Fall 2024 Undergraduate Courses

Dana Polan
Fridays, 9:30am-1:30pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 10 / Class # 15043
4 points

This course is designed to introduce the basic methods and concepts of cinema studies to new majors.  The course aims to help students develop a range of analytical skills that will form the basis of their study of film and other moving-image media they will encounter in cinema studies.  By the end of the semester, students will: 1) be fluent in the basic vocabulary of film form; 2) recognize variations of mode and style within the dominant modes of production (narrative, documentary, and experimental); 3) appreciate the relationship between formal analysis and questions of interpretation; and 4) grasp the mechanics of structuring a written argument about a film’s meaning.  Lectures and readings provide a detailed introduction to the basic terms of film scholarship, and to some critical issues associated with particular modes of film production and criticism. Screenings introduce students to the historical and international range of production that cinema studies addresses. Recitations provide students with opportunities to review the content of readings and lectures, and to develop their skills of analysis and interpretation in discussion.  

Cinema Studies majors and pre-approved minors only.

Recitations
Tuesdays
Room 670
                                            Class #       
002:  9:15-10:30am                15044
003:  10:45am-12:00pm          15045

Chris Straayer
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 16 / Class # 15046
4 points

This course closely examines a variety of theoretical writings concerned with aesthetic, social, and psychological aspects of the medium.  Students study the writing of both classical theorists such as Eisenstein and Bazin and contemporary thinkers such as Metz, Dyer, DeLauretis, Baudrillard, and Foucault.  Questions addressed range from the nature of cinematic representation and its relationship to other forms of cultural expression to the way in which cinema shapes our conception of racial and gender identity.  

Cinema Studies majors only.

Prerequisite: Intro to Cinema Studies or Expressive Cultures: Film.

Recitations
Wednesdays
Room 674
                                            Class #       
002:  9:15-10:30am                15047
003:  10:45am-12:00pm          15048

Antonia Lant
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 700 / Class # 15059
4 points

This class examines a small number of films in great detail with the intention of enhancing student comprehension of the multiple levels at which films are made and engage us. Among the film scenes that we may analyze are examples taken from: Touch of Evil (1958), Do the Right Thing (1989), In the Mood for Love (2000), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Run, Lola, Run (1998), Fish Tank (2009), Whisky (2004), Power of the Dog (2021), and Gilda (1946). The course encourages the intensive, and comparative study of film, and concentrates on a discrete number of tasks: the formal analysis of the sound and image tracks; examination of the shape of the scenario and the segmentation of the narrative; consideration of techniques of stylistic analysis; and the methods by which to aggregate and evaluate a film’s surrounding documents, such as studio papers, posters, blogs, trailers, and critical reviews. Students will acquire vocabulary and tools through which to describe the textual patterns and forces by which a film produces its meanings and effects. As a key part of the course, each student will closely analyze an individual film that they have chosen, and give a final presentation on their findings.

Prerequisite: Film Theory

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

Michael B. Gillespie
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 635
CINE-UT 707 / Class # 10560
4 points

If genre is a discourse and not a strict category, how might shifting our focus from an exclusively American sense of film genre provide for an appreciation of different ideas of culture, nation, history and/or historiography, politics, and aesthetics? Focusing on contemporary cinema and film genres such as speculative fiction/science fiction, comedy, the musical, noir, the romance, the western, and horror, the class centers the distinct ways that film genre is enacted in a range of global cinemas and contexts. Films will include Good Manners (Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, 2017), Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018), Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019), The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2019), Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021), Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013), The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, 2023), Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019), The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015), Portrait of a Lady of Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019), La Llorona (Jayro Bustamante, 2019), The Handmaiden (Park Chan-Wook, 2016), and Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016).

Prerequisite: Film Theory

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

Marina Hassapopoulou
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 710 / Class # 15061
4 points

Interactive cinema broadly refers to a cluster of interrelated filmic practices that incorporate the audience into the construction of the work (e.g. through voting polls, motion sensors, and live performance) in order to create a participatory multimedia experience. This course will approach cinema as an interconnected media landscape through a cross-cultural study of the development and reception contexts of interactive films, ranging from pre-/early cinema and avant-garde experiments in Expanded Cinema to recent digital projects in software-generated films and virtual reality. Through interactive screenings, media analysis, interdisciplinary readings, discussions, presentations, and event visits, the course will establish connections between interactive cinema and canonical approaches to Film and Media Studies, while also indicating its relevance to current topics in the Digital Humanities. The course additionally aims to provide students with an alternative historiography that takes into account unique experimental practices that have not been fully incorporated into the field of Film and Media Studies, and to productively expand and interrogate different notions of the cinematic. Students will work towards actively contributing to the expansion of the field of Film and Media Studies through media archeology projects, and through collaborative blogging for the Interactive Media Archive. Themes and key concepts include: cinema in the gallery/museum, media historiography, intermediality, prosumption, narrative and authorship in the digital age, object oriented ontology, digital democracy, remix, participatory culture, media convergence and ecology, hybridity, remediation, and virtual ethics. For their final assessment, students will have the option of choosing between a research paper and an interactive project, and each option will include a multimedia component.

