To register for graduate courses, please contact the Graduate Assistant at gradcinema.studies@utoronto.ca.
For students from outside of Cinema Studies, please inquire about spaces in these courses in August.
For all room information, please consult ACORN in August, 2025.
2025-26 (Under Construction - information is tentative)
Master of Arts Core Courses
CIN1101HF - Theories and Practices of the Cinema
FALL | Mondays 3-5, Wednesdays 11-1 | Kass Banning
Organized around a series of issues that have incited ongoing discussion and debate among scholars, cultural critics, and filmmakers, this course takes a topical approach to the study of film theory. In the process it both revisits some of the most canonical texts in the field and attends to more recent attempts to think through our contemporary moment, when digitality and transnationalism are radically changing the nature of film as well as the manner in which it is produced, distributed, exhibited, and viewed. Among those issues to be discussed are medium specificity, spectatorship, narrativity, affect, and the relationship between aesthetics, economics, and politics.
CIN1102HS - Key Developments in Film History
WINTER | Tuesdays 3-5, Wednesdays 3-5 | Nic Sammond
This course will examine a limited number of important developments in the history of cinematic media. It will extend the in-depth study of these developments in technique, technology, and text to include considerations of the sociocultural forces, economics, theories of the cinematic and aesthetics that have played a role in their development, or in the ways in which we have studied them. The course will cover a wide range of distinct time periods, geographical areas, and stylistic tendencies, and will engage with a range of scholarly approaches to key developments in cinematic media. The course aims to ensure that students' knowledge of the history of film and media is enhanced, and that they have the opportunity to engage more critically with the issues surrounding the historical study of cinema and related media that are of interest and importance to them.
CIN1006Y - Major Research Paper in Cinema Studies
SUMMER
This course provides each student with the opportunity to write a major research paper on a topic to be devised in consultation with an individual member of the Cinema Studies core faculty. Students will be encouraged to make use of the special collections housed with the Media Commons as the basis for their research projects.
CIN1007Y - Internship in Cinema Studies
SUMMER
A variety of placement settings connected to film culture. Each placement will entail some form of film-related research and/or examination of / participation in how organizations use and study film and disseminate it within a broader cultural field. Students will produce a report at the end of their internship outlining the learning experience and the implications for research and film scholarship.
Doctor of Philosophy Core Courses
CIN2101HF - Pressures on the Cinematic
FALL | Mondays 5-7, Wednesdays 3-5 | Angelica Fenner
This course examines a range of factors that shape and contest the field of cinema studies. It maintains a focus on pressures exerted on our conception of what constitutes “cinema” as they are inflected in current scholarly debates, including institutional pressures on steady and gainful employment in the field. Rapid changes in technology; shifts in modes of delivery; individual, embodied, and communal spectatorial practices, experiences and uses of cinema; globalization and industrial consolidation—all of these forces work to alter both the forms of cinematic media and their place in social, cultural, and political life. This course will study how cinema’s mutable nature remains a central issue in debates about medium specificity, the role and toll of digitalization, and the shapes and purposes of different viewing communities, among other topics.
CIN2999HF - Research Seminar
FALL | Thursdays 1-3 | Sara Saljoughi
This course is required of all second-year PhD students in the Cinema Studies Institute. Structured as a workshop, it aims to develop students' skills for surviving and thriving in the doctoral program, as researchers and teachers in the fields of cinema and media studies, and as professionals in the academy and beyond.
Elective Courses
CIN1005HF - Special Studies in Cinema
FALL | Wednesdays 5-9 | Scott Richmond
Seminar format. Drawing on the scholarly interests of faculty, courses may include intermediality, film genres, corporeality, and transnationality.
Thinking Media and Reasoning Machines: The focus of this seminar is on the theoretical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of the blur between humans and machines. The goal of the seminar will be to articulate some of the analytical tools required to dwell in that blur. To situate and understand that blur, we will stage a series of historical encounters, from the 18th century through the end of the 20th, between of the critique of instrumental reason and the critique of the media machines that embody that reason. We will study the machines which seem to offer ways of turning the human into a machine: counting machines, androids, the cinema, and digital media. We will also study the history of the critique of machines that seem to think, or (and this is the same thing) the history of the idea that thinking can be made mechanical. Ultimately, we will aim understand the apparent convertability of the machine and the human, by investigating the ways philosophers, technologists, and artists have–in moods by turns delighted and terrified–theorized how the human is already machinic, and how machines might remake humanity in their own image.
