Past courses

MA Course Descriptions 2019-2020

Note: 600-level indicates MA, 800-level indicates PhD. Several courses are offered to both MA and PhD students.

FALL-WINTER 2019-2020

FMST 600 Methods in Film Studies

Instructors: Katie Russell (Fall) and Haidee Wasson (Fall & Winter)

Location: FB 250 & VCR (Visual Collections Repository) Seminar Room

Katie Russell - Fall Term - Mondays 1:15-5:15pm in FB 250 This is a mandatory seminar in the Film Studies MA Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions by examining notable issues in the field. Course materials examine the ways that film history, criticism, and textual analysis have been and can be written, encompassing a range of ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding cinema and the moving image. Written and oral assignments are designed to develop research and communication skills appropriate to the field. The course also works to facilitate an esprit de corps within the MA class.

Haidee Wasson - Fall & Winter Terms: FALL: Every Second Monday 10:00-12noon in VCR Seminar Room / WINTER: Times TBD, location likely FB 250 This second portion of the Methods seminar, which runs parallel to Methods 1, will be designed to help students develop basic research, writing, and presentation skills required to successfully complete the program. This course will focus on workshop-style exercises and practical discussions geared towards assisting students with things like digital searching, navigating archives and libraries, building bibliographies, conceptualizing and planning programs of research, understanding difference kinds of evidence and how to use it, presentation skills, and academic writing practices. We will also discuss key survival strategies for graduate school such as developing good reading and writing habits. Time will also be devoted to practices of peer review and the many kinds of publishing and other paths your academic work can lead towards. You will be encouraged to use this class as a resource for the assignments you will be asked to complete in your other classes. In the winter term, we will focus a good deal of time on developing independent research proposals based on student interests. There will be no extended or feature-length screenings associated with this class.

FALL 2019

FMST 605/805 Topics in English Canadian Cinema – Diasporic Cinema

May Chew

Wednesdays 1:15-5:15pm

Location: FB 250

This seminar examines contemporary diasporic voices and imaginaries within English Canadian cinema. Avoiding essentialisms, this course interrogates hegemonic understandings of national film culture by analysing how the current landscape of Canadian film and media production is shaped by diverse im/migration histories. One of our primary goals will be to critically examine the ways in which ‘dominant’ and ‘minority’ screen cultures are mutually informed and negotiated. We will thus investigate how cultural policies and institutions like the National Film Board have directly impacted multicultural screen practices and resulted in ambivalent articulations of national identity. Throughout the course, we will explore how concepts of post/colonialism, multiculturalism, transnationalism, migration, exile, memory, hybridity, race, gender, and class play out in the work of filmmakers like Atom Egoyan, Richard Fung, Julia Kwan, Helen Lee, Deepa Mehta, Winston Washington Moxam, Midi Onodera, Mina Shum, Clement Virgo, and others.

FMST 635/835 Technology and Intimacy

Josh Neves

Wednesdays 6-10pm

Location: FB 250

This seminar examines contemporary forms of technological intimacy, drawing on approaches from digital media, cultural theory, feminist science and technology studies, and disability studies, among other fields. From “the cultural politics of emotion” (Ahmed), “ugly feelings” (Ngai), and “surplus life” (Cooper) to “emotional capitalism” (Illouz), “habitual new media” (Chun), and the “political economy of intimacies” (Lowe), we will trace a wide range of debates related to changing conceptions of technological and human relations. Of particular interest is the intersection of bio-technologies that now command an increased capacity to extract and harvest, alter and optimize, patent and monetize “life itself.” The course will give specific attention to debates about behavioral economies, data intimacies, algorithmic identity, network aesthetics, smart media, privacy and publicity, enhancement technologies, shifting habits and sociality, and experimental embodiment. ​

