Spring 2022 Graduate Courses

Marina Hassapoppoulou
Wednesdays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 674

CINE-GT 1020
Class # 7210
4 points

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

This course closely examines a variety of theoretical writings concerned with aesthetic, sociocultural, and psychological aspects of the cinematic medium. Theoretical frameworks are approached thematically, rather than chronologically, in order to formulate new conceptual connections between different modes of cinematic inquiry. The course uses the innovative organizational structure of Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses to address the multisensory relationship between spectators and cinema. Sound, sight, touch, smell and taste provide a way to access and compare theories ranging from classical to digital, and to explore areas that have been marginalized from overarching canons of film analysis. Approaching film theory through the senses opens up new ways of thinking about the screen-spectator relationship as the course moves from “external” to “internal” [cognitive/mnemonic] associations. Students will study the writing of classical theorists such as Eisenstein, Metz and Bazin, as well as contemporary thinkers such as Sobchack, Mayne, and Friedberg. Questions addressed range from the nature of cinematic representation and its relationship to other forms of cultural expression, to issues of theorizing film spectatorship. Theory will also be studied alongside examples from popular culture, digital contexts, and contemporary media in order to interrogate certain ideas about cinema and spectatorship that persist despite the medium’s material and technical changes. By the end of the semester, students will acquire the critical skills to apply a broad range of analytical perspectives to films and other media.

MJ Robinson
Mondays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 648

CINE-GT 1026
Class # 7415
4 points

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

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.

Dana Polan
Fridays
9:00am-12:00pm
Room 635

CINE-GT 3902
Class # 7223
4 points

This course is open to Cinema Studies PhD students only.

A seminar on the methods and procedures of writing the doctoral dissertation in Cinema Studies. The course guides students in preparing their dissertation proposal through in-class debate, written feedback from the instructor, and visits from guests with experience in the process. Students will make regular presentations of work in progress, with the goal of finishing their proposal by the end of the semester in readiness for their dissertation proposal defense. The course stresses mutual aid in class discussion.

Allen Weiss
Wednesdays
12:30-3:30pm
Room 613

CINE-GT 1981
Class # 20600
4 points

This course is open to Cinema Studies students only. Outside students should register for PERF-GT 2218.

Anything may be transformed into a doll, puppet, or marionette. For one childhood friend, the corner of his blanket was a cherished companion; for another, it was his “cushy,” a seemingly banal but actually marvelous pillow; in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the young protagonist is in secret dialogue with own finger, while in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, the protagonist’s finger becomes a lascivious and very public performer. Dolls, puppets, and marionettes may be familiar or uncanny, poetic or commonplace, artistic or commercial, playful or magical, delightful or fearful, secret or public. They may appear as private playthings, characters in object theaters, religious relics, transitional objects; as phantoms or simulacra, devils or gods, monsters or marvels, fetishes or commodities. This seminar will be truly interdisciplinary, integrating history, theory, performance, theater, cinema, art, literature, and ethnography, all in the quest to find our own inner puppets.

By Application Only: Please send an email to allen.weiss@nyu.edu, and include the following information: department; MA or PhD; theoretical background; background in dolls, puppets, marionettes; reason for wishing to join seminar. Deadline December 1st.

Marina Hassapopoulou
Tuesdays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 652

CINE-GT 2600
Class # 20601
4 points

Permission code required to register.

Interactive cinema broadly refers to a cluster of interrelated filmic practices that incorporate the audience into the construction of the work (e.g. through voting polls, motion sensors, and live performance) in order to create a participatory multimedia experience. This course will analyze the development and reception contexts of interactive films, ranging from early cinema and avant-garde experiments in Expanded Cinema to recent digital projects in software-generated films and virtual reality. A diverse spectrum of interactive genres will be discussed, including choose-your-own-adventure films, hypertexts, art installations, video games, virtual and augmented reality, mobile cinema, and web-based narratives. Through interactive screenings, media analysis, selected readings, discussions, presentations, and event visits, the course will establish connections between interactive cinema and canonical approaches to Film and Media Studies, while also indicating its relevance to current topics in the Digital Humanities. The course additionally aims to provide students with an alternative historiography that takes into account experimental practices that have not been fully incorporated into the field of Film and Media Studies, and to productively expand and interrogate the notion of cinema. The class will also work towards actively contributing to the expansion of the field of Film and Media Studies through group presentations related to media archeology, and through collaborative blogging for the Interactive Media Archive. Themes and key concepts include: cinema in the gallery/museum, intermediality, prosumption, narrative and authorship in the digital age, object oriented ontology, digital democracy, remix and appropriation, participatory culture, media convergence, hybridity, remediation, digital divides, and the ethics of interactivity.

