Fall 2024 Graduate Courses

Jacob Floyd
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1010 / Class # 15007
4 points

This course will introduce students to key concepts in film form and film narrative. The course will provide models for close analysis of audio-visual works with an emphasis on cinema. It will also deal with issues in interpreting media works through formal analysis. The first part of this course will have a strong formal emphasis, and introduce concepts like editing, mise-en-scene, cinematography, and sound in relation to their function in structuring film narrative. The course will also study film form at work in film narrative, and examine the relationship of film form and narrative to genre and culture, through cinema’s connection to cultural contexts and discourses.

This course is open only to Cinema Studies graduate students.

Dan Streible
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1015 / Class # 15008
4 points

This course examines the ways in which the history of film has been conceptualized, written, documented, researched, and revised. Readings include theoretical considerations of historiography, methodological approaches, practical guides to conducting research, and a variety of essays from the field of cinema and media history and related disciplines. We analyze social, cultural, aesthetic, economic, ideological, and technological histories of cinema.  How do we frame questions about film and the historical past that are substantial, answerable, and logically sound? What evidence might help answer these questions?  How should we thereby write historical analyses that answer questions posed?   

We will not attempt to survey the entire history of cinema. In roughly chronological sequence, we will consider particular aspects of that history: “early cinema,” “classical Hollywood cinema,” social history and exhibition, nonfiction and nontheatrical traditions, and the web-based media that cause us to reconsider what cinema is and was. This eclectic approach is indicative of the recent forms that film history has taken: de-centering Hollywood and feature films, rediscovering neglected archives, seeking “lost” works, moving past film specificity to historicize all moving images and sounds as a form of media archaeology.

This course is open only to Cinema Studies graduate students.

Anna McCarthy
Fridays, 8:00am-12:00pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 2601 / Class # 15019
4 points

This course examines a range of activities entailed in being in the Cinema Studies doctoral program and preparing for a career in cinema and media studies. Most class meetings will include a guest speaker, as most of the full-time faculty in the Department of Cinema Studies will discuss their own research methodologies and careers. The class will also read two recent influential books in the field.  The professional activities to be examined include things such as participating in professional organizations, answering a call for papers, giving a conference presentation, “dissertating,” book reviewing, teaching, and publishing one’s research. We will consider the process of choosing a research focus for a scholarly project and tackling its research problems. We will study protocols followed for research in specific locations, and also consider techniques of conducting and organizing research, with emphasis on database research and use of NYU Libraries resources. Among the practical exercises that may be assigned are: evaluating journals, presses, and websites associated with cinema and media studies; reporting on libraries, archives, and research resources; attending professional talks and special events; delivering a short scholarly talk; and/or composing a book review, a report or blog entry on a cinema studies or other event you attend or a paper based on the talk or a research portfolio.

This course is open only to first year Cinema Studies PhD students.

Jacob Floyd
Wednesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 635
CINE-GT 1127
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 20780
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 21170
4 points

Over the last decade, there has been an increased presence of Indigenous-produced and created television, especially on streaming platforms. This course will contextualize and study several contemporary Indigenous television series from Mohawk Girls to Reservation Dogs to Spirit Rangers. To begin with, we will look at the histories of television in American space and society, as well as the impact of satellite broadcasting in Australia and Canada. In response to these histories, we will look at Indigenous community and nation-produced networks and programming from Imparja Television to OsiyoTV.  We will also explore important moments in the history of Native performers on Non-Native TV, and define what Vine Deloria, Jr. called “Indian Humor” as a key concept in Indigenous TV comedy.

This course will then spend time examining Indigenous approaches to popular television genres, for example: tribal capitalism and the workplace comedy in Rutherford Falls, the uses of horror and splatter comedy in The Dead Lands and Firebite, the mystery series and knowledge in Dark Winds, etc. We will also examine the collaboration between Native and Non-Native creative personnel at work in shows like The English. Lastly, after looking at Native viewers’ responses to Indigenous presence in recent Star Wars TV shows, as well as creative acts of fandom like claiming Baby Yoda, we will study Native fan communities through a fan studies perspective, looking at their works from memes to fan art.

