Spring 2025 Graduate Courses

Marina Hassapopoulou
Wednesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1020 / Class # 12645
4 points

This course closely examines a variety of theoretical writings concerned with aesthetic, sociocultural, and psychological aspects of the cinematic medium. Theoretical frameworks are approached thematically, rather than chronologically, in order to formulate new conceptual connections between different modes of cinematic inquiry. The course uses the innovative organizational structure of Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses to address the multisensory relationship between spectators and cinema. Sound, sight, touch, smell and taste provide a way to access and compare theories ranging from classical to digital, and to explore areas that have been marginalized from overarching canons of film analysis. Approaching film theory through the senses opens up new ways of thinking about the screen-spectator relationship as the course moves from “external” to “internal” [cognitive/mnemonic] associations. Students will study the writing of classical theorists such as Eisenstein, Metz, and Bazin, as well as contemporary thinkers such as Sobchack, Mayne, and Friedberg. Questions to be addressed include: the nature of cinematic representation and its relationship to other forms of cultural expression, the connections between history/culture and theory, and issues with theorizing film spectatorship. Theory will also be studied alongside examples from popular culture, digital contexts, and cross-cultural media environments in order to interrogate certain ideas about cinema and spectatorship that persist despite the medium’s material and technical changes. By the end of the semester, students will acquire the critical skills to apply a broad range of analytical perspectives to films and other media. The course deals with both “big picture” questions and close analysis of primary texts that will ultimately converge into a balanced analytical approach that considers both micro (small scale) and macro (large scale) issues.  

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

Anna McCarthy
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1026 / Class # 12646
4 points

This course will trace the history of free speech and censorship on television. We will explore case studies of political insurgency and protest in a selection of national contexts and periods. Areas of focus include, but are not limited to, the U.S. civil rights movement, the Irish republican struggle, Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa, Palestinian resistance to the Israeli state, and Sandinista-era Nicaragua.

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

Michael B. Gillespie
Fridays, 8:00am-12:00pm
Room 646
CINE-GT 3902 / Class # 12664
4 points

Seminar on the methods and procedures of writing the doctoral dissertation in Cinema Studies. The course guides students in preparing their dissertation proposal through in-class debate, written feedback from the instructor, shared readings, and visits from guests with experience in the process. Students who have defended their dissertation proposals will visit the class. (We read their proposals in preparation for their visits.) Students will make regular presentations of work-in-progress, to meet the goal of finishing their proposal by the end of the semester in readiness for their upcoming oral exam defending it (usually in late May/early June). The course stresses mutual aid in class discussion. By the end of the semester, you should have settled who is advising your dissertation, and possibly also have identified another member of your dissertation committee (5-person in total).

This course is open to Cinema Studies PhD students only.

Chris Straayer
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 1312
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 12648
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 22071
4 points

“Neo Noir” explores the multiple ways that films made beyond the classic period reference, appropriate, extend, pay homage to, and even define that amorphous category called “film noir”: from nostalgia to escalation; from remakes to meta discourse retroactively constructing a “genre;” from genre hybridization to the dispersion of disconnected noir elements (crime, paranoia, the femme fatale, subjective flashback, existentialism); from realist-expressionist black and white to blatantly stylized color; from censorship’s dark sexuality to hyperreal violence; from national to international. To support our study of neo noir, we will simultaneously reference classic film noir from the 1940-50s and its scholarship, considering visual aesthetics, historical/cultural resonances, international/interdisciplinary influences, philosophical/psychological references, and gender relations. However, rather than attempting to rein in Neo Noir insisting on fidelity to film noir, the course celebrates Neo Noir’s exponential extrapolations. A tentative list of films includes Body Heat, Taxi Driver, Blood Simple, Exotica, Coup de Torchon, High and Low, One False Move, The Grifters, Memento, Usual Suspects, The Last Seduction, Kill Bill, Chungking Express, Mulholland Drive, The Thin Blue Line, and Funny Games.