FMST 665/865 Sound, Ecology, Cinema

Randolph Jordan

Thursdays 1:15-5:15pm

Location: FB 250

This seminar situates established approaches to the study of film sound within broader questions about the relationships between sound, society, and the environment central to sound studies across disciplines. The field of acoustic ecology is used to reframe core issues in film sound theory and to provide an interdisciplinary model for how the study of film sound can become part of larger conversations about media and the environment in the humanities. Acoustic ecology has developed a rich set of conceptual tools for thinking about the relationship between sound and human experience within specific geographical locales. Along with these conceptual tools has come an equally rich set of issues and problems pertaining to acoustic ecology’s objects of study and its research practices. In this course we explore how these tools and problems can be made equally productive for charting sonic pathways through the emerging field of ecocinema studies. Screenings across a range of genres, cultural contexts, and historical periods are paired with literature from film studies, cultural studies, communications, musicology, and critical geography. These texts provide an interdisciplinary environment through which to listen for the ways in which films can help us navigate the current state of environmentalist discourse, while also challenging key tenets of acoustic ecology and film sound theory alike.

FMST 665/865 Video Modernity: Media and Cultural Infrastructures

Ishita Tiwary

Tuesdays 1:15-5:15pm

Location: FB 250

This seminar delineates the multiple lives of video and its cultural, social and political impact through infrastructures created by VHS tapes, VCD and DVD culture, and streaming and mobile platforms.  It focuses on issues and forms distinct to each technological apparatus such as the emergence of the video nasties in the global north, local entertainment industries spurred by VCD culture in the global south, and DIY aesthetics and whatsapp videos of the digital age. Through an examination of the poetics of infrastructure, the course will map and traverse the landscape of bootlegging, piracy, local media cultures and the forensic imagination. Deploying the lens of video, the course will address the issues of media infrastructures vis-a- vis the post cinematic imagination. While it is critical that we debate video as a post cinematic apparatus, it is equally necessary that we place front and centre certain discussions from the global south (piracy as access, localized video cultures, doctored videos and the crowd) if only to comprehend infrastructural politics and poetics of the medium(s).​

 

Winter 2020

FMST 630/830 Classical Film Theory

Martin Lefebvre

Tuesdays 1:15-5:15pm

Locatio: FB 250

This seminar will focus on some of the major figures of what is now referred to as "Classical Film Theory". The course is addressed first and foremost to students interested in the history of film theory and the development of ideas about film from the silent period to the 1960s.

Classical Film Theory concerns a period in the study of the cinema that pre-dates the full-blown emergence of a discipline of films studies; one that, for the most part, precedes the development of a film studies curriculum in universities, the emergence of specialized academic journals, the rise of professional film studies associations, etc. Thus film theory was left to a  group of individual thinkers often initially trained in either philosophy, psychology, art history, sociology, or other disciplines within the Humanities and working in isolation, but whose vision nonetheless introduced some of the most important and lasting debates about the nature of film and its relation to reality and the other arts. In fact, since the digital turn has taken place, those debates have returned to the forefront of film scholarship as academics consider what (if anything) has been gained, what (if anything) has been lost with regards to what cinema does and what our understanding of it is.

The seminar will center on the writings of 5 important figures of Classical Film Theory: Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim,Sergei M. Eisenstein, André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. Students will be asked to read the works of these theorists which will then be discussed in detail during class. Lectures will situate the different theories in their intellectual context. And since film theory doesn't develop out of "thin air", but in relation to films, films and film excerpts will be occasionally screened so as to contextualize and/or exemplify the work of each of the theorists considered.

FMST 635/835 Topics in Aesthetics or Cultural Theory: Queer of Colour Film and Media

Beenash Jafri

Tuesdays 6-10pm

Location: FB 407

This seminar explores the formation and circulation of the category of queer of color and its relatives—such as queer diaspora and queer Indigeneity—and their significance for studying film and media. We will consider the separate but related genealogies of these terms, as we historicize the category of “queer” vis-à-vis frameworks such as diaspora, blackness, settler colonialism, indigeneity, and postcolonialism. Of especial interest will be how queer of color audiences and mediamakers have responded to hegemonic constructions of race, gender and sexuality through practices of critical spectatorship and production. Film and media to be examined include works by Kent Monkman, Cheryl Dunye, Dee Rees, Paul Wong, Thirza Cuthand, Isaac Julien, Pratibha Parmar, Aurora Guerrero, Adam Garnet Jones and Vivek Shraya.  

