Spring 2025 Undergraduate Courses

Antonia Lant
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 15 / Class #15367
4 points

This course introduces students to the first three decades of film history. It is designed to provide a foundation for the major, through situating the cinema within a broad cultural, aesthetic, economic, and social context, and through establishing that cinema operated internationally from the start. This period saw the rise of the studio and star systems in the consolidation of Hollywood; the production and screening of a wealth of non-fiction cinemas; and the formation of an international avant-garde cinema movement. Other topics we will cover include: the wide range of early sources for moving image culture; the earliest forms of cinema; the growth of storytelling through film; film exhibition, film audiences, and film reception; the large impact of women’s film work; film as a central component of modern life; and the development of several national cinemas such as German, Japanese, Chinese, Danish, Russian, and Soviet. Silent filmmaking has never gone away; the course may consider how it has persisted, revisited and recycled in later works for the screen.

Recitations
Wednesdays
Room 674
                                             Class #      
002:  9:15 – 10:30am              15368
003:  10:45am – 12:00pm        15369

Jacob Floyd
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 21 / Class #15621
4 points

This course will chart the history of American television by examining key issues at work from its origins, through the network era, to its ubiquitous but uncertain present moment. In the class, we will explore TV’s technological history, from broadcasting to streaming, including its relationship to other media technologies like radio and film. We will study Television’s place in American society at specific historical moments, as well as its relationship with audiences and fans. Additionally, we will identify and analyze the form and traits of several of its significant genres. The course will also introduce key terms and topics/debates in Television Studies.

Recitations
Mondays
Room 674
                                             Class #      
002:  9:15 – 10:30am              15370
003:  10:45am – 12:00pm        15371

Anthony Dominguez
Wednesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 702
Class # 15376
4 points

In their cyberpunk retrospective, Anthology Films Archives and Screen Slate dubbed 1995 “the year the internet broke” in reference to the smattering of pop-culture that brought forth the internet and the world of cybernetics into the mainstream. While 1995 saw the release of landmark cyberpunk films such as Ghost in the Shell, Hackers, and Johnny Mnemonic, the ensuing years leading up to the year 2000 were also  part of the cultural zeitgeist known as “Y2K,” an event that heralded the apocalypse, promising that a global failure in computer systems would lead humanity back to the stone age.

Since then, however, Y2K has evolved beyond its cyberpunk roots and has now become a catch-all-phrase to reference the cultural movement of the time and its encompassing elements—the rise of reality television on MTV and bubble-gum pop stars such as Britney Spears, the Global War on Terror and its mediatization, the advent of Cool Japan and the rapid advancement in game technologies, and the  technological shift in cinema heralded both by George Lucas’ embracing of digital technologies but also the dearth of independent directors who would find new creative powers in the mini d.v.

Apocalypse / Utopia: The Visual Culture of Y2K explores how the turn of the millennium shaped aesthetics, media, and technology, beginning with 1995 and ending with 2007—the year which saw the release of the iPod touch, Facebook, and the seventh generation consoles, cultural elements that signaled the beginning of web 3.0. Throughout the semester, we will explore key topics such as Afrofuturism in hip-hop and techno music (The Last Angel of History); Japanese technology and Techno-Orientalism (Ringu); Cyberspace as a queer utopia (Let’s Love Hong Kong); the rise of MMORPGs (Avalon); and finally, new internet aesthetics such as Vaporwave and Hyperpop (Macintosh Plus/SOPHIE). This course aims to demonstrate how Y2K emerged as a cultural flashpoint and reveal how emerging nostalgia over Y2K speaks to our current failures to imagine new and alternative futures.

Prerequisite: Film Theory

Permission code required to register. Request a permission code here.

Manthia Diawara
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 646
CINE-UT 707
Class # 15377
4 points

A look at contemporary African Literature, film and art as a way of examining different outcomes of postcolonial cultural policies in Africa. The main topics include 1) a discussion of the Negritude Movement and the artistic legacy of Leopold Sedar Senghor; 2) a close look at the Guinean Cultural Revolution and the attempts in Marxist Socialist revolutionary art in Africa; and the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou.