Space is limited for this seminar. Interested students must email the professor (mh193@nyu.edu) as soon as possible (preferably before November 15th) to apply for enrollment. In your application, briefly explain why you are interested in taking this course and how it relates to your research interests.

Chris Straayer
Thursdays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 652

CINE-GT 3014
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 7421
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 7422
4 points

Given the centrality of psychology to character construction and motivation in realist cinema, it is not surprising that madness has been a durable topic. The copious films fascinated with mental illness, however, offer limited depth and diversity in their portrayals and accounts of its subjects and institutions. Abiding reductionisms dominate the codification of psycho-pathology in popular entertainment, most prominently a sexual reductionism that once attributed hysteria to a wandering womb and often correlates violence and testosterone. Like the stereotypes they deploy, representations of madness still work to discipline subjects. This seminar analyzes filmic renditions of madness in relation to discourses of gender, race, class, and age, within an interdisciplinary design and bibliography. Student research can take many directions as we contextualize our topic in the history of madness & mental illness (e.g., the great confinement, the popularization of psychoanalysis, the anti-psychiatry movement, pharmacology), conceptual frameworks (e.g., nature vs. nurture, normality vs continuum), and connotative relations between insanity and other mentalities (e.g., war trauma, memory impairment, religious ecstasy, sexual obsession, addiction, bigotry, artistic genius).

Zhen Zhang
Thursdays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 652

CINE-GT 3105
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 20604
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 20605
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 nearly three decades of rapid and large-scale economic and social transformations in 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 three interconnected components: 1) Tracing a historical trajectory 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 Mainland within a broader Sinophone context and regional globalization, the course will bring in parallels or examples in HKSAR and Taiwan, analyzing their connections and divergences; 3) the 10th Reel China Biennial taking place in the department in April 2022 (pending NYU Covid-19 policies on public events) will be an integral part of the course.

Toby Lee
Fridays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 670

CINE-GT 2001
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 7215
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 7289
4 points

In this course, we examine the history of documentary form as political discourse and practice. We take as a starting point documentary theorist Michael Renov’s discussion of poetics -- which he defines as the rigorous investigation of aesthetic forms, their composition and function -- in the context of the documentary image. While Renov argues that “poetics must also confront the problematics of power,” so too must an understanding of political documentary take seriously questions of poetics and form. Through close readings of particular films and careful study of their formal strategies and aesthetic choices, we explore how documentary images act, or how they are made to act, within larger structures of power and resistance. We will look at films from a wide range of periods, places and styles — including observational, experimental, compilation/appropriation, performative, propaganda, and essay films — considering these works in relation to a variety of topics including social and political activism, revolutionary movements, state violence, surveillance, sexual politics, colonialism and anti-colonialism, human rights, labor, and the shifting politics of the image in the digital age.

Dana Polan
Tuesdays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 674

CINE-GT 2126
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 7379
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 7418
4 points

This course offers a broad survey of American cinema from 1960 up to the present.  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.

Robert Stam
Mondays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 674

CINE-GT 2512
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 24351
Section 002 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 24352
4 points

This course concerns film and media representations of colonial history and its present-day sequels. More specifically, it is devoted to the filmic representation and performance of the inter-related issues of conquest, colonialism, race, and indigeneity as apprehended in a number of different countries. The term media is here meant to refer to a wide spectrum of audio-visual-digital media including feature films, documentaries, TV series, music videos, standup comedy, critical remixes, and internet parodies. The course will see media not as mere illustration of intellectual trends and positions, but as active and productive interventions and a way of seeing these issues in themselves.  

The methodology of the course will be comparative, transnational, and transmediatic, constantly counterpointing colonial and decolonial representations and performances.The larger purpose of the course is to transnationalize debates that are too often seen through a narrow US-American frame. The course assumes that debates about colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, indigenous genocide, discrimination, stereotypes, and affirmative action are all transnational in nature and scope; they are not exclusive to the United States, and they did not start in the 21st century; they go at least as far back as 1492 and the Conquest of the Americas.  

Whatever our background, and whether we know it or not, we have all been impacted in some way by the social stratifications and cultural differences rooted in these longer histories.  The course will examine key concepts such as: Indigeneity, Conquest Doctrine, Eurocentrism, White Supremacy, Colonialist Discourse, Intersectionality, Third Cinema, and Indigenous Media. What do these terms mean? What is the relation between them? How does their meaning vary from country to country? What is their relevance to the media and its representations of history?  