Prerequisite: Film Theory

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

Anna McCarthy
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
CINE-UT 135
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 20436
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 21199
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. 

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Lauren Treihaft
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 674
CINE-UT 215
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 20291
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 21210
4 points

From the slick neo-noir aesthetic of their film debut Blood Simple (1984) to the Academy Award winning O Brother, Where Art Thou’s (2000) modern reimagining of The Odyssey in the American South during the Great Depression, few directors in recent decades have exhibited such an idiosyncratic and genre-spanning cinematic vision as Joel and Ethan Coen. This course takes a deep dive into the movies and mythos of the Coen Brothers by focusing on a range of archetypes, intertexts, and motifs that emerge in their work, from their satires on the American Dream, to their penchant for black comedy and existential philosophy. By the end of the course, students will uncover many intricacies of the Coen’s unique storytelling practices and explore the recurring themes that make up their complex cinematic universe. 

This course fulfills the American Cinema requirement.

Antonia Lant
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-UT 304
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 15055
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 15056
4 points

This course surveys the film musical genre from the coming of sound to the present. We examine the musical’s relation to technological changes (the use of optical sound, dubbing, widescreen, motion capture) and also to social, cultural, and economic transformations (the Depression, rise of teen audiences, changing priorities in casting, innovations in music). By paying close attention to editing, cinematography, lighting and other aesthetic elements as well as to the multiple aspects of performance that contribute to the musical’s milieu, we uncover both its utopian and its grittier sides. The course engages the musical’s rich critical literature about: early all-Black cast musicals; the history of classical Hollywood titles of the 1930s-1950s (Maurice Chevalier, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, etc); a range of genre appropriations and deconstructions by non-Hollywood and often non-American filmmakers (Julie Dash, Chantal Akerman, Jacques Demy, Lars von Trier); and weighs more recent musical titles within this history (eg. La La Land, A Star is Born). Coursework: short written responses; a presentation; and a final paper.

Manthia Diawara
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-UT 844
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 15063
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 21218
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.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Dan Streible
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 50 / Class # 15049
4 points

This course offers a broad survey of American cinema from its beginnings (and even its pre-history) up to 1960.  While the emphasis will be on the dominant, narrative fiction film, there will be attention to other modes of American cinema such as experimental film, animation, shorts, and non-fiction film.  The course will look closely at films themselves -- how do their styles and narrative structures change over time? -- but also at contexts:  how do films reflect their times?  how does the film industry develop? what are the key institutions that had impact on American film over its history?  We will also attend to the role of key figures in film's history:  from creative personnel (for example, the director or the screenwriter) to industrialists and administrators, to censors to critics and to audiences themselves.  The goal will be to provide an overall understanding of one of the most consequential of modern popular art forms and of its particular contributions to the art and culture of our modernity.

Recitations
Thursdays
Room 670
                                            Class #       
002:  9:15-10:30am                15050
003:  10:45am-12:00pm          15051

This course fulfills the American Cinema requirement.

Phoebe Chen
Wednesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 55 / Class # 15052
4 points

In this course, we will explore the emergence and development of cinema from the late-nineteenth century to the 1960s. We will examine the multiple histories—cultural, economic, technological, political, aesthetic—that comprise the nexus of film history as a thoroughly international phenomenon. Beginning with proto-cinematic optical devices and theories of perception in the context of western industrial capitalism and urbanization, we will approach film history through the key paradigm of circulation. Despite the largely Eurocentric focus on cinema’s origins in terms of production, we will take a more expansive approach to global histories of distribution and exhibition, considering how the flows of capital and colonial enterprises facilitated (or curtailed) the development of material infrastructures that established the technological and cultural conditions for cinema’s development around the world. 