FMST 635/835 Postcolonial Theory and Cinema

Luca Caminati

Wednesdays 1:15-5:15pm

Location: GEM Lab

This seminar will introduce students to some key concepts in the field of postcolonial theory in relation to cinema and other media practices.  Taking as our starting point Edward Said’s political and ideological renegotiation of the term “Orient”, we will explore this concept in the writings of theorists who have dealt with issues of orientalism and postcoloniality (Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, among others).  These texts will provide the initial theoretical framework by which we will then critique the orientalist tradition in European and American cinema through the writings of Shohat and Stam, Fatimah Tobing Rony, Homay King, Ray Chow, etc.). We then will turn our attention to both texts and films that speak to the experiences of colonialism and post-colonialism from the point of view of the colonized.  Taking off from Latin American Third Cinema’s manifestos, we will look at both the theory and practice of global counter-cinemas. The course will consist of weekly web-posts addressing the reading, occasional additional screenings, and a final research paper.

FMST 665/865: Platforms, Media, and Management

Marc Steinberg

Thursday 1:15-5:15pm

Location FB 250

Management - on the surface it seems marginal to the films, television series and other media we care about. Yet there is no function more crucial to understanding the process of how an idea for a film makes it to the big screen, and to grasping platform-mediated cultural production today. Indeed, the era of platforms is the era of heightened management of media and people – and this is the critical issue that we will focus on in this course. In doing so, this course will range across sites of analysis, from the middle realm of media management, to the management of media franchises and entrepreneurial selves, to the management of users by social media influencers and the gender politics of their labours, to the managing of consumers through increasingly complex and arcane end-user license agreements (EULAs), apps, interfaces and retail environments. Focuses on media in the era of platform capitalism in particular, the course will chart the multiple layers and levels at which media and its consumers are managed, from platforms to hardware to ad agencies and talent agencies. In the process we will screen and analyze the many self-referential films and TV series that stage these management practices and platform mediations for our enjoyment.

MA Course Descriptions 2017-2018

Note: 600-level indicates MA, 800-level indicates PhD. Several courses are offered to both MA and PhD students.

FALL-WINTER 2017-18

FMST 600: Methods in Film Studies

FB 250   Monday 8:45 -12:45

Instructors: Haidee Wasson (Fall) and Masha Salazkina (Winter)

This is a mandatory course in the Film Studies MA Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions by examining notable issues in the field. Course materials examine the ways that film history, criticism, and textual analysis have been and can be written, encompassing a range of ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding cinema and the moving image. Written and oral assignments are designed to develop research and communication skills appropriate to the field. The course also works to facilitate an esprit de corps within the M.A. class.

FALL 2017

FMST 605/805: Canadian Cinema

Description TBA

FMST 620/820: Arab Revolutions

FB 250 Tuesday 13:15-17:15

Kay Dickinson

From 2011 onwards, our online repositories have been awash with filmed material detailing, debating and promoting the compulsions and tactics of insurrections in the Arab world. Yet this body of work stands as simply the latest in a long line of alliances within the region between the capacities of film production and broader revolutionary praxis. For instance, Layla – purportedly Egypt’s first ever feature film – erupted out of and fortified the feminist anti-colonial campaigns of the 1920s. Since then, a significant majority of Arab moviemaking has engrossed itself in similar struggles against injustice. This course seeks to acknowledge and analyze cultural-activist engagements with a history of revolt in countries like Egypt, Palestine, Algeria and Syria, alongside related exilic, diasporic and internationalist endeavours. More particularly, this class will ask: how have various revolutions been conceptualized and enacted, and what role has, and can, cinema play within them? The corpus of films onto which this course opens comprises everything from guerrilla ventures to state-sponsored industrial output.  In terms of reading matter, the meagre Film Studies writing on these topics will be supplemented with political treatises, historical accounts, poetry, and anti-colonial theory.

