Master of Arts Core Courses
CIN1101H - Theories and Practices of the Cinema
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.
CIN1102H - Key Developments in Film History
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
CIN2100H - History and Historiography of Cinematic Media
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.
CIN2101H - Pressures on the Cinematic
This course will introduce students to a variety of methods—theoretical and historical—for the study of colour in film. We will be considering the development of various forms of colour technology and the pressures that such developments placed on cinematic style and later on the histories of style. We will also be concerned to develop strategies of colour interpretation that make use of the perceptual slipperiness of colour itself. Likewise, colour presents us with new questions about the nature of cinematic perception and naming. Thus we will move, as well, into larger philosophical questions about colour and vision, which should reorient the kinds of questions we ask about not only a work of art, but also about the knowledge and being.
CIN2999H - Research Seminar
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
CIN1005H - Special Studies in Cinema
Seminar format. Drawing on the scholarly interests of faculty, courses may include intermediality, film genres, corporeality, and transnationality.
CIN1008H - Independent Research and Reading in Cinema Studies
Offers students the opportunity to design a reading list, research project and/or writing assignments in the student’s designated area of interest.
CIN1011H - Colour And The Moving Image
This course will introduce students to a variety of methods—theoretical and historical—for the study of colour in film. We will be considering the development of various forms of colour technology and the pressures that such developments placed on cinematic style and later on the histories of style. We will also be concerned to develop strategies of colour interpretation that make use of the perceptual slipperiness of colour itself. Likewise, colour presents us with new questions about the nature of cinematic perception and naming. Thus we will move, as well, into larger philosophical questions about colour and vision, which should reorient the kinds of questions we ask about not only a work of art, but also about the knowledge and being.
CIN1100H - The Textual Object
This course combines an overview of the analytical methods that have proven particularly pertinent within cinema studies with the application of these methods to a select number of key film texts. Students will learn the role that analysis has played within the discipline while also honing their own skills as film analysts. Examination of the critical literature featuring film analysis will help students to learn how film theory and history have supported and influenced the development of analytical methodology.
Past iterations of the course have featured Touch of Evil, Imitation of Life, and Disneyland.
CIN3002H - Cinema And Nation
An in-depth examination of the intersection of cinema and nationhood, such as British Social Realism or German New Wave. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
CIN3004H - Documentary and Non-Fiction
An in-depth examination of aspects of documentary and non-fiction media, such as first-person filmmaking, interactive documentary, or reality television. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
CIN3006H - Media and Philosophy
An in-depth examination of aspects of media and philosophy. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
CIN3008H - Topics in Film and Media History
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.
CIN3010H - Topics in Film and Media Theory
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.
CIN3101H - World Cinemas, Cinematic Worlds
What are the geopolitical, institutional, and ethical imaginaries that shape the idea of “world cinemas” and how do they intersect with the senses of worlds within what may be called worlds within cinemas or “cinematic worlds”? Following Naoki Sakai’s critique of nationalist insularity and the binaries of “the West and the rest,” we will consider empire, decolonization, and Pax Americana in the constitution of the “world” of “world cinemas.” Through critical and creative juxtapositions of films and philosophical texts, this class is an invitation to investigate the possibilities of thinking world and worlds, worldformation and worldhood.
CIN3103H - Queer Girls and Racial Others
The title words of this film-centered seminar index the interventions, encounters, and deployments the course hopes to stage. “Queer” and “Girls” situate our film screenings and readings within the contact zones of queer, feminist, and trans studies; shift the focus away from the gay male subjectivity that dominated New Queer Cinema; put gender and gender nonconformity on the radar; and displace traditional feminist film theory through a focus on youth, generationality, the masculinity of tomboys, and the girliness of women, trans and cis. “Racial Others” signals a commitment to women of color feminism, queer of color critique, and the global reach of work on multicultural minorities and diasporic mobilities that queer ethnicity while also calling attention to what Roderick Ferguson calls racialized sexualities, nonheteronormative racial formations, and “other terrains for the interrogation of sexuality...that do not begin and end with queer studies.” Methodologically, this interdisciplinary course surveys a broad range of approaches: production histories, textual, historical, and formal analyses (visuality, narrative and sound), and reflexive critiques of queer film festivals and academic pedagogy.
CIN3105H - Topics in Film Aesthetics
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.
CIN3107H - Topics in Politics of the Moving Image
This course will introduce students to variety of ideas about the relation between film and politics. This might include the role of cinematic representation in the production of social formations, questions of identity and identification, film as a form of antagonism, moving image media and community, to name a few areas of inquiry.
CIN6153H - Race and Cinema
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.
Affliliated Courses
Consult other departments directly, as their course offerings will vary from year to year.