The main line of the course traces the philosophical and theoretical articulation of two twinned figures: the human made into machine, and the irreducible humanity of the human. Major figures from this intellectual history will include Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Sylvia Wynter, Donna Haraway, Paul Preciado, and Fred Moten. At the same time, as a history of technology and media, this course sets this intellectual history in relation to histories and analyses of particular machines and scenes of human/machine encounter: Charles Babbage’s counting machines and their ancestors; Soviet Futurist Cinema; Spacewar!, the first videogame; early “artificial intelligence” systems of the 1960s; and the history of Black androids.
Students will pursue substantial semester-long research projects which develop case studies of their own devising. These projects will be scaffolded across the term.
CIN3006HF - Media and Philosophy
FALL | Tuesdays 5-9 | Brian Price
An in-depth examination of aspects of media and philosophy. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Character and Moral Philosophy: In this seminar, we will consider what it means to take character as a central concern in film viewing and analysis. By character I mean both the fictionalized beings enacted in film and television and the values we assess in our most basic and, I would argue, most important experience of cinematic fictions and everyday life: namely, what kind of person is this before me? How am I to value them? How, in other words, am I to assess their character and understand that character in relation to my own? What could it mean to have character? These are questions recently raised in a host of provocative ways about literature in Character: Three Inquiries into Literary Study by Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski and Toril Moi. It was also the subject of Murray Smith’s pioneering work on the subject in film studies, Engaging Characters. Among other questions, the authors of Character wonder why, for instance, we tend to regard character and characterization as if it were separable form style and form, and also why structure and ideology would be understood as antithetical to character. In bringing this question to back bear on film study, and in view of Murray Smith’s important work for film theory, my hypothesis is that the ontological concerns about fictional characters takes on an even greater significance for film especially as the skeptical strains of film theory tend to regard characters less often as persons than as subjects. In returning to the question of character, we will be read works in moral psychology, an important sub-field of moral philosophy; one that tends to complicate psychoanalytic discourses about subjects, drives and acts by tending to the psyche as something textured, complex, and not easily reducible to generalizations in and about being. We will consider the relation between value pluralism in our responses to characters. And to be clear, it will not be argued that style does not matter. Rather, it will be on us to understand—having considered, first, the question of character as a matter of value and then psychic complexity—how style may in fact be the ground of character, and so, being.
CIN3008HF - Topics in Film and Media History
FALL | Tuesdays 2-5, Thursdays 11-1 | Bliss Cua Lim
An in-depth examination of a specific topic in film and media history not covered by the core curriculum, such as Women’s Film Festivals, or Animals and Film. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Queer Asian Cinemas: (coming shortly)
CIN3107HS - Topics in Politics and the Moving Image
WINTER | Tuesdays 5-9 | Meghan Sutherland
This course will introduce students to a wide variety of approaches to the study of film style and questions about the aesthetic experience of film: how film impacts the senses, how we understand film style in relation to other art forms, how notions of beauty in film raise related questions about race, gender, power, capital, and also autonomy.
Melodrama As Politics/Politics As Melodrama: The category of aesthetic form known as melodrama holds a strange distinction: it is defined above all by its excessive relation to most traditional categories of form. To call a film, a play, or even a person melodramatic is to evoke a sense of gendered overindulgence that is emotional, moral, and aesthetic all at once—one that reflects not only on the quality of the work or the person in question, but on the sensibility and judgment of the implicitly reactive, feminized audience that enjoys it. In other words, the term melodrama has often served a pejorative function in western culture, indicating an “over-the-top” display of female artifice, affect, and stylization that exploits only base and irrational people and feelings. This rather unusual aspect of the form has made it notoriously difficult for scholars to define, but it has also positioned the unstable category of entertainment known as melodrama at the center of debates about the politics of popular aesthetic form. While an important body of literary theory ties the politics of melodramatic form to the emergence of modern democracy writ large, and regards it as a medium through which the oppressed have found new modes of expression when silenced, many other traditions of critical thought point to the role the form has played in the historical construction of those very same oppressions, and regard the form as an exploitation of mass sentiment with grave implications for the disenfranchised people whose suffering it so often thematizes. The pivotal role the form plays in the feminist and queer film theory of the 1980’s and 1990’s, and the debates around the politics of aesthetic form this moment launched for the field more broadly, only further underscore the intractable nature of this debate. What has never been seriously in question is the political significance of melodrama itself—that it carries some volatile yet fundamental bond with that which exceeds, expands, forms, or contains the very limits of the social and its sufferings.