This course will span a selection of films from France, Germany, Mexico, China, Italy, India, Egypt, and Japan, while critically challenging the framework of national cinema by emphasizing questions of transnational aesthetic and economic exchange. For instance, although we will take up popular case studies like German Expressionism, we will also examine such movements through their transnational circulations in Mexican and Japanese cinema. We will also investigate the development of cinema as a medium shaped by the histories of its (intended or actual) use. This includes the instrumentalist approaches in China and the Soviet Union which sought to mobilize cinematic affects towards political consciousness, various manifestos from the French avant-garde that rally for a cinéma pur to expand perceptual experience itself, the postwar approach to realism and ethics in Italian and Indian cinema, and postcolonial negotiations with cosmopolitanism and identity in the former colonial core.

Recitations
Mondays
Room 674
                                            Class #       
002:  9:15-10:30am                15053
003:  10:45am-12:00pm          15054

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Kenneth Dancyger
Thursdays / 3:30-6:10pm
Room 109
CINE-UT 146 / class # 19563
4 points

This class is designed to help the students analyze a film script through both viewing and reading of a script. Plot and character development, character dialogue, foreground, background, and story will all be examined. Using feature films, we will highlight these script elements rather than the integrated experience of the script, performance, directing, and editing elements of the film. Assignments include writing coverage.

Limited seats available. This section open to Cinema Studies BA only.

Eric Kohn
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
CINE-UT 600 / class # 15058
4 points

This course demystifies the professional and intellectual possibilities of film criticism in the contemporary media landscape through a historical foundation. Students will write reviews & critical essays as well as produce analyses of existing work, all of which should aid those interested in pursuing further opportunities in criticism and/or developing a deeper understanding of the craft. Through a combination of readings, discussions, and screenings, we will explore the expansive possibilities of criticism with relation to global film culture, the role of the Internet, distinctions between academic and popular criticism, and the impact of the practice on the film and television industries themselves. We will cover the influence of major figures in the profession with course readings and discussions based around work by major figures including Ebert, Haskell, Farber, Kael, Sarris, Sontag, and many others. Major critics will visit the course to provide additional context. Emerging forms of critical practices, including podcasts & video essays, will also figure prominently, as will discussions surrounding the value of entertainment reporting and other related forms of journalism. In addition to engaging in classroom discussions, students will be expected to write weekly reviews, pitch essay ideas, file on deadline during certain courses, and complete a final essay.

Seats in this class are very limited. This course is open to Cinema Studies undergraduates only.

CINE-UT 900 / Class # 15062      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 # 15064      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.

Ludovic Cortade
Fridays, 2:00-4:45pm
Room 670
CINE-UT 125 / Class # 14351
4 points

Over the past forty years, French and Francophone cinema has evolved in the wake of the New Wave and its legacy. Globalization has generated new challenges and identities in France and in Francophonie that are reflected by contemporary French and Francophone cinema. This course offers an introduction to the history of French auteur cinema since the New Wave from two angles: (1) the director’s artistic signature and (2) the contextualization of films in the political and cultural history of the French speaking world.

Course learning objectives:

• Investigate the notion of the “auteur” and arthouse cinema
• Study the film techniques that allow us to identify the artistic signature of an auteur in contemporary French and Francophone cinema
• Understand and discuss the key themes of French and Francophone directors from a stylistic point of view
• Situate and analyze films in the historical context of French and Francophone culture from the 1980s onwards

Directors include: Truffaut, Pialat, Varda, Audiard, Sciamma, Denis Sissako, etc.

This crosslisted section of the course is open to Cinema Studies majors only. Other students should register for FREN-UA 879.

Josslyn Luckett
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Cantor 102
CORE-UA 750

Visit the College Core Curriculum website for more information including recitation schedules.

Gregory Cram
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:30pm
Room 670
CINE-GT 1804 / Class # 15028
4 points

With the advent of new technologies, film producers and distributors and managers of film and video collections are faced with a myriad of legal and ethical issues concerning the use of their works or the works found in various collections. The answers to legal questions are not always apparent and can be complex, particularly where different types of media are encompassed in one production. When the law remains unclear, a risk assessment, often fraught with ethical considerations, is required to determine whether a production can be reproduced, distributed or exhibited without infringing the rights of others. What are the various legal rights that may encumber moving image material? What are the complex layers of rights and who holds them?Does one have to clear before attempting to preserve or restore a work? How do these rights affect downstream exhibition and distribution of a preserved work? And finally, what steps can be taken in managing moving image collections so that decisions affecting copyrights can be taken consistently? This course will help students make intelligent decisions and develop appropriate policies for their institution.

Students outside of the Moving Image Archiving & Preservation (MIAP) MA Program should email the MIAP staff at tisch.preservation@nyu.edu with your N-ID number to request enrollment.