Chris Straayer
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 635
CINE-GT 1780
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 15013
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 15014
4 points

This course maps the emerging interdisciplinary field of Trans Studies, which concerns the history and culture of transgender, transsexual, non-binary, and non gender conforming people. From 19th century (and ongoing) sexology, to 1950s (and ongoing) genital “corrections” of intersex infants, to the 1969 Stonewall (and ongoing) rebellions for gay/lesbian liberation, to the 1970s second wave (and ongoing) feminist movement, the history of transgenderism has intersected lesbian, gay, bi, intersexual, and feminist histories in complicated ways. The phrase “a woman in a man’s body” has typed male homosexuals as well as transsexuals. Genital surgeries forced on intersexuals have been sought by transsexuals. Internal and lateral oppression often truncate coalitions against oppression. Within this complex history of theory and practice, trans* activists, lawyers, health workers, celebrities, scholars, artists, and filmmakers have produced an immense and vibrant culture. 

Josslyn Luckett
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 2002
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 15030
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 15031
4 points

While decades of Asian American filmmaking has engaged and critiqued the manifold ways that anti-Asian policies, rhetoric, and violence have impacted Asian American and Asian immigrant communities in the U.S., mainstream media discourse still too frequently centers conversations on the topic of "race" in black/white binaries. It has taken multiple pandemics in the past years to bring about increased discussion of racism and racial violence against Asian/Asian American and Pacific Islander communities and yet the conversations still tend to happen in silos as if racial violence directed at African Americans and Asian Americans bears no relationship. In this course we will take a comparative and relational look at recent (1990s to the present) documentaries produced by Asian American and Black Independent filmmakers (Including but not limited to Marissa Aroy, Damani Baker, Vivek Bald, Garrett Bradley, Yance Ford, LisaGaye Hamilton, Grace Lee, Tadashi Nakamura, Spencer Nakasako, Michelle Parkerson, Marlon Riggs, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Renee Tajima-Pena) to explore convergences and contrasts in style, themes, practices of resistance, and strategies of media activism/programming/education across the two communities.

Zhen Zhang
Fridays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 3105
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 21032
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 21168
4 points

The new Chinese documentary as an independent film practice emerged around 1989. Prior to that, documentary film in China was exclusively produced and distributed within a state-controlled media system. Paralleling and bearing witness to decades of rapid and large-scale economic and social transformations in post-Mao China, the new documentary has also transformed itself into a multifaceted social movement involving filmmakers, critics, curators, and publics on a variety of platforms including the internet, and has caught the attention of both domestic and international film and arts festivals. An integral aspect of the course will inquire into issues of technology, distribution, exhibition and reception.  

The seminar has two interconnected components: 1) Tracing multiple historical genealogies of the movement and to explore conceptual frameworks for understanding the dynamic relationships between aesthetic experimentations, socio-political exigencies and ethical responsibilities in the Chinese independent documentary; 2) Placing the evolving phenomenon in the PRC within a broader Sinophone context and regional globalization, the course brings in parallels or alternative developments in Taiwan and Hong Kong, analyzing their connections and divergences. A crucial component of the course requires active participation in the 11th Reel China Biennial.

Michael B. Gillespie
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 1332
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 15040
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 15041
4 points

What might it mean to consider film blackness in the key of avant-garde and experimental film and video? Focusing on the work of Black artists from around the world, the course examines issues of history, politics, culture, blackness, and aesthetics towards understanding the distinction of black avant-garde and experimental film and video. With a concentration on new methodologies of black study and interdisciplinary scholarship devoted to black visual and expressive culture, the course will challenge and expand canonical notions of black cinemas and avant-garde/experimental cinemas. Artists may include Cauleen Smith, Kevin Jerome Everson, Ja’Tovia Gary, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Christopher Harris, Barbara McCullough, Arthur Jafa, Steffani Jemison, Ulysses Jenkins, Ephraim Asili, Tracey Moffatt, Issac Julien, Terence Nance, John Akomfrah, Martine Syms, Noutama Frances Bodomo, Med Hondo, Garrett Bradley, Leah Gilliam, Edgar Arceneaux, and Morgan Quaintance.