FMST 635/835: Digital Media Ethnography 

FB 6^th floor lab Wednesday 13:15-17:15

Joshua Neves 

This research creation course combines audiovisual practice with critical approaches to digital media. Drawing on sensory ethnography, sarai, and related projects, the course will both examine digital media practices and technologies, and consider how to use digital media to do media studies. Course meetings will combine seminar style reading, writing, and debate with auvdiovisual exercises and “crit” style workshops. We will examine research methodologies and interpretive frameworks from Cinema/Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Anthropology, Urban Studies, and others, as well as genealogies of ethnographic and experimental media. Students will gain basic facility with video shooting, sound recording, editing, and online capture, develop site-specific digital ethnography projects, and make collaborative video essays. In short, this course is a practice-led introduction to the field of Digital Media Studies—including a focus on forms of emergent media that fall outside of current imaginations of technomodernity.

FMST 665/865: Managing Media

FB 250 Monday  13:15-17:15

Marc Steinberg

Management - on the surface it seems marginal to the films and television we care about; boring, even. Yet there is nothing more critically essential to understanding the process of how an idea for a film makes it to the big screen. This course will examine the mysterious middle realm of media management, from the production processes where film and television and novels get made, to the management of media franchises, star images and brands, to the managing of consumers through increasingly complex and arcane end-user license agreements (EULAs), apps, interfaces and retail environments. It will chart the multiple layers and levels at which media is managed, from platforms to hardware to ad agencies and talent agencies, and will analyze the many self-referential films and TV series that stage these management practices for our enjoyment.  

WINTER 2018

FMST 630/830 Christian Metz and The structuralist Moment in Film Theory

FB 250 Wednesday 13:15-17:15

Martin Lefebvre

The heyday of structuralism in film studies lasted roughly from 1964 to 1980. It corresponded to important and lasting changes in the study of cinema. Though it was not the sole factor involved, structuralism played a key role in the academic specialization of film studies. This course aims to provide students with an understanding of what structuralism meant in the history of film studies through reading and discussion of a number of key structuralist texts. There will be a focus on the work of Christian Metz (though the work of other theorists — Bellour, Kuntzel, etc. — will also be considered).

FMST 635/835 Cinema and the City

FB 250 Wednesday 18:00-22:00

Catherine Russell

The interpenetration of cities and cinemas takes place on many levels, and has shifted considerably over the 120 years of film and media history, from nickelodeons to digital displays. The study of cities and cinema is a means of better understanding the relations between the social world and cultural imagination, memory and the built environment. Themes of utopia and dystopia are pervasive, as well as themes of political activism and alienation; the analysis of visual style likewise extends to architecture and urban planning. This course will look at a wide range of filmmaking, including fiction, experimental, and documentary, to better understand the close affinities between urban space and film practice, spectatorship, and global film history. Screenings will include city “symphonies,” film noir, European art cinema, essay films, Asian cinema, science fiction, and web-based media art. Readings will include key works of modernity theory by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer; cultural theorists such as Lefebvre and de Certeau, film theorists Giuliana Bruno and Edward Dimendberg, and a selection of contemporary urban theory. Students will be asked to oral presentations, and final papers in addition to participating in a class project that will produce a “landscapes of Montreal” archival screening.

FMST 640/840 Women and Film Culture

FB 250 Monday 13:15-17:15

Rosanna Maule

This seminar investigates women’s contributions to film culture in initiatives, publications, and events associated with cinema as an art, a form of entertainment, and an educational tool. Particular attention will be put on activities, texts, and services that explicitly advocate women’s cinema and on the role of women within film-related institutions such as archives, museums, schools, and universities. While offering a theoretical approach to film culture, the course will select specific historical periods and geocultural contexts and present them through a series of case studies. The final part of the course will consider women’s participation in cinema’s transition to global digital culture.

FMST 660/860: Approaches to Pasolini's Cinema

FB 250 Tuesday 18:00-22:00

Luca Caminati

This class will analyse Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema and its global legacy, as well as the different methodological and theoretical paradigms in the study of film and authorship. More specifically, this course will move chronologically through Pasolini’s filmmaking career (1960-1975) in the context of post-WWII European modernist cinema while, at the same time, it will allow students to interrogate the different scholarly approaches (auteur theory, Marxism, Semiotics, Postcolonial and Queer Theory, among others) which have been applied to this canonical director’s films. This class will also introduce students to “remakes” and visual ripostes of and to Pasolini’s work from filmmakers and artists the world-over, thus further interrogating the notion of cinematic legacy and impact.

