Introduction to film form (including style and narration), different types of films, and popular approaches to the study of cinema. Topics include: narrative cinema, documentary, avant-garde, genre, authorship, ideology, and representation.

Films create story worlds, imaginary environments in which characters live and act, and where events, large and small, transpire. Some story worlds are elaborate, fanciful constructs (think of Disney’s animated films). Others stay close to reality (think of “docudramas”). But across the spectrum, all of them are framed by and provided with rules of time and space, of believable or impossible. This course offers an examination of selected story worlds from several periods of film history. Emphasis falls on the expansive story worlds of contemporary corporately-run media-franchise “universes,” like the cross-media “DC Universe.” Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This first-year foundation course is a survey of sound film (with a brief selection of silent shorts) on the topic of how popular cinemas have represented going to school. Looking at one film and one scholarly text a week, the course will offer an introduction to the close reading of film texts, reading and writing film criticism, and the fundamentals of film history. By engaging with only one film/reading per week, the course emphasizes depth over breadth. Texts for the course may include excerpts from Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing About Film, Sturken and Cartwright’s Practices of Looking, Staiger’s Interpreting Films, and Prince’s Movies and Meaning, along with selected criticism on the movies screened. Those films may include Zero for Conduct, Aparajito, Tom Brown’s School Days, Tea and Sympathy, If, Rock and Roll High School, Mean Girls, School Daze, Blackboard Jungle, or Lady Bird. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Examines the practices, theories, and debates surrounding the emergence of cinema through to the development of studio system filmmaking in the first half of the 20th Century. Topics include: film's relation to the other arts, formalist and realist traditions, technological innovations, audiences and reception, and cultural industries.

Horror film as a genre, focusing on three types of international horror: the un-dead, body horror, and the supernatural. The genre's popular appeal, affective power, unique means of producing pleasure, and current global resurgence will be emphasized. Topics include: the aesthetics of gore and violence, technologies of fear, J-Horror, new French extremity, cult fandom and paracinema, and media convergence.

This course is the study of science fiction films in their cultural and political contexts and the genre's narrative and conceptual components. The goal of the course is to familiarize students with science fiction films as popular genre texts, emphasizing the period between 1950 and the present.

Action movies cement the dominance of commercial cinema, and they largely define the contemporary era of the blockbuster and CGI effects. This course examines the narrative modes and the extremes that action scenes reach, and it explores the commercial and social function of the genre. The course also traces Action's historic reach and global diversity to include its significant precursors and transnational forms that Action cinema takes on.

Erotic images and sounds have long featured in filmic pleasure and, for just as long, excited controversy. This course examines how sex is articulated on screen and how its regulation suggests broader themes and ideas. Topics include: obscenity laws and the history of film censorship, the eroticized aspects of conventional movies, art cinema, and "adult" erotic films.

Introduction to the study of new and contemporary media forms, with a focus on aesthetic and moving-image media. Students will learn key concepts in digital media studies through close examination of historical and contemporary examples from art, cinema, video, and games. Course readings draw on interdisciplinary critical models from cinema studies, cultural studies, art history, and digital media studies.

This course examines the development of the Fantasy imagination in cinema from the start of film production (i.e., Georges Méliès) through the classical era (i.e., Wizard of Oz) to the contemporary proliferation of Fantasy cinema (i.e., Lord of the Rings, Snow White and the Huntsman). Course includes study of Asian, European, and South American Fantasy films.

Originating in the mid-19th century from journalistic accounts and detective stories, crime fiction has emerged as one of the dominant popular genres in the 20th century across a variety of media and platforms, from true crime dime novels to radio dramas, from hard-boiled literature to prestige television series. Rejuvenated in the 21st century by the consolidation of gaming culture and the rise of podcasting, crime narratives have expanded to transmediality, stretching the boundaries between fiction and documentary practices. In this context, the culturally porous and generically elastic crime film had remained one of the most enduring cinematic expressions of sociopolitical anxieties related to class, gender, race, and ethnicity. This course examines a selection of crime film traditions across various geographical areas and historical periods, investigating the resilience of this form from the silent period to the present day.

Course on special topics in cinematic genres and modes. Topics vary each year.

Examines cinema as a commercial enterprise, emphasizing production, distribution, and exhibition and the political economy of North American film culture.

This is a Breadth Category 3 course but has been specially-designed to fulfill the Quantitative Reasoning requirement for Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors.

Course on special topics in Cinema Studies. Topics vary each year.

