Fall 2025 Graduate Courses

Instructor TBA
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1010 / Class # 8852
4 points

This core course introduces the methods and areas of study in the Cinema Studies MA program. In keeping with the department's evolving profile, we'll also learn about research idioms that blend theory and practice, such as documentary, data visualization, and curation. The course is divided into modules that reflect this range of possibilities. Assignments comprise both written and practical projects and will involve some group/collaborative work.

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

Dan Streible
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1015 / Class # 8853
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 significant, answerable, and logically sound? What evidence might help answer these questions? How should we write historical analyses that answer questions posed?

We will not 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 digital-era, 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.

Indeed, the historiography of film is always changing and therefore always new. Events and conditions of the historical past are not changeable, but our understanding of them necessarily changes. Rediscoveries (literal and figurative) of films occur regularly. Indeed, recent film histories include much work about formerly neglected or suppressed aspects of cinema and media production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. In this way new film histories are often inspired by surprising rediscoveries.

This course is open only to Cinema Studies graduate students.

Anna McCarthy
Fridays, 8:00am-12:00pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 2601 / Class # 8870
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.

Feng-Mei Heberer
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 1025
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 8854
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 8855
4 points

This course explores film and other visual media through the lens of migrancy and diaspora, asking what it would mean if we placed histories of movement and border-crossings at the center of our analysis? To do so, we will combine studies of representation, or how experiences of migration and (un)belonging are told on screen, with inquiries into media infrastructures and practices, i.e. how works are made, circulated, and received beyond national and regional boundaries. Readings from cultural studies, media industry studies, and ethnic studies will define our theoretical framework. Case studies include auteur and popular film, personal documentaries, and television shows as well as media piracy and fan-based online practices.

Chris Straayer
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 3006
Cinema Studies majors: Section 001 / Class # 8875
Non-Cinema Studies majors: Section 002 / Class # 8876
4 points

This seminar will consider a variety of sites of passing such as class, ethnicity, religion, age, health, and criminality. Enabled by conventional semiotics, passing exploits a dominant gaze that can be unseeing in its assumed omnipresence. At the same time, passing requires convoluted engagements with self and presentation, trespass and ambiguity. The passer’s passage is not simply a camouflaged presence, but a counter existence. Does it disguise or alter the passer? Filmic address can pose passing as serious, comical, brutal, victorious, pitiful, seductive, justified, fated, and ironic. Across this spectrum, what do narratives of passing provide or fulfill for viewers? Indeed, we will consider not only the fictional passer and dupe, but also us spectating judges. Is a genre approach productive to this study? If so, what particular historical and theoretical arguments are most relevant? We might ask if the successful act of passing--successful in terms of the film viewing experience—requires a special negotiation between repetition and variation. Filmic narratives of passing always involve more than one vector. This seminar will encourage student contributions on contemporary instances of passing that entail unusual complexity and/or creativity.

Laura Harris
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 646
CINE-GT 3011
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 8877
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 8878
4 points

We will consider the way the environmental materials and activity, what we might otherwise think of as the background or the scene of production, are registered in/on film (as well as prior and subsequent forms of audiovidual recording), and the significance of that.  We will also consider the environmental impacts of machines and infrastructures for film production, preservation, digital streaming, etc.  Arts and films may include:  Harun Farocki, An Image; Lumière Brothers, Feeding the Baby and Boat Leaving the Port; Alan Lomax, Sounds of the South; John Cohen, The High Lonesome Sound; Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria; Martine Barrat, South Bronx footage; Jack Smith, various films and film fragments; Malena Szlam, Altiplano and Chronogram of Inexistent Time; Stan Brackage, Mothlight; Otolith Group, Medium Earth and Communists Like Us; Masao Adachi, et. al., A.K.A. Serial Killer; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, La Cueva Negra, Otros Usos and Post-Military Cinema; Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Celaje and Assimilate and Destroy; Julieta Aranda, found footage from the island of Kiribati; and a range of “field recordings.”  Theoretical and critical writing may include: Dai Vaughan, “Let There be Lumière”; Akira Lippit, Electric Animal; Rei Terada, “Repletion”; Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film; Elena Past, Italian Ecocinema; Karen Barad, various essays, including “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness” and “What is the measure of nothingness?”

Zhen Zhang
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
CINE-GT 1135
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 8857
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 8858
4 points

This course introduces a wide range of manifestations of Sinophone cinemas across national boundaries. We trace the origins of Chinese-language cinema in Shanghai in the Republican period (1910-1949), then its transformation and diversification into a multi-faceted phenomenon in the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan and, to some extent, other Sinophone film practices in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. We study several film cultures including their historical kinship ties and place them within the regional and global contexts of modernization, war, revolution, decolonization, 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 and renovation, co-production, authorship, and cine-feminism. 

Antonia Lant
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 1325
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 8861
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 8862
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 the genre’s both utopian and grittier sides. The course engages the film musical’s rich critical literature on topics such as: early all-Black cast musicals; the history of classical Hollywood titles of the 1930s-1950s (starring Maurice Chevalier, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, 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 (possibly including La La Land, A Star is Born, Mean Girls, Wicked, Barbie).