MA Course Descriptions 2016-2017

Note: 600-level indicates MA, 800-level indicates PhD. Several courses are offered to both MA and PhD students.

FMST 600 A /3 (Fall-Winter) Mondays, 13H15 - 17H15

Location: FB-250

Methods In Film Studies

Instructors: Catherine Russell (Fall) and Marc Steinberg (Winter)

This is a mandatory course in the Film Studies MA Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions by examining notable issues in the field. Course materials examine the ways that film history, criticism, and textual analysis have been and can be written, encompassing a range of ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding cinema and the moving image. Written and oral assignments are designed to develop research and communication skills appropriate to the field. The course also works to facilitate an esprit de corps within the M.A. class. The first term, taught by Catherine Russell, will address issues of criticism, theory, film analysis, and approaches to cinema. The second term, taught by Marc Steinberg, will focus on the relationship between film and other media, their technologies and infrastructures.  Final grades will be calculated on the basis of all assignments and presentations in both semesters.  

FMST 610/810 A  /2 (Fall)  Thursdays, 13H15-17H15

Location: FB-250

Topics in Québécois Cinema: Confessionality

Instructor: Tom Waugh

This seminar is on the historiography, theory and criticism of a specific genre in Québec cinema across its historical span, namely the first-person, autobiographical, self-portrait or diary film—in short, what we are calling the confessional film. It is a commonplace in Quebec film history and criticism that Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother, 2009) launched a new era in Québec cinema. Yet this film, directed, written and performed by the teenage wunderkind in an autobiographical mode, belonged to a decades-old tradition of Québécois filmmakers speaking in the first person. The first thrust of this genre during the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s and 70s coincided and engaged with the international historical phenomenon known as the Sexual Revolution. However confessional cinema also has addressed issues of ethno-culture, kinship, gender, language, ability and other matrices of identity. We shall explore this genre through textual analysis of representative films belonging to a range of modes, in their historico-cultural context and in the light of theoretical debates about identity and confession sparked by Michel Foucault and others. The seminar is based on the traditional Concordia pedagogical format of weekly screenings anchored in critical and theoretical readings, plus active online and in-class discussions. Though some documentaries and fiction in English are represented, our emphasis is of course on films in French, and detailed synopses and translations are provided in the rare instances where subtitled versions are not available. Weekly readings will be processed in Moodle forums, and each student will present a brief exposé on a syllabus film in class. The projected outcome of the seminar for each registrant will be a publishable research paper on a subject of her/his choice pertaining to the seminar corpus and approved by the instructor.

FMST 620/820 AA  /4 (Winter) Tuesdays, 18H00-22H00

Location: FB-250

Topics in Non-European Cinemas: Global Indigenous Cinema and Media

Instructor: Ezra Winton

This seminar explores Indigenous cinema across a broad geographic and diverse cultural and formal spectrum. With an emphasis on Canada, Australia/New Zealand and Latin America, we will encounter and critically assess the cinematic expression of Indigenous filmmakers working in animation, fiction and documentary from disparate regions and histories. Keeping in mind the historical, political, economic, artistic, social, and screening contexts of Indigenous cinema, this course will examine both differentiating factors and common threads across this rich, robust and politically-charged body of work. As we encounter in-class screenings, engage in discussion, read related literature and give presentations, students should become familiar with Indigenous cinema from diverse and distinct origins, as well as the attendant key concepts of this seminar: fourth cinema, decolonization, sovereignty and self-representation, politics of refusal and remote avant-garde.