This course will undertake an intensive exploration of the nature of this bond and its implications for contemporary understandings of the relation between politics, aesthetics, and affect—especially as they delimit the terrain of modern liberal democracy and its values. On the one hand, we will seek to form a more rigorous grasp of the theoretical and philosophical arguments that underpin this relation as it is conceptualized today, taking melodrama as a particularly formative medium for the discourse of aesthetic politics more broadly—one that pushes the very concept of aesthetic form to its limit, allowing it to morph into different configurations over time. On the other hand, however, we will consider what this genealogical examination of the relation between politics and melodrama stands to teach us about a phenomenon of contemporary political culture and media that simultaneously reproduces and transforms the basic coordinates of this relation on the terrain of digital media technology: namely, the rise of what is pejoratively referred to as “cancel culture,” “call-out culture,” “clap-back culture,” and so on, and the equally extreme displays of emotional and moral outrage it elicits in conservative “shock” media. Although a wide range of emergent frameworks for the study of new media technologies insist on the obsolescence of formalistic and subject-oriented approaches, we will take the twisting, ever-transforming limit case of aesthetic form instantiated by melodrama, and the excessive dynamics of affect, form, and morality that define it as such, as an opportunity to explore more fully what it means to talk about the politics of popular form today. Screenings will range from works of classical Hollywood cinema and global art film to YouTube rants and television news broadcasts, but with an emphasis on cinematic texts; readings will likewise move between an array of disciplinary formations, including film studies, critical race theory, continental philosophy, and political theory, but with a steady emphasis on the meeting point of affect and form. Throughout all of it, we will try to make sense of the liminal relation between politics, affect, and form that melodrama coordinates across these shifting configurations of popular discourse—and just as importantly, what to do about it now, both as scholars and political actors.
CIN6153HS - Race And Cinema
WINTER | Mondays 5-9 | Lauren Cramer
This course will consider the role race has played in defining film genres and film language. We will look primarily at American films, from the silent era to contemporary cinema and we will consider how the representation of race informs (or deforms) film narratives. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality intersect in film and film theory.
Black Studies in Cinema: Black Studies is an undisciplined project that centers black life as a way to, first, understand the relationship between blackness and the humanist subject and, second, coalesce around alternatives ways of living in and knowing the world. This seminar aims to identify the generative possibilities of utilizing this collection of theoretical and analytic tools in Cinema Studies. We will explore key concepts in Black Studies including black feminist thought, debates “between" Afro-pessimism and black optimism, black geographies, and the Black Radical Tradition with the aim of understanding the political potential of film aesthetics and filmmaking as an aesthetic practice. As we develop a sense of Black Studies as a field with overlapping and diverging methods, objects of study, and aims, this course will consider the implications of Black Studies' critique of disciplinarity for the field of Cinema Studies.
JFF1102HF - Animage-Animots-Animotions
FALL | Tuesdays 9-11, Wednesdays 9-11 | James Cahill
(joint course with French; counts as a Cinema Studies course)
Animages, Animots, Animotions (Animals in Theory) tracks key debates in thinking about media through animals and animals through media, as well as the broader “animal turn” in French theory and cultural studies. Special attention is given to modernist, deconstructionist, materialist, feminist, queer, and posthumanist approaches to animals in theory and theoretical animals. Our enquiries will be organized around three key themes—animages (or animal images and questions of their epistemic and magical properties from Lascaux to modernist practice), animots (Derrida’s term for animal-words and the enframing of animal life within anthropocentric representational systems, as well as broader inquiries into the animations of language, metaphor, and figuration), and animotions (or the forms of movement, emotion, and affect expressed by or invested in animals and media). Through these themes we will track a triptych of questions: What can media teach us about animals (why and how we read with and look at animals on the page or on screen; how we represent, understand, and think with animals; what lessons or pleasures we gain or hope to gain from watching them)? What can animal media reveal or teach us about any given medium and forms of mediation, particularly the “electric animal” (to use Akira Mizuta Lippit’s term) known as cinema? What are the aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and political stakes of encounters between animals and media and how might they sensitize and sharpen our manners of thinking and approaching scholarly inquiry? Students can expect to encounter significant and emergent arguments in the field, work on their analytic and interpretive skills with textual and audiovisual materials, and rehearse high-level thought and the development of original interventions through two papers and a research presentation. Readings will include works by Daniel Arasse, Jean-Christophe Bailly, André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Vinciane Despret, Georges Didi-Huberman, Baptiste Morizot, Emanuel Levinas, Thangam Ravindranathan, Paul Valéry, and Simone Weil, among others. Screenings will likely include work by Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Jacques Perrin, Nagisa Oshima, Momoko Seto, Pierre Thévenard, and others. Readings will be in French and English translation. Work can be completed in French or English. Seminar in English.