Allen Weiss
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 3011 / Class # 13637
4 points

Brillat-Savarin, in The Physiology of Taste (1825), discusses the aesthetic value of cuisine from two seemingly contradictory viewpoints, since he claims both that cuisine is the most ancient art and that “Gasterea is the tenth muse: she presides over the joys of taste,” suggesting that cuisine finally takes its place as the newest art form at the height of the Romantic period. But what does it mean to speak of cuisine as a fine art? What are the relations between cuisine and the other arts? How have the histories of gastronomy and aesthetics intersected? Can cuisine evoke the sublime? How do considerations of cuisine transform the relations between arts and crafts? Can we speak of a specifically culinary filmic genre? How is “nouvelle” cuisine related to modernism and regionalism, and “hybrid” cuisine to postmodernism and globalization? This seminar will investigate the conceptual preconditions, the discursive limits, and the poetic and rhetorical forms of the culinary imagination, under the assumption that the pleasures of the text increase the joys of eating. Our goals are to effectively conceptualize cuisine, to establish cuisine’s rightful place among the fine arts, and to examine the varied modes of gastronomic representation.

Limited seats. Permission code required to register.

Admission by application. Prospective students should send an email to allen.weiss@nyu.edu stating their department, class standing (MA or PhD -- no undergraduates admitted), their reason for wishing to take the course, and a very brief statement of their familiarity with modern and contemporary art, performance and theory.

Toby Lee
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 3025 / Class # 12659
4 points

No matter what our relation to our mother figure(s) may be, it is always a tangled one, a murky matrix of projections, attachments, disavowals, and blind spots. With each new generation, this figure returns as a question, posed on levels both individual and collective, about the formation of self and subject, the limitations and possibilities of gender, and the politics of reproduction. Taking a non-essentialist view of the maternal, this course explores the narratives and social structures that have shaped our understanding of motherhood — and of our mothers — in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with particular attention to the political economy of reproductive labor and the intersections of motherhood with class, race, gender, sexuality, migration, medical science, and technology. We engage closely with texts from across a range of registers, including the scholarly, literary, and cinematic. Readings draw from film and media studies, feminist and queer theory, autotheory, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, as well as poetry, novels, and memoirs, brought into conversation with a variety of moving image work including fiction, non-fiction, and experimental film and video; installation; social and vernacular media.

Permission code required to register. Please contact course instructor (tobylee@nyu.edu) with your department/degree program and reasons for your interest in the course.

Allen Weiss
Wednesdays, 12:30-3:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 3103 / Class # 12660
4 points

Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double is among the foundational texts of Performance Studies. Its influence has been inestimable, and it continues to inform contemporary theory and practice across the arts. This work takes on all the more urgency as it resonates with our current situation of contagion, confinement, violence, revolt. Its most celebrated chapter, “The Theater and the Plague,” proposes an aesthetic of suffering, with the epidemic as its central metaphor: a “theater of cruelty” that prefigures the privation, isolation and incarceration of his last years, from which arose his most extraordinary works. However, The Theater and Its Double is usually read without a broader context, or more recently – given the current wave of interest in the sound arts – along with his radio piece, To Have Done with the Judgment of God. The other thirty volumes of his complete works are generally ignored by all but specialists, yet the earliest writings composed at the moment of his association with the Surrealists offer a prefiguration of his mature work, while the last pieces (diaries, poems, drawings, radio) are tantamount to a radical transformation of modernist French poetry and poetics.

This section is open to students in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies only. Outside students should register under PERF-GT 2217.

Anna McCarthy
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
CINE-GT 1122
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 12647
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 22068
4 points

This course surveys the cinema and television of Ireland from the silent period to the present day, asking how Irish cinema fits within the wider domain of postcolonial film, literature, and media. The postcolonial context is important. Ireland’s independence from the British Empire is relatively recent and remains partial to this day. The freedom struggle was violent, and it lasted for centuries; not surprisingly, its effects continue to reverberate in Irish culture. As our screenings, readings and discussions demonstrate, the making of a distinctively Irish cinema is, necessarily, a process of cultural reflection on the history of the nation, and on state-engendered physical and emotional violence in particular. Topics covered include settler colonialism and land clearance, entrenched sectarian conflict, and state-sanctioned religious tyranny. We will examine Irish film and media not only in their historical context but also in relation to signature creative works from other twentieth century liberation and decolonization struggles. Assessment will be based on short essays, final group presentations, and ongoing participation. 