The course will focus especially on media treatments of these issues in Brazil (and to a lesser extent Spanish-speaking Latin America), France, North Africa, and the U.K,  while also touching briefly on Aboriginal Australia, India and other sites, always against a comparative backdrop with the U.S. What are the commonalities and the differences between these diverse situations, both in terms of the debates themselves and in turns of the media, how are they related to colonialism, and how do they shed light on the situation in the U.S?  What can we learn from the social attitudes and artistic practices of these other societies? How have the societies from which we come been marked by colonialism and racism? How are “race” and colonialism seen differently in Brazil, the US, France, and India? How do stereotypes vary around the world?   Why is the theme of racial chameleonism and metamorphosis – for example, blackface, redface, “white Indians” and the like -– so ubiquitous in the popular culture of the Atlantic world? Apart from the specific national zones “covered” in the course, students are encouraged to make the course their own by bringing in other zones or related issues of interest, whether connected to their own background or not.  

If history is “that which hurts,” it is also “that which inspires,” that which edifies and clear our minds through Art and Activist engagement. The course in this sense combines critique and celebration, critique of colonialist institutions and the celebration of artistic creativity. Contemporary critical media does not only take the form of indispensible features like 12 Years a Slave or 13th; it also takes the form of parody, satire, music, remixes, and commentary to be found in figures like Charlie Hill, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, Amber Ruffin, the 1491s, and Porta dos Fundos in Brazil, which offer a popular critical pedagogy that entertains while criticizing.

The course will also host visitors with special expertise in these issues. The guests include anthropologist Faye Ginsburg, a celebrated scholar on indigenous Media;  Amalia Cordova, curator of Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous media at the Smithsonian in Washington; Leo Cortana, a doctoral candidate and filmmaker who has a rich experience and analysis of racism as lived in France, Brazil, and the U.S; Native American Dine (Navajo) scholar/filmmaker Teresa Montoya who will show her film Doing Good for the Sheep; and Filmmaker/scholar Nerve Macaspac will talk about indigeneity and race in the Phillipines. The course will feature fiction films like Bolain’s Even the Rain,  Bouchareb’s Hors-la-Loi,  and Karim Ainouz’s Madame Satan, documentaries like Ava Duvernay’s 13th and Joel Zito Araujo’s Negation of Brazil, along with myriad clips, short films, music videos, remix parodies and the like. The readings will bear on antic-colonialism, postcolonialism, intersectionality, and indigeneity.  

Robert Stam is the author of a number of books on topics related to the course, notably Tropical Multiculturalism; A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (1997), and with Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994, new edition 2014) and Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (2012). His Indigeneity and the Decolonizing Gaze: Transational “Indians,” Media Aesthetics, and Social Theory is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press. 

Ivone Margulies
Thursdays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 670

CINE-GT 2582
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 25062
Section 002 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 25063
4 points

Following the line that splits sincerity from artifice, audience from scene, catharsis from estrangement, theatricality in film and in social life, is intrinsically related to a thematization of truth. The truth of cinema, its verisimilitude is interestingly disturbed and magnified by theatrical infiltration. The embrace of heightened materiality; of a presentational mode of address and the imposition of co-presence through extended duration or frontality produce an instant questioning of what kind of realities and presence matter in cinema.

In an attempt to gain a more nuanced perspective on anti-naturalist cinema this course discusses how theatrical traits such as enhanced physicality, visible proscenium, spatial convergence, marked blocking, excessive gesture, emphasis on text and dialogue, tableau formations, direct audience address open cinema to new performative and rhetorical potentials.

The course explores the impetus for self-revision in cinema looking at the intricate relation of verité, confessional modes and theatricality. We examine the ritual, psychological and evidentiary effects of reenactment in cinema discussing how cinema appropriates pedagogic, clinical and legal models (such as talking cures, psychodrama, public testimony and truth and reconciliation commissions) to deal with the past; when and how it matters that the person herself act her story; what is the interface between theatrical and therapeutic repetition and how verbal recall differs from mimetic replay.

We also examine the formal, pedagogic and rhetorical effect of extended or imbalanced dialogue looking at filmic adaptations with educational or exposé-like purposes (Rosselini’s didactic films; Sacha Guitry’s chauvinistic defense of France in Ceuz de Chez Nous and Melville’s Resistance, “anti-cinematic” film Silence of the Sea).

Readings involve classic and current debates on the relations between theatre and cinema; the historical and philosophical roots of an anti-theatrical prejudice; dramaturgical analogies for social interaction; the notion of mimicry in social formation; social front and role playing; notions of acting out in psychoanalysis and in psychodrama; the association of theatricality and gender; the notion of liminality and theatrical frame.

Films include: Lubitsch’s To Be or not to Be, Morin and Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch’s The Human Pyramid, Moi Un Noir, Ann Robertson's diary films; Cassavetes’s Opening Night, Rohmer’s Triple Agent, Renoir’s The Golden Coach, Makhmalbaf’s Salaam Cinema, Kiarostami’s Close Up, Malle’s Vanya on 42^nd Street, Bodanzky, Senna’s Iracema, uma Transa Amazonica; Fassbinder’s Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, Dreyer’s Gertrud, Melville’s Silence of the Sea, Akerman’s Meetings with Anna, Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, Rithy Panh’s S21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Lanzmann’s Shoah, Rivette’s Secret Defense, Guitry’s Ceux de Chez Nous and De Jeanne D’Arc à Philippe Pétain..