2024-25
Master of Arts Core Courses
CIN1101HF - Theories and Practices of the Cinema
FALL | Tuesdays 9-1 | Elizabeth Wijaya
Organized around a series of issues that have incited ongoing discussion and debate among scholars, cultural critics, and filmmakers, this course takes a topical approach to the study of film theory. In the process it both revisits some of the most canonical texts in the field and attends to more recent attempts to think through our contemporary moment, when digitality and transnationalism are radically changing the nature of film as well as the manner in which it is produced, distributed, exhibited, and viewed. Among those issues to be discussed are medium specificity, spectatorship, narrativity, affect, and the relationship between aesthetics, economics, and politics.
CIN1102HS - Key Developments in Film History
WINTER | Wednesdays 11-3 | Rakesh Sengupta
This course will examine a limited number of important developments in the history of cinematic media. It will extend the in-depth study of these developments in technique, technology, and text to include considerations of the sociocultural forces, economics, theories of the cinematic and aesthetics that have played a role in their development, or in the ways in which we have studied them. The course will cover a wide range of distinct time periods, geographical areas, and stylistic tendencies, and will engage with a range of scholarly approaches to key developments in cinematic media. The course aims to ensure that students' knowledge of the history of film and media is enhanced, and that they have the opportunity to engage more critically with the issues surrounding the historical study of cinema and related media that are of interest and importance to them.
CIN1006Y - Major Research Paper in Cinema Studies
SUMMER
This course provides each student with the opportunity to write a major research paper on a topic to be devised in consultation with an individual member of the Cinema Studies core faculty. Students will be encouraged to make use of the special collections housed with the Media Commons as the basis for their research projects.
CIN1007Y - Internship in Cinema Studies
SUMMER
A variety of placement settings connected to film culture. Each placement will entail some form of film-related research and/or examination of / participation in how organizations use and study film and disseminate it within a broader cultural field. Students will produce a report at the end of their internship outlining the learning experience and the implications for research and film scholarship.
Doctor of Philosophy Core Courses
CIN2100HF - History and Historiography of Cinematic Media
FALL | Tuesdays 5-7, Wednesdays 11-1 | Scott Richmond
In 1824, the influential German historian Leopold von Ranke described the aim of history as "to show what actually happened," assuming the possibility of an unambiguous access to the past. Today few theorists of history would be as confident. And yet, if an unmediated past is inaccessible – if history is instead inevitably a personal construct, shaped by the historian's perspective as a narrator – how is one to assess the historical enterprise? What can it mean to think historically, and what are the unique characteristics of historical inquiry? And what clues can cinema, as a supposedly "referential" visual form, provide about history, as a similarly (and also supposedly) "referential" discourse? Broadly stated, the class can be defined in terms of three major goals: to investigate the range of hermeneutic perspectives from which film history has been written; to assess and to theorize the kind of archival sources that film historians have conventionally drawn upon; and to confront cinema's status as a technology and the pressures that technological change (in particular, digitization) has placed on history and cultural memory. Rather than deny or avoid these pressures, this course seeks ultimately to suggest ways of running positively with them; ways of "doing history in the postmodern world" – arguably the world we live in.
CIN2999HF - Research Seminar
FALL | Mondays 6-8 | Lauren Cramer
This course is required of all second-year PhD students in the Cinema Studies Institute. Structured as a workshop, it aims to develop students' skills for surviving and thriving in the doctoral program, as researchers and teachers in the fields of cinema and media studies, and as professionals in the academy and beyond.