FMST 625/825 AA  /4 (Winter) Wednesdays, 18H00-22H00

Location: FB-250

Topics in Film History: Chaplin: Comedy and Global Response

Instructor: Maria Corrigan

This course examines Charlie Chaplin’s role in the formation of cinema, as well as the astounding array of responses his comedy has elicited from artists, scholars, and politicians across the globe. We will see how the iconic figure of the Tramp is developed, reflected, and fractured into a multiplicity of roles in the different cultural contexts that embrace him. The course will begin with an examination of Chaplin in the silent era: we will watch his films from the 1910s in order to catch and analyze his growing universal appeal. Then, we will trace Chaplin’s reappearances in artistic movements across the world, from avant-garde circles in the 1920s, to philosophical discussions of the nature of cinema, to the coming of sound, and, finally, to the politics behind the “universality” of Chaplin’s appeal. It was no simple feat that Chaplin—a British immigrant from a vaudeville background—came to be thought of simultaneously as a pure symbol of America and of cinema itself. At the same time, the overall goal of any class focused on Chaplin is to laugh and to question why we laugh.  

FMST 630/830 A  /4 (Winter) Tuesdays, 13H15-17H15

Location: FB-250

Topics in Film Theory: Classical Film Theory

Instructor: Martin Lefebvre

This seminar focuses on some of the major figures of what is now referred to as "Classical Film Theory". The course is addressed to students interested in the history of film theory and the development of ideas about film from the silent period to the 1960s. The course centers on the writings of 5 important figures of Classical Film Theory:  Hugo Münsterberg, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. Students are asked to read the works of these theorists, which are discussed in class. Lectures situate the different theories in their intellectual and philosophical context. Films and film excerpts are screened so as to contextualize and/or exemplify the work of each of the theorists considered.

FMST 635/835 A  /4 (Winter) Wednesdays, 13H15-17H15

Location: H-333

Topics in Aesthetic/Cultural Theory: Piracy: Culture and Politics

Instructor: Joshua Neves

This course examines multiple genealogies of the pirate and piracy as an ineluctable underside of capitalist modernity. It will focus on issues related to media piracy and intellectual property—from print culture to cinema and the Internet—and engage the broader social, economic, and political functions of piracy beyond media practices (mimicry, counterfeit, fakes, etc.). In its thrust, the course will move from discussions of primitive accumulation and the advent of copyright to contemporary discourses of free culture (rip/mix/burn), information feudalism, biopiracy, and pirate modernities. We will examine a range of key concepts, including: property, (il)legality, creativity and innovation, technology, governance and democracy, and the common. In addition to high-tech and Western contexts, the course will trace how the piratical shapes the production of legitimacy (and thus zones marked by illegitimacy and underdevelopment) across the Global South.

FMST 640/840 AA /2 (Winter)  Tuesdays, 18H00-22H00

Location: FB-250

Women and Film: Women's Cinema 2.0

Instructor: Rosanna Maule

Digital platforms are important sources for the production and the promotion of films by women filmmakers, the consolidation of networks among women in the film industry, and the promotion of feminist and gender-specific discourse on film in the public sphere. This seminar offers a critical overview of women¹s cinema since the digital turn at a time when gender equity is too easily taken for granted and corporate media are consolidating dominant and conservative ideologies. The focus is on a vast range of social actors that adopt digital platforms as alternative circuits and channels to promote and circulate films directed by women, advance gender issues, and advocate feminist discourse and women¹s equal treatment and representation in film. Case studies include professional figures, companies, and organizations within the film industry, film scholars and critics, film spectators or fans, feminist activists and associations, and film festivals.

The purpose of the course is to interrogate the status of women's cinema within a culture and a public sphere saturated with digital and social media. In underlining the social and cultural benefits of the digital economy for women within the context of global corporate media, the seminar also stresses the power relations embedded in Web-based activities and services.

FMST 665/865 AA /2 (Fall) Mondays, 18h00–22H00

Location: FB-250

Topics in Film Studies:  Cinema Behind Bars

Instructor: Kay Dickinson

Prison populations continue to rise steeply; most dramatically, in the United States numbers of increased by 700% since the 1970s. Incarceration is not only an ever more widespread human experience, but also represents a crucial and troubled nexus between juridical, biopolitical, economic and human rights concerns. In this course we explore the long history of films set in and made within prisons; aimed at investigating the social implications and context of these films. The class looks at whether knowledge of the penal system helps in better understanding “prison films”. Political and theoretical writings on prisons and written by imprisoned persons help the class engage with a wide range of movies from around the world.

