Fall 2018 Graduate Courses

William Simon
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
4 points
Class # 6949

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to central concepts in film form and style as well as film narrative. The course is structured to suggest a constant but expanding series of models for textual analysis of audio-visual works, with emphasis on the “cinematic signifier." The course will also deal with issues of the interpretation of audio-visual works in relation to textual analysis. Part One of the course will have a strong formal emphasis: introducing concepts such as shot structure, editing, mise-en-scene, camera movement and sound in relation to their function in the structuring of film narrative. Part Two will formulate these concepts more thoroughly in terms of parameters of film narrative (e.g. focalization and its implications for the representation of gender and race). Parts Three and Four will further expand the conceptualization of these issues by dealing with the relationship of film narrative to: (1) genre, understood in terms of its social and ideological implications; and (2) cultural history, understood in terms of the social relations between cultural discourses and the specificity of film narrative.

This course is open to Cinema Studies M.A. students only.

Mark Williams
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
4 points
Class # 21580

This M.A. core course examines the background, context, and history of television with an initial emphasis on broadcast and digital eras in the U.S., then expansion into case studies of international television. The approach is comparative, with a focus on television as cultural, social, and aesthetic formation.  Topics include histories of technology, economics of media institutions, local and networked intersectional politics, audiences and reception, and questions of representation. We will also pay particular attention to methods and modes of historiography, especially in light of emerging opportunities for online access and digital research tools. 

Mark Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College and director of The Media Ecology Project. He has published widely on media history and historiography, for example in Télévision: le moment expérimental (1935-1955); Convergence Media History; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; Collecting Visible Evidence; Dietrich Icon; Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays; and Living Color: Race, Feminism, and Television.

This course is open to Cinema Studies M.A. students only.

Toby Lee
Fridays, 12:00-3:00pm
Room 635
4 points
Class # 7090

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; and delivering a short scholarly talk. Students will be required to compose (1) a book review (ca. 1,500 words), (2) one report or blog entry on a cinema studies or other event you attend, and (3) a paper based on the talk or a research portfolio. 

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

Feng-Mei Heberer
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21775
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21776

This graduate course revolves around the manifold notions of work in film and media cultures. It asks not only how various forms of work have been represented, and how so, but: what kinds of work enable our consumption of film and media, from production to circulation to the work of interpreting a piece of art? How do invisible and often unrecognized forms of labor (e.g. fandom) structure our media usage? Why do these forms remain so frequently disguised, especially in their gendered and racialized dimension, and how can we change that? 

Fueled by readings in documentary activism, media industry studies, and Marxist cultural critique, this course explores a wide range of paid and unpaid media labors from the 1970s to today. We will pay particular attention to how new forms of work as forged by digital economies and social media habits generate new sorts of market value. At the same time, we will probe the persistence of seemingly obsolete kinds of material labor, such as the manual assembly of electronic devices, or the underpaid task of sifting through Facebook content for inappropriate posts. While the focus is on film and media cultures, we will also relate our analysis to larger global developments, including the increase in transnational service work, the economy of emotional labor, and the digitization of entertainment and social infrastructures.

Paul Fileri
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21766
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21767

This graduate course offers a wide-ranging critical survey of French and Francophone cinemas, placing a special emphasis on filmmaking that raises the conceptual, cultural, and political problem of resistance in varying historical contexts of occupation and collaboration, liberation, colonial rule and republican democratic politics, and postcolonial relations of inequality over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. How have films, figures, movements, and practices of cinema in and around France troubled critical and popular understandings of debates over French identity? How have they developed forms of address in moving image and recorded sound that give life to social and political action that is framed as engagement, critique, and contestation pivoting around the complexities of nationhood, empire, diaspora? We will approach this history through narrative features, documentary, and experimental works that sought to challenge established notions of Frenchness as well as French national cinema or Francophone cinema as a unitary object of study, as understood through identifications of language, territory, cultural belonging, and sovereignty. We will consider emblematic figures, institutions, and works, both well-known and still fairly obscure, in relation to major historical developments in cinema and politics from the sound era to the present: Popular Front struggles in the 1930s, Nazi Occupation and Vichy rule during World War II, postwar processes of industrial modernization and crises over decolonization animated by anti-colonial movements for national liberation; postwar postcolonial political conflicts traversing metropolitan France and formerly colonized regions and nations of North and West Africa, Vietnam, and the Caribbean; the worker and student uprisings of May ’68; the mobilization of new social formations and cultural practices around questions of feminism and queer sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond; and more recently, confrontations produced by anxieties over globalization and unemployment, forms of racism, policing, immigration, and asylum. Topics related to screenings, readings, lectures, and discussions will include colonialism and post-colonialism, transnationalism, state censorship and regulation of dissent, labor and collective mobilization, revolution and the figure of the people in republican and militant traditions, immigration and assimilation, displacement and migration, language politics and translation, critique and activism, historiography and the archive. Course taught in English; films with English subtitles or accompanying English translation.