BIO: Ivone Margulies teaches film at the Film and Media Department, Hunter College and at the Graduate Center (CUNY.) She is the author of In Person: Reenactment in Modern and Contemporary Cinema (2019) and Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (1996). She is the editor of Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (2003) and On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations (2019). She has published on performance, theatricality and realism, French and Women’s cinema. Most recently she published Filmes de Plastico: A plural Realism,” in FQ (winter 2021).

Allen Weiss
Tuesdays
1:00-5:00pm
Room 670

CINE-GT 3104
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 20602
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 20603
4 points

This course fulfills the MA Film Theory Core requirement.

As an elemental articulation of the symbolic, landscape has always been a primary site of performance, from popular festivals to courtly extravaganzas; it has served for centuries as the mythic ground of painting, has appeared among the first subjects of photography, and has been transmuted into the background of most films. Paying special attention to the contemporary hybridization of the arts, this course will investigate the following topics in relation to both avant-garde and popular cinema: anguish and trauma, eros and the landscape as symbolic form; landscape, film and the Gesamtkunstwerk; imaginary landscapes and alternate worlds; ecological and technological soundscapes; the aesthetics of dilapidation.

Dan Streible
Mondays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 670

CINE-GT 1806
Class # 7256
4 points

This course embraces a broad conception of curating as the treatment of materials from their discovery, acquisition, archiving, preservation, restoration, and reformatting, through their screening, programming, use, re-use, distribution, exploitation, translation, and interpretation. It  focuses on the practices of film and video exhibition in cinematheques, festivals, museums, archives, web platforms, and other venues. The course examines the goals of public programming, its constituencies, and the curatorial and archival challenges of presenting film, video, and digital media. We study how archives and sister institutions present their work through exhibitions, events, publications, and media productions. We also examine how these presentations activate uses of moving image collections. Specific curatorial practices of festivals, seminars, symposia, and projects will be examined.

Walter Forsberg
Mondays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 674

CINE-GT 3049
Class # 7219
4 points

This course studies the different kinds of institutions that collect and manage cultural material: museums of art, natural history, and motion pictures; libraries and historical societies; corporate institutions. It compares and contrasts these types of institution to reveal how they differ from one another, paying particular attention to how different institutional missions affect internal metadata and information systems. It examines theories of collecting, the history and ethics of cultural heritage institutions, the organizational structures of institutions that house collections (including trends in staffing and the roles of individual departments), and their respective missions and operational ethics. The class will visit a variety of local cultural organizations, and will have working professionals talk about their organizations and duties.

Jacqueline Hazen
Thursdays
2:00-4:30pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 107

CINE-GT 1403
Class # 7211
4 points

Permission code required to register.

In the last two decades, a new field -- the ethnography of media -- has emerged as an exciting new arena of research. While claims about media in people’s lives are made on a daily basis, surprisingly little research has actually attempted to look at how media is part of the naturally occurring lived realities of people's lives.  Anthropologists and media scholars interested in film, television, and video have been turning their attention increasingly beyond the text and empiricist notions of audiences (stereotypically associated with the ethnography of media) to consider, ethnographically, the complex social worlds in which media is produced, circulated and consumed, at home and elsewhere. This work theorizes media studies from the point of view of cross-cultural ethnographic realities and anthropology from the perspective of new spaces of communication focusing on the social, economic and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice, whether in production, reception, or circulation.  The class will be organized around case studies that interrogate broader issues that are particularly endemic to questions of cross-cultural media including debates over cultural imperialism vs. the autonomy of local producers/consumers, the instability and stratification of reception, the shift from national to transnational circuits of production and consumption, the increasing complicity of researchers with their subjects over representations of culture. These concerns are addressed in a variety of locations, from the complex circulation of films, photos, and lithographs that demonstrate the historically and culturally contingent ways in which images are read and used; to the ever increasing range of televisual culture, from state sponsored melodramas, religious epics and soap operas, to varieties of public television; to the activist use of video, radio, the Internet, and small media. Readings will be selected to address the research interests of students in the class.

Fridays
6:20-8:50pm

CINE-GT 1996
Class # 7213
4 points

Permission code required to register.

For approved Culture & Media students in their second year only after completing Culture & Media I and Sight & Sound: Documentary.

CINE-GT 3908
Class # 7244
4 points

In order to register for this course, please fill out the Directed Reading registration form.