Robert Stam
Fridays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 2117
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 8867
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 8868
4 points

This course is a graduate survey course in cinema studies (also open to graduate students in other departments with interests in Brazilian culture) devoted to the history of Brazilian Cinema from its beginnings up to the latest features. While focusing on the one hand on film stylistics and film-as-film, the approach will also see film, in a “cultural studies” manner, as embedded in a broader discursive-mediatic-artistic continuum that includes history, literature, music, and performance. Thus the course will offer not only a history of Brazilian Cinema but also a history of Brazil and Brazilian culture during the century of cinema, at least insofar as it has been represented, refracted, and performed through the cinema, the media, and popular culture.

The course will move through a more or less chronological sequence from the silent period, on to  the musical comedies (chanchadas) and the studio films of Vera Cruz, through the various phases of Cinema Novo, on to the 1990s retomada, culminating with the variegated productions of a new generation of 21 st century filmmakers. While the feature films will be screened in roughly chronological order, the classes themselves will be clustered around issues that range across historical periods. Shuttling between past and present, the course will treat such themes as: representations and self-representation of the indigenous peoples in Brazil (the so-called “Indians”); foundational fictions of Euro-indigenous romance; representations of Afro-Brazilian culture; carnival and the carnivalesque; multicultural dissonance as artistic resource; anthropophagy; aesthetics of hunger; aesthetics of garbage; trance-modernism; dictatorship, censorship, and resistance; literary adaptation; the telenovela; musical audiotopias; the favela and the divided city; the counter-culture; intersectionalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality; indigenous media; the emergence of new social actors. Certain themes and leitmotifs-- the “Indian,” Afro-Brazil, Literary Adaptation, Alternative Aesthetics -- will come up repeatedly, at different moments in the course.

Given the extreme compression of the course in treating more than a century of cinema in a single semester, the course will adopt a number of procedures so as to cover as much ground as possible. Along with a feature film, each class will show many brief clips in order to: a) illuminate broader trends and genres; b) offer examples of close analysis of films; c) whet student appetite for seeing the films in their entirety; d) stimulate interest in possible topics for term projects. At the same time, students will also be asked to see a number of widely disseminated and easily screened films outside of class and to write one-page personal responses to those films. The responses will not be graded but will serve to communicate your reactions to the films, your evolving interests and possible topics for research; the responses will also hopefully reflect the growing knowledge of Brazilian cinema and culture that comes with the readings, the screenings, the lectures, and the discussion.

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

This survey of cinema in the United States up to 1960 examines its predominant commercial form (narrative fiction, including classical Hollywood movies) alongside nonfiction, experimental, and nontheatrical films. The course looks at films themselves -- how do their styles and narratives change over time? -- but also at contexts: how do films document, reflect, or alter their times? How did the U.S. film industry develop and change? how did the business of movies use stars, genres, publicity, theaters? What role did technologies play? What other institutions and forces impacted American cinema before 1960? We also attend to key figures in this history: the filmmakers (producers, directors, writers, performers, technicians) and shapers of discourse (critics, authors, censors, politicos, the press, et al.), as well as audiences. The goal is to understand this consequential and popular modern medium and its contributions to the art and culture of what came to be called modernity.

Graduate students will do the assigned undergraduate readings as well as additional advanced readings.

Michael B. Gillespie
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 3101
Cinema Studies students: Section 001 / Class # 8880
Outside students: Section 002 / Class # 8881
4 points

This class explores how cinema enacts a writing of history in the terms of visual historiography. If historiography entails the study of the writing of history, then this class will consider the cinematic writing of history with attention to aesthetics, narrativity, temporality, the production of historical knowledge, cultural memory, performativity, and power. The class will take a critically disobedient approach by framing the films as historiographic operations and not reducible to merely questions of fidelity, authenticity, or truth. In this way the class centers on the critical consequence of how history is rendered and complicated by cinema. 

Imogen Smith
Wednesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 1141 / Class # 8860
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, and improve their ability to analyze, interpret, and evaluate films. We'll explore the role that criticism has played in shaping film studies, culture, and filmmaking itself, 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 social media, the demands of covering the festival circuit, and issues of identity and personal voice in criticism. Students will explore the practicalities and challenges of writing about film across all genres, time periods, and national origins—including mainstream comedies, melodrama, and film noir, art cinema and avant-garde film, indie films and documentaries—and we’ll discuss modes of critical practice useful in addressing those forms. Weekly readings, screenings and writing assignments are required.

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

CINE-GT 2900 / class # 8871           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 # 8888            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 # 8885
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.

Instructor TBA
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 1800-02 / Class # 20546
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.

This course is open only to Cinema Studies MA and PhD students.

Gregory Cram
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:30pm
Room 670
CINE-GT 1804-002 / Class # 20614
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.

This course is open only to Cinema Studies MA and PhD students.

Faye Ginsburg
Tuesdays, 5:00-8:00pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 107
CINE-GT 1402 / Class # 6888
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, 8:00-10:30am
25 Waverly Place, Room 612
CINE-GT 1995 / class # 6889
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.