Anna McCarthy
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 670
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21733
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21734

This course surveys the cinema of Ireland from the silent period to the present day. In addition to looking at feature films, we will examine home movies, documentary, and television programming. Film and media intersect with this history of modern Ireland in complex ways, as the readings will detail. In the period spanning the beginning of the twentieth century (when film was introduced) to the present day, the Irish people lived through colonial domination, revolution, partition, civil war, mass emigration, theocracy, paramilitary sectarian violence, martial law (The Emergency Provisions Act), an unprecedented peace agreement and, finally, a contradictory sort of liberal secularism. In different ways, all of the course's screenings speak to some aspect of this history. The goal of lectures and discussions is to amplify the implications of these depictions, through a focus on formal and aesthetic practices and an awareness of the historical and geopolitical context of the present. Assignments: short midterm essay, longer final paper.

Laura Harris
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21677
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21679

This class will focus on experimentation in film and video around the world in the 1960s (broadly construed to include a few things from late 1950s and a few things from the early 70s). We will consider the relation between the experimentation in the 1960s and that of earlier avant-garde experimentation.  We will also consider the relation between experimentation in film and video in relation to experimentation in art and television at that time.  More importantly, however, we think about the way film and video figure into the general tumult of this period, and with that in mind, we will consider what moved filmmakers and videographers to adopt experimental procedures (at the level of production and screening), what they hoped the effects of those procedures might be, and what happened when the films and videos were screened.  Our focus will be international, including filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Francesco Rosi, Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker, Vera Chytilová, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Joyce Wieland, Harun Farocki, Jean Marie-Straub and Danièle Huillet, Nam Jun Paik, Shirley Clarke, William Greaves, Haile Gerima, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Santiago Álvarez, Jorge Sanjinés, Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Masao Adachi, and Shuji Terayama, among many possible others.

Paddy Johnson
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 674
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21730
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21731

This course will investigate how the development of digital time-based media from early animated GIF use, to YouTube, to Instagram stories has influenced creative practices across the globe. How has the development of proprietary online platforms effected art making? What are the ethical concerns related to archiving and scholarship of these new mediums? How much control do artists and individuals need to have over their work? Expect to look at artworks by artists such as Cameron Askin, Simon Bear, Olia Lialina, Christian Marclay, Lorna Mills, and Tony Oursler, and phenomenons such as early blogs, surf clubs, and YouTube competitions, not to mention more recent experiential works such as the Rain Room and Meow Wolf. Context and critical writing give shape to these movements, so we’ll also study texts by Olia Lialina, Alex Galloway, Ed Halter, RM Vaughan, and Karen Archey to name a few.

Paddy Johnson is the founding Editor of Art F City. In addition to her work on the blog, she has been published in magazines such as New York Magazine, The New York Times and The Economist. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet at venues including Yale University, Parsons, Rutgers, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2008, she became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. Paddy was nominated for best art critic at The Rob Pruitt Art Awards in 2010 and 2013.  In 2014, she was the subject of a VICE profile for her work as an independent art blogger.