Elective Courses
CIN1005HS - Special Studies in Cinema
WINTER | Fridays 1-5 | Angelica Fenner
Seminar format. Drawing on the scholarly interests of faculty, courses may include intermediality, film genres, corporeality, and transnationality.
Film and/as Phenomenology: As a strand of philosophical thinking, phenomenology locates meaning and value in the ebb and flow of lived (human) experience. As a result, perception and embodiment become crucial vehicles for exploring the mind-body connection and the relationship between subjective experience and objective world. Film phenomenology, by extension, approaches the experiential component of film viewing, the apparatus, and even the institution of cinema, as perceptual worldmaking; this entails exploring how film form and narrative content allow us to feel and sense, both physically and emotionally, that which transpires on screen, and further, how film as textual object focalized through the camera, engages in sense-making and is itself a form of phenomenology. To come to terms with the changing stakes across a century and more of phenomenological thought, we will read Bergson, Heidegger, and Sartre, among other philosophers, diverse film theorists, and the film scholarship of Barker, Chamarette, Marks, Sobchak, Yacavone, and Wahlberg, also with attention to such vectors of difference as gender, race, the queer and the nonhuman. Weekly screenings of visual media produced across disparate historical eras and in diverse genres and modes will help us visualize the issues under investigation.
CIN3006HS - Media and Philosophy
WINTER | Tuesdays 3-7 | Meghan Sutherland
An in-depth examination of aspects of media and philosophy. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Rethinking Italian Neorealism: On the Making of Film Philosophy: This course will explore the animating role that Italian cinema has played in the philosophical and political imagination of film. On the one hand, it will consider the distinctly philosophical sensibility of the filmmaking movements that have defined Italian cinema since the postwar era, taking the films themselves as contributions to a range of reflections on the nature of existence, humanity, ethics, justice, and collective social life. On the other hand, the course will explore the pivotal role these same films played in prompting philosophical and political writings about cinema and also the culture of art cinema more broadly, working through a range of philosophical treatments of the medium and its relation to the world that emerged in response to the films’ provocations. We will begin this exploration by taking a sustained look at the influential tradition of Italian neorealism, and the auteurist theories of cinema that so famously accumulated around its major figures. This may seem an unlikely place to begin a consideration of the relation between film and philosophy, but our more specific concern will be to examine the distinctly philosophical preoccupations that drive this seemingly old-fashioned tradition of film criticism, and to mine it for new aesthetic, philosophical, and political currency. Students can expect to work through fresh encounters with the writings of Bazin, Croce, and Deleuze in this initial part of the course. As our consideration continues, though, we will turn increasingly to more contemporary movements in Italian cinema and philosophy, tracing the continuing dialogue that takes shape between Italian filmmakers, philosophers, and political theorists as it unfolds across new generations, new territories, new cultures, and new aesthetic approaches, influencing later traditions of political filmmaking in the process. In this part of the course, we will work more with the writings of Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Adriana Cavarero, and Giorgio Agamben, among others. The overarching goal will be to take seriously the philosopher Roberto Esposito’s argument that filmmaking and other modes of aesthetic and political production should be understood as vital parts of the heterodox and emphatically worldly culture of philosophical expression that defines Italian thought as a practice. And yet, along the way, students will also gain a strong working knowledge of some key movements in the history of Italian cinema, and the various currents of film theory, film criticism, radical film aesthetics, and philosophy they’ve helped to define. To borrow Esposito’s formulation, we will approach the films we watch and the essays we read alongside them as examples of “living thought” that challenge us to take philosophy out of the academy and into the world through the medium of the moving image.
CIN3008HF - Topics in Film and Media History
FALL | Fridays 1-5 | Patrick Keilty
An in-depth examination of a specific topic in film and media history not covered by the core curriculum, such as Women’s Film Festivals, or Animals and Film. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Film and Media Archives: If archives have long been an administrative tool of governments, states, and corporations, and later the methodological terrain of historians and cultural production of social movements, most recently, they have become the conceptual and analytical terrain of a range of disciplines across the humanities. Scholars invoke "the archive" to refer to places, institutions, collections, memory practices, psychic traces, methodologies, organizing principles, information networks, and theoretical frameworks. This "archival turn" in the humanities has produced a wealth of recent scholarship, examining archives as sites of tension between the mediated subjectivity of those documented in records and the authority of state record-keepers to shape memory. Meanwhile, others have taken up the archive as a metaphorical apparatus to examine the transmission of knowledge through shared cultural forms. The result is an understanding of archives as never simply a site for historical accumulation and administrative power. Instead, they are also a site of creative irruption that re-assembles history to serve as the contestatory ground over the boundaries of community, evidence, memory, epistemology, and identity.
