Fall 2023 Undergraduate Courses

Josslyn Luckett
Fridays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 10 / Class # 12688
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                12689
003:  10:45am-12:00pm          12690

Gianni Barchiesi
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 16 / Class # 12692
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.  

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

Recitations
Mondays
Room 674
                                            Class #      
002:  9:15-10:30am                12693
003:  10:45am-12:00pm          12694

Dan Streible
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 635
CINE-UT 700 / Class # 20526
4 points

The term "orphan film" emerged as the governing metaphor in film preservation. What should be done with the thousands of films abandoned by their owners? Now scholars, archivists, curators, and artists apply the term more broadly to refer to any audiovisual recording that has been neglected. That neglect might be physical (decaying or discarded media), cultural (marginalized, unpopular, or underground films), legal (works in copyright limbo; censored content), industrial (never-completed or undistributed movies), technological (recordings in obsolete formats), or historical (forgotten, outdated, or ephemeral films). It's all manner of media outside the commercial mainstream: home movies, outtakes, industrial and educational movies, independent documentaries, ethnographic films, newsreels, experimental pieces, silent-era productions, stock footage, found footage, medical films, kinescopes, small-gauge celluloid, amateur productions, surveillance footage, test reels, government films, advertisements, student works, sponsored films, and more.

The collective work of researchers, preservationists, and media makers devoted to saving and studying such material constitutes what has been called an orphan film movement. Part of that creative ferment stems from our department's biennial Orphan Film Symposium (nyu.edu/orphanfilm).

Through screenings, research, and readings, this seminar explores the rich variety of work generated under the "orphans" rubric. We consider the implications for film and media histories and research rediscovered films in depth. Students complete historical research and/or creative projects designed for web publication.

Prerequisite: Film Theory

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

Robert Stam
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 707 / Class # 20527
4 points

Before “remix” was called “remix,” it went by many other names, such as: “tradition and the individual talent,” influence, parody, pastiche, burlesque, adaptation, dialogism, the carnivalesque, collage, detournement, refunctioning, intertextuality, and so forth. This course, which should be of interest to students concerned with literature, film, popular culture, and with artistic adaptation in general, will explore artistic and interpretative remix practices that are both very ancient and extremely contemporary. While “remix” is a recent term that evokes internet culture, its roots go back to long-standing traditions in the arts. We will discuss “remix” in both its literal and figurative meanings to explore its long term-genealogies and its relevance to literature, film, and mass-mediated culture.

What all of the terms and theories and practices cited above have in common is that they refer to processes of recombining or reframing pre-existing materials to create something new. One central thinker in formulating these ideas, long before the advent of the internet, was Russian literary and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who a century ago articulated key concepts such as dialogism, speech genres, and carnivalesque parody, all relevant to contemporary remix.Another key thinker was French narratologist Gerard Genette with his concept of “transtextuality,” which he defines as “all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts.” The goal of the course is to help students understand transtextual remix both as a longstanding (but also contemporary) artistic process and as a mode of analysis. Contemporary remix practices are rooted in millennial traditions. The course willmove constantly across borders between past and present, between literature and film, between the arts and the media, and, where possible, between theory and practice.

Prerequisite: Film Theory

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

Marina Hassapopoulou
Wednesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 710 / Class # 13211
4 points

This course will explore the film-philosophy of mind-bending cinema. Mind-game films are usually commended for the unusual ways in which they tell stories, experiment with narrative and form, and intellectually engage cinephiles. These films address philosophical issues on the fringes of human perception, and their often-disorienting formal structures could thus be tied to an uncertainty on how to organize and adequately convey such complex inquiry. This course will study mind-bending cinema’s universal, cognitive, and culturally-specific aspects, and question whether the increased popularity of disordered narratives can be regarded as symptomatic of the changing role of the moving image within contexts of “global” connectivity and interactive media. Students will also have the opportunity to study the work of influential international auteurs through the mind-game lens (such as Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren, Akira Kurosawa, Jordan Peele, David Lynch, Park Chan-wook, Chris Marker, and Michel Gondry), as well as discover experimental mind-game films from multiple cultural contexts and industries (including South America, Australia, Asia, and Europe). Mind-game films are some of the most challenging films to write about, which means that students will be engaging in rigorous and multifaceted film analysis that often pushes the boundaries of linguistic expression; for this reason, the course will attempt to supplement and expand written and verbal critique with other modes of interpretation, including visualizations and digital tools.