This course takes four selected directors' films and examines them analytically and interpretively. The purpose of the course is to apply and test the auteur theory in the context of concepts of film style and film conventions.

Course on selected topics in Cinema Studies. Past topics include: "New Media."

The examination of popular American cinema through its social, political, and commercial practices, and through the study of selected popular films from the 1970s to the present.

Examines film theory and practice from the 1950s onward, and the impact of media change on earlier film cultures and aesthetics. Topics include: New Wave cinemas, the politicization of theory, spectatorship, counter-cinemas, transnational film and “Global Hollywood”, and media theory from the analog to the digital.

Avant-garde films, both canonical and marginal, are examined mainly in the context of modern art and poetry from the 1920s through the 1990s. Films include works from Europe, North America, and Japan. Art contexts range from Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism in the 1920s to Neo-Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Postmodernism.

Critical and historical survey of documentary practice, including cinema verité, ethnographic experiments, and various hybrid forms, with emphasis on the rhetorical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of the "art of record." Topics include: the filmmaker/subject/audience nexus; historiography, hagiography, and performance; and how emerging technology and new media platforms, evinced in the rise of documentary-based webdocs, i-docs, and webgames, affect the actual production and style of linear documentary, as well as impact earlier models of documentary exhibition, distribution, and viewer engagement alike.

Study of theoretical-analytical models of film genres, narrative form, and narration. Structuralist, cognitive-neoformalist, and historiographical approaches will be developed. Genres to be studied include: Westerns, musicals, crime films, biography films, gothic and fantastic films, and art cinema.

This course aims to unsettle the privileging of the visual and of live action cinema in film and media studies. The founding impetus of the class is to counter the marginalization of two intertwined issues – animation and sound – in cinema studies. This course takes seriously the suggestion of various scholars that animation is central rather than peripheral to film history and the rise of digital media.

The course aims to give students a working knowledge of key concepts at the intersection of animation, sound, and music, while also surveying a range of historical, national, and transnational contexts. The class considers feature-length titles from Hollywood and Japan as major nodes in the global circulation of cartoons and anime; at the same time, it de-centers these major players by also exploring short, experimental, and independent animation work in a transnational vein. This eclecticism is paralleled by a variety of approaches to sound and animation covered in the class, from more theoretical, philosophical, or formalist discourses to perspectives that foreground history and ideology, and considerations grounded in the materiality of media, production contexts, or industrial circulation. Throughout, the class is attuned to the cultural and political work that animated sound films do in negotiating dynamics of race, gender and sexuality.

Courses in special topics designed for Specialists and Majors in Cinema Studies. Past topics include: "Contemporary Screen Comedy," and "Eco-cinema: The Nature of Film."

Courses in special topics designed for Specialists and Majors in Cinema Studies.

This course examines "cult" and "exploitation" cinema. It examines the growing popularity of cult/exploitation films as an emerging cinematic subculture that valorizes disreputable or "trash" cinema. A number of sub-genres within exploitation film, including teen films, educational/instructional films, sexploitation, and Blaxploitation, will be explored. The social politics of appropriating texts through ironic reading strategies will also be considered.

Gender politics of feminist film culture since the 1970s. Topics include: apparatus theory and its legacy, models of spectatorship, feminist historiography, the cinematic (re)production of identity, the relationship between social movements and cinema, "postfeminism."

How race functions in cinema. Topics include: the foundational role of racial inscription and its expansion beyond the black/white paradigm, visual ethnography, 'the primitive,' and Orientalism, indigenous media, the 'Black Atlantic' and Diaspora, Banlieu and exilic film practice and theory, border aesthetics, race and urban space, 'post-race', and the evolving racial imaginary.

An introduction to early animation, considering its vaudeville roots, industrialization, emerging aesthetics, and representational tropes. Examination of the early corpus of animation from 1900-1950, and in-depth study of the artistic, social, and cultural milieux from which animation derived.

This course examines the second fifty years of animation, first by marking Disney's shifting fortunes, then broadening the scope to take in its competitors here and abroad. The global nature of postwar animation has been an odd amalgam of competition and cooperation, of private and public funding, and of film, television, and eventually webcasting, and we will explore some of the changes the form has gone through in the past fifty years or so. Since this is a study of art and of commerce, and of high and low culture, we will view our limited history through the lenses of aesthetics, cultural practices, business decisions, and sometimes political struggle.

This course focuses on queer film, television, and/or digital media. Approaches may include cultural, historical, analytical, critical, and theoretical methods. This course may focus on the representation of queer people in film in media, or film and/or media made by queer people, or both.