Manthia Diawara
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21762
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21763

The course will examine the questions of archive, history and documentary cinema in Africa and its diaspora.  The class will be divided into three parts. First we will study the questions of voice, citizenship and the struggle for representation in the African American documentary tradition from William Greaves to contemporary directors.  Second, we will look at the strategies of representing the black uprisings in UK and the militarization of the police in the experimental documentary cinema of black British film collectives such as Black Audio, Ceddo and Sankofa.  Finally, we will consider the place of history and archives in the emergence of the documentary tradition in Africa, with directors such as Jean Mary Teno, Raoul Peck and Jihan El-Tahri. An important goal of the class will be to trace the cinematic relations, influences and differences between the three traditions of film-making.   In addition to films, the preliminary texts include:  Struggles in Representation (Phyllis Klotman), Policing the Crisis (Stuart Hall, et.al.) and Postcolonial African Cinema (Kenneth Harrow).

Chris Straayer
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21759
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21760

From a social-activist perspective, passing is often criticized as a willful act of deception for the purpose of personal gain.  Such an understanding invests in both “truth” and visibility politics, and assumes that allpassing is both voluntary and upwardly mobile.  This seminar seeks to complicate the discussion by analyzing passing in relation to supporting structures (e.g. compulsory heterosexuality, the binary sex system, constructions of race, stereotypes, and assimilation) and processes (e.g., transing, masquerade, infiltration, interpellation, performativity, appropriation, identification, imitation, simulacrum, stealth).  Enabled by conventional semiotics, passing exploits a dominant gaze, unseeing in its assumed omnipresence.  At the same time, passing requires complex engagements with identity and presence, trespass and ambiguity.  The passer’s passage is not simply a camouflaged identity, but a counter existence.  By addressing a number of passing sites (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, class) while considering that passing always involves more than one vector, the seminar encourages student projects on passing that entail a wider variety of situations (e.g. ethnicity, age, migration, wellness).

Marina Hassapopoulou
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 635
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21772
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21773

This course will critically explore interactive digital works that focus on individual and collective rewritings and negotiations of shared histories, including the emerging practice of i-docs (interactive documentaries) and docu-games (documentary games) practices. The class will engage with works that employ interactivity in order to interrogate the varying relationships between the personal, the historical, and the fictional. We will analyze interactive media that make audiences reflective of the very tools that construct, selectively archive, and universalize shared histories. Such projects and case studies include Digital Humanities projects (e.g. SelfieCity, Filming Revolution), interactive museums, Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor, 2015), That Dragon, Cancer (Ryan Green et al, 2016), Playing Columbine (Danny Ledonne, 2008), Terminal Time (Vanouse, Mateas et al., 1999), Dys4ia (Anna Anthropy, 2012), and virtual reality projects. The class will also explore how a film’s performative and affective aspects – including audience interaction and virtual reality immersion – enhance its potential to present a compelling argument for historical mythmaking as an integral part of history. Furthermore, students will analyze the ways in which contemporary subjectivity is shaped by mnemotechnical prostheses (external, memory-assisting devices) amplified by interactive media by exploring digital autobiographical films such as Jonathan Caouette’s iMovie Tarnation (2003), autobiographical and historical games, and standardized interfaces/platforms that narrativize memory and guide the public authoring of the self. As a final project, students will engage in theory-practice by applying and extending the theoretical and critical frameworks acquired during the course to their own historiographical projects. No prior production experience is required for this course; in fact, the final project will demonstrate students' ability to materialize complex intellectual ideas through easy-to-use and accessible digital means in order to reflect on critical making as a viable method of scholarship at a time where academic paradigms are shifting towards more born-digital projects.

William Simon
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
4 points

Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21681
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21682

This seminar will involve an intensive exploration of the artistic career of Orson Welles, placing special emphasis on his films but also dealing with his radio, theatre, and television work. Central topics for discussion include: 1) an examination of the narrative conception and structures with emphasis on the relationships among the theatre, radio, and film works; 2) the relations of the works to the changing historical, cultural, and production institutions of the relevant periods during Welles’ career (e.g. New Deal, World War II, Cold War); 3) the theorization of the works through Bakhtin’s formulation of the dialogic and through theories of sound and orality; 4) a consideration of the problematic production histories of Welles’ filmmaking, hence a concern with the incomplete states of a great deal of his work and issues of restoration of the films. Readings, response papers, and a research paper required (The seminar will assume familiarity with Citizen Kane.).

