FILM 873a and FILM 8730a / EALL 5810a, Japanese Cinema and Its Others  Kirsten Seuffert

Critical inquiry into the myth of a homogeneous Japan through analysis of how Japanese film and media historically represent “others” of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and sexualities, including women, black residents, ethnic Koreans, Okinawans, Ainu, undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ minorities, the disabled, youth, and monstrous others such as ghosts.
MW 11:35am-12:50pm, T 7pm-10pm

FILM 6010a / CPLT 9170a / ENGL 920, Foundations of Film and Media  John MacKay

The course sets in place some undergirding for students who want to anchor their film interest to the professional discourse of this field. A coordinated set of topics in film theory is interrupted first by the often discordant voice of history and second by the obtuseness of the films examined each week. Films themselves take the lead in our discussions.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm, T 7pm-10pm

FILM 6020b / AMST 6627b / ENGL 5820b / RLST 6600b, Media and Religion  John Peters and Kathryn Lofton

Media and religion are devices of information and agencies of order. This course proceeds from the possible synonymy of its organizing terms, using as a form of weekly debate the relationship between media and religion. Readings think about how religion and media generate meanings about human doings and their relations with ecological and economic systems while also being constitutive parts of those systems. Students develop projects that allow them to explore a relationship between concept and subject in humanistic study.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

FILM 6050a, Film and Media Studies Certificate Workshop  Neta Alexander and Fatima Naqvi

The workshop is built on students’ needs and orientations. It is aimed at helping the individual trajectories of students and at deepening the topics they have met while attending seminars, conferences, and lectures. Students are required to present a final qualifying paper demonstrating their capacity to do interdisciplinary work. The workshop covers two terms and counts as one regular course credit. Open only to students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Film and Media Studies. Prerequisite: FILM 601.  ½ Course cr
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

FILM 6127a / E&RS 6900a / RSEE 6120a / SLAV 6120a / UKRN 6120a, Cinematic Ukraine: Culture, Identity, and Memory  Olha Tytarenko

This course traces the evolution of Ukrainian cinema from the avant-garde experiments of the 1920s to the vibrant post-2014 film resurgence. Exploring themes of national identity, historical memory, and resistance to political and cultural oppression, we analyze how filmmakers have shaped Ukraine’s self-conception through film. Topics include the poetic cinema of the 1960s, post-Soviet transition films, and contemporary works responding to war and cultural sovereignty. Students engage critically with cinematic language, narrative structures, and visual aesthetics while incorporating perspectives from postcolonial theory and memory studies. The course features guest lectures from Ukrainian film directors and hands-on cinematographic workshops. Weekly thematic units pair films with historical and theoretical readings, offering a dynamic exploration of Ukraine’s place in global cinema and cultural history.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm, Th 6pm-9pm

FILM 6310a / AMST 8808a / WGSS 6310a, Media, Embodiment, and the Senses  Neta Alexander

This graduate seminar examines the intersections of critical disability studies and media theory to challenge conventional understandings of communication, technology, and culture. Through critical engagement with contemporary film, media, art, and design, this course explores how all technology functions as “assistive” technology and interrogates the pervasive idealization of able-bodiedness. Readings, screenings, discussions, and practice-based assignments encourage students to rethink normative assumptions about the body, ability, and accessibility, moving beyond audio-visual approaches to media.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

FILM 6460a / GMAN 5460a, Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From A Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl  Austen Hinkley

Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From A Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl remains a monument of postwar German literature—and it was written in and about New York City. Across its 367 short chapters (each corresponding to a day of the year), the novel unfolds on three levels: the historical present in New York, memories and family history from Germany, and reporting from the New York Times on current events. The result is a view of life, politics, and history in the middle of the twentieth century that is as rich and expansive as it is fragmented. The social and political climate of New York in the late ’60s is put into contact with memories of the rise of Nazism in Germany; reporting on the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and the Prague Spring is refracted through the lenses of the protagonist’s past life in East Germany and her new life raising her daughter alone in New York. This course undertakes a close reading of Johnson’s sprawling novel with attention to its many historical, political, and literary contexts. Readings from the novel will be complemented by relevant short readings in theories of media, politics, literature, and history. No prior knowledge of German language and literature is required.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

FILM 6810a / AMST 7740a / WGSS 741a, The Photographic Memory Workshop  Laura Wexler

This seminar considers landmark examples of photography’s cultural work in producing, cementing and erasing individual and collective memory.  Topics to be considered include but are not confined to “memory, post-memory and counter-memory”; “the biopolitics of images”; “the visuality of violence”; “photography’s place and space”; and the “potential history of photography.” Students are invited to develop and present their own case studies on topics of interest. Readings encompass: The Unseen Truth by Sarah Lewis; Camera Geologica by Siobhan Angus; The Unintended by Monica Huerta; Race Stories by Maurice Berger; Through a Native Lens by Nicole Dawn Strathman; When a Photograph is Home by Leigh Raiford; From These Roots by Tamara Lanier; and Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography by Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler. Guest lectures and travel to exhibitions are anticipated.
T 9:25am-11:15am