Laura Harris
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
CINE-GT 1178
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 18862
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 22070
4 points

Drawing on Kara Keeling’s notion of “the cinematic” as a hegemonic common sense conditioned by cinematic processes, we will consider the way the cinematic circulates in the Caribbean and the way the racial, heteropatriarchal and capitalist logics it reproduces have shaped the organization of social life there.  We will also consider the way cinematic processes have become interlinked with other aesthetic, social and spiritual practices in the Caribbean. Does that interlinking further consolidate the cinematic or does it open it to other possible configurations of life? We will view films and videos made about the Caribbean (Hollywood, Soviet, anthropological, political, etc.) and films and videos made in and around the Caribbean (by filmmakers such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Sara Gómez, Hugh A. Robertson and Suzanne Nunez Robertson or Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and diasporic filmmakers such as Horace Ové, Richard Fung, Raoul Peck or Miryam Charles). We will read about the creation of alternative filmmaking infrastructures (the state-sponsored institute in post-revolutionary Cuba, for example, as well as radical collectives like the Victor Jara film collective in Guyana). We will also study various quasi-cinematic practices such as: music by dancehall deejays who adopted the names of cinema stars and characters; the deployment by poet Kamau Brathwaite of a computer-generated font he calls “Sycorax Video Style;” video “transmissions” in Santeria rituals documented by scholar-practitioner Aisha Beliso-De Jesus; and the radical venue-shaping activities of intellectuals and artists like M. Jacqui Alexander, Sean Leonard, Christopher Cozier and Kriston Chen.

Dana Polan
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 1703
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 12650
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 22072
4 points

Best known as a singer, Frank Sinatra also had an important and extensive career in Hollywood cinema. Many of his stand-out films use his ethnic and working-class background to investigate—and sometimes interrogate—postwar class structures and strictures, especially around projections of masculinity. We approach the culture and politics of post-World War II America through a study of key films starring Frank Sinatra, including On the Town, Suddenly, From Here to Eternity, The Man with the Golden Arm, Young at Heart, Guys and Dolls, Some Came Running, High Society, and The Manchurian Candidate. While focusing on cinema and the meanings of performance within that medium, we also attend to Sinatra’s efforts in other media, such as radio and recording, and analyze pop music as American expressive art. The overall aim is to use Sinatra as a case study for means by which, contrary to stereotypes of postwar conformity and suburban middle-classness, popular American culture in the period could serve in the expression of nonconformity, new projections of masculinity, and liberal examination of ethnic identity.

Toby Lee
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 2001 / Class # 12654
4 points

In this course, we examine the history of documentary form as political discourse and practice. We take as a starting point documentary theorist Michael Renov’s discussion of poetics — which he defines as the rigorous investigation of aesthetic forms, their composition and function — in the context of the documentary image. While Renov argues that “poetics must also confront the problematics of power,” so too must an understanding of political documentary take seriously questions of poetics and form. Through close readings of particular films and careful study of their formal strategies and aesthetic choices, we explore how documentary images act, or how they are made to act, within larger structures of power and resistance. We will look at films from a wide range of periods, places and styles — including observational, experimental, compilation/appropriation, performative, propaganda, and essay films — considering these works in relation to a variety of topics including social and political activism, revolutionary movements, state violence, surveillance, colonialism and anti-colonialism, human rights, and the shifting politics of the image in the digital age.  

Permission code required to register. Please contact course instructor (tobylee@nyu.edu) with your department/degree program and reasons for your interest in the course, no later than November 22.

Jacob Floyd
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 2125
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 8165
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 22074
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.

Josslyn Luckett
Fridays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 1500 / Class # 12669
4 points

MGM screenwriter Dorothy Farnum once described script writers as "stokers of a ship, necessary but condemned to the hold of obscurity...we do work so the stars and directors will have a nice time on deck." This course is designed to center the work of the writer by analyzing the techniques employed by Hollywood, independent, and international screenwriters. This semester we will devote our study to the crafting of the BIOPIC by engaging traditional works and those that subvert the genre (from Gandhi to Bessie, from I'm Not Here to Jason and Shirley). Music, politics, art world icons, when does this genre get it right and when does it fail miserably? What is the place for (Auto)Biopics like All that Jazz (Fosse) or Pain and Glory (Almodavar), and how willing are we to dwell in poetic meditations such as Jimmy by Yashaddai Owens?  We start in the "hold" by exploring the formal elements of the script (character, scene, dialogue, plot structure). We then move to consider how underrepresented communities are served (or not served) by this genre's efforts to bring lesser known historical moments and figures to the big screen for the first time. Finally in several cases we will compare these biopics to the award winning documentaries from which they "borrow" heavily.