Assignments for this course include film response papers, presentations, online discussion, blogging, visualizations, and a final research paper or project (with professor’s approval).

Prerequisite: Film Theory

Michael B. Gillespie
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
CINE-UT 320
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 13586
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 13587
4 points

This course is an interdisciplinary approach to American cinema with a focus on noir films of the 1990s and an investment in noir not as a fixed categorical genre but as a discourse, modality, or what James Naremore calls “the history of an idea.” Students will study how these films consequentially restaged issues of criminality, detection, the social contract, the city, and the ambiguities of good and evil. Rather than defer to the classical noir model and the reductive frame of “neo-noir,” this course considers how this period posed distinct enactments of film form, historiography, culture, gender, sexuality, class, and race/ethnicity.

Toby Lee
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-UT 417
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 22777
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 22778
4 points

This course offers a defamiliarizing view of what can look like a familiar genre: the sports documentary. We will combine close viewing with readings from diverse fields — including documentary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and sports studies — to engage with a wide range of media, from early cinematic engagements with the human body, physiology, and movement, to today’s blockbuster documentaries produced by the likes of ESPN or major streaming platforms. Zooming in, we will take a critical look at the formal strategies and narrative structures that dominate the sports documentary, and we will consider alternative and experimental approaches, as well as recent evolutions of the genre in response to changes in media production, distribution, and viewing practices. Zooming out, we will expand on our close readings of media to ask larger questions about the relationship between the documentary, the body in movement, and organized sports. How do sports serve as a space where class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability intersect in negotiations of the human and the social, the individual and the collective? In what ways does documentary, as form and practice, illuminate but also contribute to the place of sports, as a social practice, in the cultural imaginary?

Feng-Mei Heberer
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 674
CINE-UT 488
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 22794
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 22795
4 points

This course explores transnational Asian media cultures in the “digital age.” We will examine how digital technologies – from the camera to social media to the Internet – have changed habits of media consumption, production, and representation; and how they have enabled new aesthetic, social, and political movements. We will discuss these changes in the larger context of historical struggles over power, money, land, and the future. Case studies include the secret work of online content moderation; cute cats on the Internet; Asian (American) influencers; sci-fi films; and at least one Korean blockbuster. Moreover, by paying particular attention to the cross-border dynamics of and between these various case studies, Digital Asias aims to pluralize “Asia” as an often-assumed homogeneous continent that stands opposite the so-called “West.” In sum, this course connects the seemingly immaterial online sphere to our complex lived realities.

Please note: Students may not join this course if they have missed the first class meeting.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Lauren Treihaft
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 50 / Class # 12696
4 points

From the invention of the kinetograph in Thomas Edison’s laboratory in 1892, to the blood-soaked bathtub at the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, this course looks through the lens of history to reveal the story of American cinema in half a century— from its origins through 1960.   

Although this course will offer a largely chronological, linear narrative of the evolution of American cinema, it will commence at the end of the time span studied in the course with 1960’s Psycho.

There are a number of reasons to begin any study of film history with Psycho, the mythos of the Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock for one, our reason for beginning with this film is meant to places emphasis on the way that it offers a nuanced and complex exemplar of many of the elements and concepts that are absolutely fundamental to the  technological, historical and formal development of an American national cinema as well as the American film industry itself.

From editing techniques, to the Golden Age of Hollywood and the Star System, to genre studies and audience reception studies, with Psycho we get the full picture of what’s to come. Why not cut straight to the chase and work backwards?

Recitations
Thursdays
Room 670
                                            Class #       
002:  9:15-10:30am                20523
003:  10:45am-12:00pm          12697

This course fulfills the American Cinema requirement.