Laura Harris
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 1704
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 15010
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 15011
4 points

What is a city?  How might cinema enable us to understand its social dynamics, sanctioned and habitual, but also deviant and/or riotous?  And how does cinema itself figure into this landscape?  Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer, we will pay attention to the interplay between the disciplined activity of the workplace, what Kracauer describes at one point as “the prison of the home where intimacy has become a deadening routine” and the more open-ended, promiscuous encounters and rebellious assemblies that can take shape in the street.  We will begin by viewing a wide range of examples from film history, but we will conclude by looking more specifically at the restructuring of New York City propelled by fiscal crises and moral panics in the second half of the twentieth century.  We will focus in on films that address the spaces created by state-sponsored “urban renewal” projects.  We will also examine films that explore what Gilles Deleuze describes as the “any spaces whatever,” the “deserted and inhabited…waste ground” created in cities in the course of their demolition and reconstruction, spaces that are no longer recognizable and where habitual action is no longer possible.  How do people survive and sustain one another as they maneuver those kinds of spaces?  What kinds of social activity get purged?   What new kinds of activity find shelter there?  How does cinema represent, interpret and sometimes even anchor them?  What is cinema?

Dan Streible
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 2123 / Class # 15029
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.

Marina Hassapopoulou
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 670
CINE-GT 3040 / Class # 15024
4 points

This course will explore Cinema Studies within the interdisciplinary context of the Digital Humanities (DH). Digital tools and platforms, along with the databases they create, have expanded the ways we study moving images and filmmaking traditions. Despite Cinema Studies’ important contributions to the expansion of DH, the study of moving images and time-based media is usually not at the forefront of DH-related inquiry. One of the course objectives is to therefore place Cinema Studies research at the center of DH methodologies in order to diversify interdisciplinary approaches to both DH and Cinema Studies. In this course, students will study DH practice alongside related critical frameworks in order to explore the profound historiographical, philosophical, sociocultural, and institutional imperatives that drive the need for digital tools and computational methods in the study of moving images. This approach will help students establish in-depth connections between theory and practice, and will assist them in planning, prototyping, and creating their own final projects to address significant research questions related to Cinema Studies and other related fields.

Part I of the course will focus on a historical and critical exploration of pre-digital and early digital Cinema Studies projects that prefigure the interactive, data-driven, cartographic/spatial, and/or computational logic of current DH tools. We will cover a broad historical range of critical making that includes the works of early film theorists-practitioners (such as Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein), collaborations between computer scientists and artists (including 1960s computer films, and early software generated cinema), as well as more recent digital projects and tools (e.g., by Yuri Tsivian, Deb Verhoeven, Anne Friedberg, Steve F. Anderson, and others). In addition, Part I of the course will analyze DH projects that contribute to a relatively new subfield in Cinema Studies: “new cinema history,” which refers to a cluster of new methodologies and digital tools for studying the cultural and social histories of cinema and its audiences. We will explore the impact of this new cinema history and of “distant reading” (the collection and computational analysis of large amounts of text data, rather than the close reading of individual texts) on traditional methodologies in Cinema Studies, through the work of influential DHers and emerging theorist-practitioners. Our analysis of these projects will not only focus on technical and methodological aspects, but also on the intellectual, cultural, ethical, and institutional debates regarding the use of digital and open-access platforms.

Part II of the course will provide hands-on DH training through workshops that will introduce students to a variety of DH tools and platforms, including data visualization, text mining, glitching/data-bending, AI, mapping, annotations, digital archiving, collaborative authoring, film forensics, volumetrics, interactive design, databases, and remixing. The workshops will help students acquire a diverse set of skills for analyzing moving images, and will provide them with tools to use in their final projects and other class activities. The scope of the workshops will be adjusted according to student interests. Final project options include: conceptualizing and designing new DH tools, creating new platforms for the digital analysis of moving images, curating digital/digitized artifacts/collections, using existing DH tools for a new research project, activist projects, new approaches to archives, contributing content to an existing DH initiative, producing multimedia scholarship (including videographic criticism), or using an online authoring platform (such as Scalar, Omeka, Mapme, and StoryMaps) for an academic research Paper.

Course assignments will include short response papers (part I of the course), presentations (I & II), software reviews (II), prototype design or project outline (II), and a final project (II). The course is suitable for all levels of technical expertise.

Permission code required for Cinema Studies students. Request a permission code here. MA Prerequisite: Film Theory.

Students outside of the Department of Cinema Studies must request permission of the instructor by email Professor Hassapopoulou (mh193@nyu.edu) and conveying their reasons for wanting to take the course and any relevant academic background.