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

Tejaswini Ganti
Mondays, 2:00-4:30pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 107
CINE-GT 1403 / Class # 4908
4 points

Description TBA.

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

Andrew Lampert
Wednesdays, 12:30 - 4:30
Room 674
CINE-GT 1806-002 / Class # 23109
4 points

This course embraces a broad conception of curating as the treatment of materials from their discovery, archiving, preservation and reformatting, through their exhibition, distribution, exploitation, and interpretation. It compares and contrasts the often differing curatorial practices found in archives, museums, cinematheques, festivals, art galleries, web platforms, and other venues. The course examines the goals of public programming, audience engagement, and the myriad factors involved with presenting and distributing moving image media. We explore various methods to present archival and often marginalized moving film, video and digital media via engaging exhibitions, events, publications, and media productions. Our guest speakers are professionals involved in the world of cinema, art and cultural curating and programming.

This section of the course has limited seats available to all graduate students.

Ara Merjian
Mondays, 3:30-6:15pm
Casa Italiana, Room 203
CINE-GT 1981 / Class # 22739
4 points

This course examines modes of modernist painting, cinema, and literature which destabilize perspectives, points of view, and narrative positions, most notably interior/exterior, subjective/objective, and private/public.  It tackles head-on the theory and practice of Free Indirect Style: a widespread mode of prose and film which conflates third-person narration and first-person speech, affording the illusion of temporary entry into a character’s consciousness.  Pioneered by authors such as Austen, Flaubert, and James, developed by high modernist authors like Woolf and Joyce, and applied to the cinema by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gilles Deleuze, Free Indirect Style conflates, multiplies, and hybridizes points of view.  It contains utopian potential in terms of shared vision, empathy, and intersubjectivity; yet it can also be used to ironize, isolate, and distance.  In all of these instances, it destabilizes any clear sense of who speaks or who sees.
 
Pasolini called the Free Indirect the “mimesis of the gaze,” since what is shared is not simply visual information about another individual, but that individual’s way of seeing.  Our interdisciplinary course will examine its application to the realm of painterly vision.  The mode came to be named and studied only in 1912, precisely as modernism (and especially Cubism) had begun shattering paradigms of perspective and point of view.  What connections may we draw between these shifts?  How precisely do the fundamental ambiguities of Free Indirect style relate to the ambiguities of modernism?  Are its destabilizations partly constitutive of modernism as we know it?
 
Tendencies will include Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Metaphysical aesthetics. Artists, authors, and auteurs will include Gustave Flaubert, Gustave Caillebotte, Virginia Woolf, Giorgio de Chirico, Franz Marc, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jules Romains, Jean-Luc Godard, Pasolini.  We will read texts by Pasolini, Deleuze, Mikhail Bakhtin, Charles Bailly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson,   Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds; Richard Pearce, The Politics of Narration, and parts of Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel.  Along the way we will examine related (but different phenomena such as stream of consciousness and interior monologue; we will address questions of transparency, mediation (and its relationship to media), private/public; and we will attend to questions of class, gender, “primitivism,” and the phenomenon of non-verbal literary evocation.  

Limited seats available for Cinema Studies students only. Other interested students should register for ITAL-UA 1981-004.

Cheryl T. Furjanic
Thursdays, 5:00-7:30pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 102
CINE-GT 1996 / Class # 4909
4 points

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

For approved Culture & Media students in their second year only after completing Culture & Media I and Sight & Sound: Documentary.

CINE-GT 2901 / class # 12655        1-4 points variable
CINE-GT 2903 / class # 12656        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-GT 2950 / class # 8158        1-4 points variable
CINE-GT 2952 / class # 12667      1-4 points variable

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