Required courses

SAC 600: Introduction to Screen Cultures: Research and Materials

An introduction to the critical vocabulary, scholarly concerns, and research/writing methodologies of film, television, and digital media studies. Divided into three sections, this course will first review the audiovisual grammar of screen-based media and the critical terminology of the discipline. Second, it will review past and contemporary debates on aesthetic forms and traditions (i.e., realism; avant garde; classical Hollywood ; postmodernity), identity and representations (class, gender, race, and sexuality), and geoculture (colonial/postcolonial; national/transnational, global /diasporic). Third, it will instruct students on the research and writing protocols of media scholarship: i.e. bibliographies, filmographies, and dedicated electronic databases. Possible instructors: all tenure-track faculty.

An examination of a specific issue of concern to film or electronic/digital media theory. Instead of surveying the field of classical and contemporary theory, this course will focus on a specific subject to explore the theories it has generated and how their resulting methods of analysis have informed the study of this aspect of media. Areas of theoretical consideration may include: narrative practice, genre, spectatorship, authorship, stardom and performance, technology and the apparatus, the representation of gender and sexuality. Course content will vary according to the interests of the instructor. Possible instructors: Murphy, Saks, von Moltke.

An examination of the process and progress of historical research and writing in film or television. Students will read, with a critical eye, historical arguments in various areas of film or television history: aesthetic, technological, business, and social history. This seminar will use several specific productive "problems" (such as the emergence of the "national," the advent of the star system, the practice of censorship, the rise of independent production, the development of exhibition practices) as the focus or case study for considering diverse methods relied upon by historians in conceptualizing processes of determination and historical causality in relation to production and reception. Students will do extensive research with primary materials. Possible instructors: Abel, Bertellini, Murphy, Nornes.

This course aims to develop a critical and historical understanding of the production cultures of the film, television, and digital imaging industries. It operates under the notion that critical comprehension of screen aesthetics and cultures is inextricably linked to the knowledge of material practices (social, economic, industrial, intellectual) that inform the use of technologies of moving image capture, manipulation and display and the strategies linked to the development, production, and dissemination of film, television, and digital images. Too often material practices have been bracketed off from the critical study of media texts. This seminar is a corrective to this approach and offers a way of conjoining these two vital areas of study. Possible instructors: Bertellini, Kybartus, McNamara, Murphy, Rayher, Saks, Sarris.

A minimum of three hours of directed research in screen cultures. Each student will carry out a research project in screen cultures that represents the culmination of her or his graduate work. Based on individual reading and screening lists, this written project normally will serve as a preliminary stage of the student's dissertation.

Elective Courses

This course, designed broadly within a Cultural Studies framework, investigates the interrelation of film or electronic/digital media and a set of cultural practices and/or cultural forms. The specific subject could focus on either a synchronic or diachronic study of such practices and forms; it also could either be restricted to a particular culture, country, or region or else involve a confrontation between one or more cultures, countries, or regions. Possible instructors: Abel, Bertellini, Murphy, Nornes, Saks, von Moltke.

This seminar examines many of the social, ethical and philosophical problems and issues -i.e., questions of authenticity, representation, voice, authority, form and politics- surrounding non-fiction and documentary film and video. It explores a range of non-fiction film practices through the application of anthropological, historical, gender, and cultural studies theory to a range of genres including counter-colonial, cinema verité, direct cinema, ethnographic, instructional, historical, and auteurist documentaries. Topics covered include the boundaries of documentary/non-fiction discourse, documentary poetics, historical representation on film, non-western documentary and feminism, and the essayistic in film and video. This course could be conceived as an integrated studies and production course and, following the model of the integrated undergraduate courses, be team-taught by studies and production faculty (see page 27). Possible instructors: Kybartus, McNamara, Nornes, Rayher, Saks, Sarris.

There is a growing worldwide interest in media that visualize experiences of global diasporas. Films and television programs about migrant populations (and here one takes migrant to mean geographically-dispersed communities) force one to rethink the notion of "national cinema" and local versus global. Whether termed "postcolonial hybrids" or "accented films," these products are labeled as "world cinema" in the video store. Like world music, this label signals the universality of diversity and mobility in today's global world. The result: a diasporic cinema and media. This seminar explores how experiences of migration, dislocation, or exile are represented in world cinema and media. Not a course on a national cinema per se, it crosses those boundaries to examine such concepts as hybridity, multiculturalism, citizenship, cosmopolitanism and civic society in an age characterized by connectivity and what Anthony Giddens calls "an intensification of world-wide social relations." Possible instructors: Bertellini, Nornes, Saks.

This course will concentrate on a contemporary theoretical methodology (or related set of methodologies) germane to the disciplines of Film and Electronic/Digital Media Studies. It will explore the epistemology, discursive organization, and research productiveness of the methodology as well as raise the question of what theory can reveal about cinema and/or new media and what they, in turn, can reveal about theory. The specific theoretical focus will vary from term to term, depending on the instructor, and could include: semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, Feminist film theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, geography, etc. Possible instructors: Eagle, Murphy, Saks, von Moltke.

This course will concentrate on a specific historiographical problematic (or set of questions) pertaining to the disciplines of Film and Television History. The specific subject will vary from term to term, depending on the instructor, and could include a particular historical period (e.g., early cinema), a major moment of historical change (e.g., the emergence of feature films, the coming of sound, the "New Wave" phenomenon), the question of periodization, transnational frameworks of interpretation, interdisciplinary research on media audiences, etc. Possible instructors: Abel, Bertellini, Nornes, Saks, von Moltke.