The aim of the class is to provide students with a sense of the context of artistic productions in Africa; some of the major trends in African literature and film; and the politics, aesthetics and reception theories of African imaginative works.

Prerequisite: Film Theory

Permission code required to register. Request a permission code here.

Chris Straayer
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 710 / Class # 15378
4 points

The status of film noir, a 1940-50s American film phenomenon named by French critics, remains hotly debated. Was it a genre, a thematic movement, or a stylistic innovation? Was it the product of post war malaise? Was it knowingly existentialist? Was it a voice from society’s underside? Did it admit disrupted gender roles? Was it perverse? Was it American? And, finally, how has it intensified and morphed in more recent filmmaking? We address such topics as international and interdisciplinary influences, philosophical and psychological references, artistic and literary precursors, historical and cultural resonances, war-time and post-war culture, industrial and technical implications, semantic and syntactic elements, adaptation, production economics, genre hybridity, narrative structure, urban locations, racialized space, masculinity in crisis, and the femme fatale. We also examine film noir’s relation to modernist literature, hard-boiled fiction, tabloid and photojournalism, German expressionism, French poetic realism, and surrealism. A tentative list of films includes: Double Indemnity, Crossfire, Detour, The Naked City, Mildred Pierce, Gilda, Kiss Me Deadly, Out of the Past, and Murder, My Sweet.

Prerequisite: Film Theory

Permission code required to register. Request a permission code here.

Navnidhi Sharma
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
CINE-UT 105
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 21545
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 22051
4 points

This course will provide a historical overview of the incredibly diverse cinematic practices and cultures that together form “Indian Cinema,” tracing the long history of cinema in India under colonialism in the early 20th century to the globalized multi-billion dollar industry it is today. While focusing on the Hindi-Urdu language cinema produced in Bombay (now Mumbai) popularly called "Bollywood", we will also study Indian cinemas from other regions and languages, and attend to cinematic practices and genres outside of mainstream production infrastructures. Students taking this course will be familiarized with the historiographic debates that animate the field of study of Indian films and acquire a synoptic understanding of the film industries that together produce the largest number of films in the world, gripping their viewers in what film critic Anupama Chopra once termed “a particularly virulent case of movie madness.”

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Ludovic Cortade
Fridays, 2:00-4:45pm
Room 670
CINE-UT 126 / Class # 15372
4 points

This course offers an introduction to French auteur cinema from three perspectives: the director’s artistic signature, film theory and criticism, and the political and cultural history of France. The movements and directors we will be discussing include: Surrealism and the Avant-Garde (Bunuel), Poetic Realism (Renoir, Carné), the New Wave (Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Varda, Demy).

Limited seats. This course is open to Cinema Studies majors only. Outside students should register for FREN-UA 878.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Stefano Albertini
Tuesdays, 12:30-1:45pm & Thursdays, 12:30-3:15pm
Casa Italiana Auditorium
CINE-UT 235 / Class # 22520
4 points

Studies representations of Italian history from ancient Rome to the Risorgimento through the medium of film. The use of filmic history as a means of forging national identity.

Limited Seats. This course is open to Cinema Studies majors only. Outside students should register for ITAL-UA 174.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Robert Stam
Fridays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-UT 300
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 20649
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 22045
4 points

This course is an undergraduate survey course in the Cinema Studies department devoted to Brazilian Cinema and Culture, open to undergraduates from other schools and departments. The course will discuss the history of Brazilian Cinema from its beginnings up to the latest features, but always approached in a transdisciplinary “cultural studies” manner, as embedded in a broader discursive-mediatic-artistic continuum that includes history, literature, music, and performance. Thus the course will offer not only a history of Brazilian Cinema but also a history of Brazil and Brazilian culture during the century of cinema, at least insofar as it has been represented, refracted, and performed through the cinema, the media, and popular culture.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Josslyn Luckett
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-UT 314
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 15373
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 22054
4 points