Stephanie Zacharek
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 1141 / Class # 15009
4 points

This course will examine the history and practice of film criticism as a means of helping students to sharpen their own critical thinking and writing. We'll focus on the finer points of film scholarship and film criticism, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of theory as applied in criticism. We'll also examine the role of criticism in the age of the internet, and the specific demands of covering the festival circuit. Students will explore the practicalities and challenges of writing about film across all genres—including mainstream comedies and action films, art cinema and avant-garde film, political films and documentaries—and we’ll discuss modes of critical practice useful in addressing those films. Course readings will include essays by Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, André Bazin, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, James Agee, and others. Students will be expected to write an essay of 800 to 1000 words each week evaluating films screened in class or playing in the New York City area.

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

CINE-GT 2900 / class # 15020           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 # 15034            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.

CINE-GT 3907 / class # 15027
4 points

Please fill out the Directed Reading form, to be verified by your faculty advisor, in order to receive a permission code to register.

Michael Grant
Tuesdays, 5:30-9:30pm
Room 674
CINE-UT 1800 / Class # 15016
4 points

This course introduces all aspects of the field, contextualizes them, and shows how they fit together. It will discuss the media themselves (including the technology, history, and contextualization within culture, politics, and economics) Topics include: conservation and preservation principles, organization and access, daily practice with physical artifacts, restoration, curatorship and programming, legal issues and copyright, and new media issues. Students will learn the importance of other types of materials (manuscripts, correspondence, stills, posters, scripts, etc.). Theories of collecting and organizing (as well as their social meanings) will be introduced.

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.

Faye Ginsburg
Tuesdays, 5:00-8:00pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 107
CINE-GT 1402 / Class # 7835
4 points

This course explores the history and evolution of the genre of ethnographic film (and related experimental projects) as well as Indigenous media and the broad issues of cross-cultural representation that have emerged in the works and debates around it , from the early 20th century to the contemporary moment within the wider project of the representation of cultural lives.    We will consider the key works that have defined the genre, and the conceptual and formal innovations associated with them, addressing questions concerning documentary, realism, and social theory as well as the institutional structures through which they are funded, distributed, and seen by various audiences.  Throughout the course we will keep in mind the properties of film as a signifying practice, its status as a form of anthropological knowledge, and the ethical and political concerns raised by cross-cultural representation. Films are placed in the context of an evolving discursive field, shaped by concerns of the time and responses to critiques. What have the theoretical, political and cinematic responses been to efforts to create screen representations of culture, from the early romantic constructions of Robert Flaherty to current work in feature film, to the scientific cinema of the American post-war periods, to the experimental reflexivity of Jean Rouch and others, to the development of television and video on the part of indigenous people throughout the world over the last two decades, to recent experiments in sensory ethnography?

Pegi Vail
Tuesdays, 9:00-11:30am
25 Waverly Place, Room 102
CINE-GT 1995 / class # 7836
4 points

For approved Culture & Media students in their second year only. Prerequisites include completion of Culture & Media I and Sight & Sound: Documentary.

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

Elisabeth Bronfen
Fridays, 2:00-4:45pm
September 6 - October 11
GCASL Room 284
CINE-GT 2222 / Class # 21175
2 points

As Shoshana Felman has argued in her work on the juridical unconscious, there is a seminal distinction between legal and aesthetic justice: While a trial ends in a sentencing that is predicated on a clear distinction between guilty and non-guilty, any literary enactment of a trial refuses such closure, at times even reopening what was a closed case. Cinema, in turn, has emerged as a particularly vibrant genre for staging this dilemma, turning the audience into the jury. Taking Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men as the prototype of the genre, this seminar will explore how the courtroom drama replays a court case by focusing on the moral complexity involved in evaluating evidence and witness reports. We will then turn to two films by Fritz Lang, M. Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder and Fury, comparing his discussion of justice in the context of Weimar Germany with his revision of it during the depression in America. In a next step we will bring Arendt’s reporting of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem into conversation with Stanley Kramer’s historical re-enactment Judgement at Nuremberg. Continuing with an exploration into the belated re-articulation of historical trauma we will look at Alfred Hitchcock’s Witness for the Prosecution and Wolfgang Staudte’s Rosen für den Staatsanwalt. Finally, with Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, we will bring into play the metaliterary dimension of courtroom drama.  

This course is open to Cinema Studies students only. Non-Cinema Studies students should register for GERM-GA 2222.