FILM 6900a / CPLT 9013a / SPAN 6330a, Third Cinema: Arts and Politics in Latin America  Moira Fradinger

This seminar studies the articulation of art and politics proposed by the world renowned film movement usually identified as “Third Cinema” that took shape in Latin America roughly between 1955 and 1982. Continental in scope, the movement has also been called “New Latin American Cinema” joining the “new waves” of the global sixties and expanding its influence throughout the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement. The seminar examines the category of “Third cinema,” first formulated in Solanas's and Getino's 1969 “Manifesto Towards a Third Cinema” and opposed to “First Cinema” (Hollywood) and “Second Cinema” (“cinema d’auteur” or independent film art). The manifesto's political thinking will be framed in terms of contemporary political ideas about “the third way” or “the non-aligned third world” as well as put in dialogue with an array of film manifestos emerging at this time in the region. The seminar engages concepts such as “imperfect cinema,” “urgent cinema,” “cinema novo,” “aesthetics of hunger,” “liberation cinema”; the “camera as expropiator of image-weapons,” and so forth. The seminar casts a wide net in terms of the corpus, which includes a minimum of two films per week, from countries such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Mexico. Taught in English; knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese is not required but certainly useful.
M 6:30pm-11pm, W 6:30pm-9pm

FILM 7350a / AMST 8832a, Documentary Film Workshop  Charles Musser

This workshop in audiovisual scholarship explores ways to present research through the moving image. Students work within a Public Humanities framework to make a documentary that draws on their disciplinary fields of study. Designed to fulfill requirements for the M.A. with a concentration in Public Humanities.
W 3:30pm-6:20pm, T 7pm-9pm

FILM 7620a / GMAN 6050, Weimar Cinema  Fatima Naqvi and Claire Demoulin

The German cinema, 1919–1930. Expressionist films and films of the New Objectivity. The pressures of technology and the other arts—especially painting—on cinema; issues of spectatorship, visual pleasure, and distraction in the context of a national cinema. Readings by Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, and others. Films by Murnau, Lang, Pabst, Lubitsch, Brecht, von Sternberg, and others. Conducted in English, with readings in English.
Th 9:25am-11:15am, W 6pm-8pm

FILM 7790a / ITAL 8783a, Italian Film Ecologies: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow  Millicent Marcus

Landscape and the natural environment have never occupied “background” status in Italian film. Given the spectacular visual presence of its terrain—thanks to the relative proximity of mountain chains and the long seacoast—and given the pivotal importance of farming and pasturage in this traditionally agrarian economy, the synergy between the human and natural worlds has played a prominent role in Italian filmmaking since the very inception of the industry. Most recently, two developments have pushed this issue to the forefront of scholarly attention: the advent of ecocriticism, which found one of its earliest and most influential champions in Serenella Iovino, and the establishment of regional film commissions, grassroots production centers that sponsored cinematic works attuned to the specificity of “the local.” The course includes study of films that predate our current environmental consciousness, as well as recent films that foreground it in narrative terms. In the case of the older films, which have already attracted a great deal of critical commentary over time, we work to shift our interpretive frame in an “eco-friendly” direction (even when the films’ characters are hardly friends of the environment). Among the films considered are Le quattro volte, Il vento fa il suo giro, L’uomo che verrà, Gomorra, L’albero degli zoccoli, Riso amaro, Red Desert, Christ Stopped at Eboli, and Il ladro di bambini. We screen one film a week and devote our seminars to close analysis of the works in question.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm, M 7:30pm-10pm

FILM 7830a / AMST 7783a, The Historical Documentary  Charles Musser

This course looks at the historical documentary as a method for carrying out historical work in the public humanities. It investigates the evolving discourse sand resonances within such topics as the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, and African American history. It is concerned with the relationship of documentary to traditional scholarly written histories as well as the history of the genre and what is often called the “archival turn.”
T 3:30pm-5:20pm, M 7pm-10pm

FILM 8740a / EALL 8920a, Japanese New Wave Cinema  Kirsten Seuffert

This course explores the “New Wave” in Japanese cinema in the context of the rise of “new wave” across cinemas in the American sphere in the period roughly between 1955 and 1975. It focuses on both local contexts and global flows in the turn to experimental filmmaking in Japan, paying particular attention to how films sought to make social and political interventions in both content and form. We analyze New Wave films and critical writing by asking what they can tell us about Japan’s postwar, high-speed economic growth, student and counterculture movements, and place in the Cold War order. We also consider what the Japanese New Wave tells us about the possibilities of cinema: its global simultaneity, transcultural movement, and historical trajectory. Topics include the legacy of World War II in Japan and cinema as a mode for narrating history; the rise of global youth culture in the context of postwar economic growth; cinema and protest against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty; the aesthetic use of sex, violence, and politics to shock mainstream culture; documentary as a site for radical experimentation; the studio system, independent filmmaking, and transformations of the Japanese film industry; and what is meant by “modernist” and “avant-garde” in New Wave cinema.
HTBA