Can a visual archive help to change the discourse of a musical form? How does what we see/screen about this music called "jazz" (in narrative feature films, in PBS documentaries, in music videos, on Grammy night) inform our listening, our purchasing and streaming? Could a different set of films, a wider reaching visual archive transform our understanding of this music, or to paraphrase the late great Gang Starr poet, Guru, could what we see restructure the metaphysics of a jazz thing? Much of what Hollywood feature films and mainstream documentaries have scripted or proclaimed about the history of this music is that it was created by some black genius musicians (all tragic), and a few white genius musicians (some tragic), who were all male (except for an occasional junkie female vocalist) and are now all dead. In spite of decades of academic and cinematic signifying about jazz as democracy and jazz as freedom, this visual archive tells a very limited tale of this music, who played it, and what it meant to communities from the Treme to Sugar Hill to Central Avenue, to the world, and even to the stars ("space is the place"). In this course we will center a different visual archive that tells a wider tale of this music and who made and still makes it and who is energized and challenged by it. We will evaluate this counter-archive of narrative, documentary and experimental film and video keeping in mind Sherrie Tucker and Nichole Rustin's challenge to "grow bigger ears" to listen for gender in jazz studies. This archive and its international, multiracial, multireligious musician participants invites us to grow bigger ears and eyes for the sound. A combination of film studies and jazz studies readings will support our viewing of a wide range of shorts and features, as well as some close listening of film scores by jazz composers.

This course fulfills the American Cinema requirement.

Jacob Floyd
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 51 / class # 15381
4 points

In this course, we will explore American cinema from 1960 to the present. While the emphasis will be on Hollywood and the narrative fiction film, we will also pay attention to its relationship to other forms of American cinema such as animation, documentary, independent and experimental film during this era. In the class, we will chart changes in the American film industry (in production, distribution, and exhibition), noting developments in film narrative and style, and identifying the relationship between film and emergent media technologies. Additionally, we will situate these developments in context, exploring how films reflect, and are impacted by their cultural and historical moments.

Recitations
Thursdays
Room 670
                                             Class #      
002:  9:15 – 10:30am              15382
003:  10:45am – 12:00pm        15383

This course fulfills the American Cinema requirement.

Dominic Clarke
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 56 / class # 15384
4 points

International film history is rich with film movements and moments that have continued to inspire each successive generation of both makers and viewers. Film has the power to encourage audiences to confront social issues, rethink historical moments, and help to bring about changes in norms. International cinema also provides an opportunity for audiences to gain a deeper understanding of other cultures, political issues, all while being exposed to different filmmaking styles and, in some cases, genres. This course is designed to survey both major and minor film movements from around the globe, it cannot be exhaustive but it does allow us to consider whether or not terms such as “national cinema” and “foreign film” are useful descriptors.

Recitations
Tuesdays
Room 670
                                             Class #      
002:  9:15 – 10:30am              15385
003:  10:45am – 12:00pm        15386

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

CINE-UT 901 / Class # 15379      1-4 points variable
CINE-UT 903 / Class # 15380      1-4 points variable

A student wishing to conduct independent research for credit must obtain approval from a full-time faculty member in the Department of Cinema Studies who will supervise an independent study for up to 4 credits. This semester-long study is a project of special interest to the student who, with the supervising faculty member, agrees on a course of study and requirements. The proposed topic for an Independent Study project should not duplicate topics taught in departmental courses. This is an opportunity to develop or work on a thesis project.

To register, you must submit an Independent Study Form. Once the information from your form is verified by your faculty supervisor, you will receive a permission code.

CINE-UT 950 / Class # 8219      1-4 points variable
CINE-UT 952 / Class # 8229      1-4 points variable

A student wishing to pursue an internship must obtain the internship and submit the completed Learning Contract before receiving a permission code. All internship grades will be pass/fail.

Please visit the College Core Curriculum website for a course schedule and description.