, the filmic and sociopolitical
forces that continued to shape the style, and the development of neo-noirs and hybridized noir films while analyzing stylistic traits, plot conventions, and character archetypes. Screenings may include Double Indemnity, The Long Goodbye, The Third Man, Stray Dog, L.A. Confidential, and Blade Runner.

This course offers a historical overview of Hong Kong cinema, with a particular focus on the 1960s through the 2000s. Academia often prizes the study of art cinemas over
unmistakably commercial industries such as Hong Kong's. However, the city produced a vibrant cinema as hybrid as its complicated history, providing a worthy case study of
international film that defies traditional notions of nationhood. Screened films will include many genres, including comedies, dramas, and film-festival breakouts, but the vast majority will contain the various strains of action that defined the industry for decades (e.g. swordplay, martial arts, "gun-fu"). Movies will be shown with English subtitles and their original audio tracks (i.e. Mandarin in some cases but mostly Cantonese).