Richard Porton
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 652
4 points
Class # 7071

This course will combine an in-depth examination of selected topics in the history of film criticism with an emphasis on assisting students to write their own reviews and critical essays. We will focus on distinctions between film criticism and theory, the relationship of cinephilia to the history of criticism, the importance of the essayistic tradition, the role of criticism in the age of the Internet, and the symbiosis between contemporary criticism and the festival circuit. Various modes of critical practice— auteurist, genre, formalist, political, feminist etc.—will be assessed. The challenges of reviewing mainstream films, as well as art cinema and avant-garde work, will be explored. Course readings will include seminal essays by, among others, Bazin , Agee, Kael, Sarris, Farber,  Haskell, Macdonald, Daney, Durgnat, Rosenbaum, Hoberman, Mekas, and Adrian Martin. Students will be expected to write at least 1,000 words a week evaluating films screening in the New York City area.

Josslyn Luckett
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
4 points
Class # 21790

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 a diverse range of Oscar nominated screenwriters to lesser known independent screenwriters such as Paddy Chayefsky, Nora Ephron, Guillermo Ariaga, Tina Fey, José Rivera, Kathleen Collins, Josefina Lopez, Dee Rees, and Jordan Peele. We start in the "hold" by exploring the formal elements of the script (character, scene, dialogue, plot structure, genre). We then move to consider how underrepresented communities are served by the efforts of script writers to bring untold stories to big and small screens, thereby changing and challenging film culture.

Josslyn Luckett writes about independent film of the African diaspora and the multiracial media and music communities of Los Angeles. Her research includes and combines cinema studies, comparative and relational ethnic studies, and jazz and improvisation studies. She is also a screenwriter and playwright with a PhD in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley. A former story editor for The Steve Harvey Show, her original screenplay, Love Song, was directed by Julie Dash and produced by MTV.

Juana Suárez
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
4 points
Class # 6952

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
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 646
4 points
Class # 6954

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.

CINE-GT 2900
1-4 points (variable)
Class #6957

CINE-GT 2902
1-4 points (variable)
Class #6958

A student wishing to conduct independent research for credit must obtain approval from a faculty member 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 present a signed “Independent Study Form” at the department office when you register.  This form must be completely filled out, detailing your independent study project.  It must have your faculty sponsor’s signature (whomever you have chosen to work with - this is not necessarily your advisor) indicating their approval.

CINE-GT 2950
1-4 points (variable)
Class #7114

CINE-GT 2952
1-4 points (variable)
Class #7115

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.  

1-4 points (variable)
Class #6963

A student wishing to conduct a directed reading for credit must obtain approval from a faculty member 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.  To register, you must present a signed “Independent Study Form” at the department office when you register.  This form must be completely filled out, detailing your independent study project.  It must have your faculty sponsor’s signature indicating their approval.

David Bagnall
Tuesdays, 6:20-9:00pm
Room 017
4 points
Class # 6950

This course examines documentary principles, methods, and styles.  Both the function and the significance of the documentary in the social setting and the ethics of the documentary are considered.

Faye Ginsburg
Tuesdays, 6:00-9:00pm
25 Waverly Place, Kriser Screening Room
4 points
Class # 6951

This course explores the history and evolution of the genre of ethnographic film (and related experimental projects)  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, andsocial 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? 

Non-Cinema Studies graduate students need permission of instructor at faye.ginsburg@nyu.edu.

Ezra Sacks
Mondays, 6:20-9:00pm
Room 109
4 points
Class # 7069

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.

Cinema Studies graduate students only, not open to first year MA students.

Eva Meyer
Tuesdays, 12:30-3:10pm
Room TBA
4 points
Class # 20889

To accept a text at face value, to literally explore its gestures when it produces and refuses meaning, we need not only to reconsider that the words “theory“ and  “theater“ share the same etymological root. From thea, “to see,” the two converge in an act of spectatorship that itself needs to be reconsidered as being both contemplative and active, in a free and indirect way. Starting from Heinrich von Kleist’s seminal text “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking,” this course embarks on a journey into free and indirect speech as a method of thinking, traversing literary and theoretical texts, and films. Questions addressed range from theatricality, translation, and transference to heteroglossia and amalgamation waltz. We will analyze texts by Charlotte Salomon, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bachtin, Gilles Deleuze, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Eric Rohmer, Virginia Woolf, and Emily Apter and discuss films directed by Danièle Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis, John Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville, among others.