In what ways could interpretations of the archive in one academic field help reframe archival questions in another? How can professional archival practices and institutional politics structure our understanding of evidence? How might histories of the archive reshape histories written from the archive? This course traces an intellectual and institutional formation around archives, with specific emphasis on film and media archives. Throughout the course, students will learn archival research tools and practices by conducting original research within a variety of local archives, such as the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, City of Toronto Archives, National Film Board Archives, the UofT Media Commons, and the TIFF Film Reference Library.
CIN3010HF - Topics in Film and Media Theory
FALL | Wednesdays 1-5 | Kass Banning
An in-depth examination of a specific topic in film and media theory not covered by the core curriculum, such as theories of the viewing subject, film and phenomenology, or reviewing spectator studies. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Oceanic Imaginaries: The Black Atlantic, Migration and the Planetary: Inspired by John Akomfrah’s moving image installation Vertigo Sea, Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” and Kamau Braithwaite’s neologism tidalectics, this seminar adopts an oceanic imaginary–its visual and material modalities –as its central analytic. While maritime life worlds and beasts from Leviathan to Moby Dick have served as generative metaphors for our mutable relationship with watery depths, this seminar will foreground three registers – the Black Atlantic and “hydro colonialism,” migration, and the planetary – through the distinctive lens of “wet ontologies.”
“Blue humanities” inquiry highlighting reciprocal relationships between marine environments and the human –culled from literature, postcolonial studies, cultural geography, black and indigenous studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanist feminist phenomenology – will be placed in conversation with a variety of moving image works. The sea’s spatial foundation – voluminous, material, and undergoing continual renovation – one that can reinvigorate, redirect, and reshape debates restricted by terrestrial limits, will steer our inquiry. We will “think with water” to explore novel hydro-scenes suggestive of an aesthetic aquatic “spacetime mattering” (Barard) – beyond Sigmund Freud’s infamous treatise on “oceanic feeling.”
CIN3105HF - Topics in Film Aesthetics
FALL | Mondays 11-1, Tuesdays 3-5 | Brett Story
This course will introduce students to a wide variety of approaches to the study of film style and questions about the aesthetic experience of film: how film impacts the senses, how we understand film style in relation to other art forms, how notions of beauty in film raise related questions about race, gender, power, capital and also autonomy.
Captive Cinema: Prison Films and Abolitionist Imaginaries: This course will introduce students to a wide variety of approaches to the study of film style and questions about the aesthetic experience of film: how film impacts the senses, how we understand film style in relation to other art forms, how notions of beauty in film raise related questions about race, gender, power, capital and also autonomy.
The non-fiction filmmaker Harun Farocki argued, describing his film Prison Images (2000), that “the camera has always been attracted to prisons.” The documentary landscape of recent decades, including a flurry of true crime serials, offers confirmation of this claim. Indeed, across the moving image landscape, crime scenes, cell blocks, courtrooms, victims and vigilantes continue to dominate our screens and our imaginations, producing and reproducing what we might call a “carceral common sense.”
This course explores the relationship between the carceral apparatus - that matrix of institutions, laws, and logics that make up the prison industrial complex and the criminal-legal system - and the cinematic representations that have historically valorized carceral narratives for popular consumption. The class will combine class discussion of relevant readings, film screenings, and examinations of various media through the lens of abolition. Together we will deconstruct carceral scenarios and affects in order to unearth and imagine transformative approaches to moving image art.
ITA1820HF - The Mediterranean Noir: A Transnational Approach
FALL | Mondays 10-2 | Alberto Zambenedetti
Through the exploration of a variety of literary and cinematic works this course will grapple with questions arising from the repositioning of film noir in a transnational and global context. We will study films from Mediterranean cinemas (primarily Italian, French, and Spanish) understanding the permeability of noir to ideas and styles from many cultures. Ultimately, this course traces an alternative history of noir, one that engages with dark shadows and rainy North American cityscapes as well as with the sunny landscapes and blue hues of the Mediterranean basin.