Andrea Avidad
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-UT 50 / Class # 12700
4 points

In this course we will examine the origins and development of cinema, examining the materiality of cinematic mediation vis-à-vis the cultural politics of the Late 19th Century and of the first half of the 20th Century. This investigation into the complex microhistory of the moving image requires a critical engagement with crucial and expansive historical “moments” and the dominant cultural logics that correspondingly emerged from each of them. Our study calls for an exploration of the cultural logic of monopoly capitalism, the shift to multinational capitalism, as well as of the technological and perceptual revolutions linked to these multifaceted slices of historical time. Our historical survey will interrogate dominant methodological approaches that employ the concept of “invention” (of a device), the material contradiction between the national and the international at the heart of cinema’s own birth and expansion, the status of the film object as commodity, and the historical entanglement between sensation and technical media. We will give attention to both well-known case studies such as the Soviet avant-garde, with its innovative approach to film revolutionary aesthetics (a dialectical approach to film form, the “inhuman” Kino-Eye, and Radio Eye), and to less-known cases such as 1950s explorations of “Techno-Mysticism” and “Tactilvision” in the work of Spanish experimental filmmaker José Val del Omar, who articulated a poetics of expanded cinematic sensation during Francoist Spain. We will also consider cases such as 1930s avant-garde Surrealist influences on the scientific documentary, scrutinizing the work of Jean Painlevé, whose cinematographic explorations give us an image of nature’s queerness. But the study of these alternative cinematic histories will not prevent us from also assessing the material implications of cinema and authoritarian political contexts, especially those of WWI and WWII, where film served as technology for ideological indoctrination, operating at the level of bodily affect and cognition. Following this critical line of investigation, we will embark on a study of colonial and neocolonial configurations, assessing the dual function of film as an enabler of oppressive global relations, and as a tool for contestation and resistance.

Recitations
Wednesdays
Room 674
                                            Class #       
002:  9:15-10:30am                20524
003:  10:45am-12:00pm          12701

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Eric Kohn
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 670
CINE-UT 600 / class # 12993
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. 

Cinema Studies Undergraduates ONLY.

CINE-UT 900 / Class # 12704      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 # 13086      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. All internship grades will be pass/fail.

Kenneth Dancyger
Thursdays / 3:30-6:10pm
Cantor 109
CINE-UT 146 / class # 13110
4 points

This class is designed to help the students analyze a film script. Premise, character population, plot and genre, 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 will include three script analyses.

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

Ludovic Cortade
Fridays, 2:00-4:45pm
Room 670
CINE-UT 125 / Class # 20268
4 points

This course offers an introduction to the history of French and Francophone filmmaking from the latest films of the New Wave (Truffaut, Pialat, Varda) to the present (Ozon, Honoré, Denis, Audiard, Sciamma, Sissako). The emphasis is placed on race, class, national identity, gender and sexuality.

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

Benjamin L. Robinson
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:30-4:45pm
Silver 406
CINE-UT 319 / Class # 20525
4 points

Nothing is more common than getting worked up about politics. But what is it about politics that riles the passions – and what role do the passions play in shaping politics? Why are some expressions of emotion valorized in political culture, while others are dismissed as irrational, illegitimate, or pathological? Starting around the time of upheaval brought about by the French Revolution, this course will explore through the optic of literature and film the whole scale of political affect from the “righteous passion” of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas to the peculiar impassivity of Melville’s Bartleby. For passion in politics can express itself in moments of revolution, rebellion, or outrage, but equally in apparently more “passive” attitudes of disaffection, apathy, or depression. Discussion will be supplemented by readings in political theory from Hobbes to Butler. Literary texts may include Hölderlin, Kleist, Kafka, Melville, Jelinek, Coetzee, Lorde, Dangarembga; films by Chantal Akerman, Michael Haneke, Béla Tarr, and Claire Denis.  Course taught in English.

Limted enrollment. This crosslisted section of the course is open to Cinema Studies majors only. Other students should register for GERM-UA 202.

Zhen Zhang
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Cantor 102
CORE-UA 750 / Class # 7712

This course traces the origins of Chinese-language cinema in Shanghai in the early twentieth century, then its transformation and diversification into a multi-faceted phenomenon in the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan and, to some extent, the diaspora. We study several Sinophone film cultures including their historical kinship ties and place them within the regional and global contexts of modernization, war, revolution, nation-building, globalization, and attendant socio-cultural changes. Topics related to screenings and discussions include urban modernity, exhibition and spectatorship, the transition to sound, propaganda, gender and ethnic identities, genre formation, New Waves, and independent documentaries.

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