FMST 665/865 A  /2 (Fall) Wednesdays 13H15-17H15

Location: FB-250

Topics in Film Studies: Curating with Communities: Negotiating Aesthetics and Politics in Film Programming

Instructor: Ezra Winton

This graduate seminar explores and analyzes the theoretical and practical implications of cinematic curatorial work that engages directly with communities. Keeping in mind the relationship between the values and goals of curators (and their attendant institutions) and those of interpretative and stakeholder communities, we explore curatorial practices and strategies across three distinct fields: film festivals, alternative film events and educational film initiatives. We use case studies of institutions, organizations, programs and films to interrogate the crucial role curators and programmers play as intermediaries between disparate groups and as cultural agents who not only give shape to culture but who forge communities around particular films and/or programming strategies. From members of diasporic constituencies to anarchist squatters to silent film fans, curating and community intersect as fascinating historical, political, social and cultural objects of study. Through course readings, student presentations and in-class screenings and discussions, we investigate this understudied aspect of film theory and practice.

MA Course Descriptions 2015-2016

FMST 600 /3 Methods in Film Studies
Instructors: Luca Caminati (Fall) / Joshua Neves (Winter)
Description:
This is a mandatory course in Film Studies MA Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions. The first term, taught by Luca Caminati, will address issues of criticism, theory, film analysis and cultural approaches to cinema. The second term, taught by Joshua Neves, will focus on the relationship between film and other media, their technologies and circulation.  Final grades will be calculated on the basis of all assignments and presentations in both semesters. 

FMST 605 /2 John Greyson
Instructor: Tom Waugh
Description:
A seminar on the oeuvre of Toronto film-, video- and media- maker John Greyson (b. 1960), based on the pedagogical format of weekly screenings anchored in critical and theoretical readings, plus active online and in-class discussions.

Our 13-week trajectory follows a roughly chronological structure, and raises issues of media activism; interdisciplinary, transgeneric and transmedium film practice; sexuality and queer arts creation—all in historical cultural context. In keeping with the seminar rubric it also focuses on cinematic practice and history rooted in the English Canadian national and local (Toronto) arenas though with global political and cultural backdrops. The instructor’s 2013 anthology The Perils of Pedagogy: the Works of John Greyson (McGill-Queen’s University Press) is the basic text.

In-class presentations explore Greyson’s films’ intertext/intersection with other artists and contexts. The projected outcome for each registrant will be a publishable paper building on his/her presentation or on a subject of her/his choice.

FMST 630B /4 Narrative Theory
Instructor: Martin Lefebvre
Description:
This seminar seeks to offer students a solid historical understanding of the main aspects of narrative theory with special emphasis on issues and problems raised by film narrative (as well as post-cinematic audio-visual media). We will examine the different traditions in narratology: formalist, structuralist, cognitivist, and post-structuralist.

FMST 635 /4 Affect and the Anthropocene – modes of viewing, listening and perceiving the cinematic
Instructor: Erin Manning
Description:
This course is not an overview of affect theory. Rather, it takes affect as a starting point to ask, following Spinoza, how affect opens up, challenges, or reorients ecologies of existence? And: how does such a reorientation influence the place the cinema plays in our lives.

640/2 MA Gender Issues: Special Topic: Women and Silent Film History
Tues 13:15-17:15
Instructor: Dr. Liz Clarke
This course will focus on women during cinema’s silent period. We will focus on women in film, women behind the camera, and women as audience members. This course seeks to enrich students’ understanding of women and film while also training students as feminist film historians. Topics of study will include cross-dressing in silent film, sexuality in the 1910s and 1920s, female comediennes, women and war propaganda, female directors, editors, and screenwriters, leisure and the movie-going audience.  Assignments will not only require students to engage with the historical materials but, also, with methodological questions in feminist film history.

FMST 645 /2 Topics in Film Genres: The Horror Genre
Instructor: Donato Totaro
Description:
This course moves forward on the premise that the classical form of the horror genre took root in the 1930s, then some time in the 1960s the ‘modern’ horror film was born, and things haven’t been quite the same since. These two presumptions, definitional in nature, represent two of the many horror film discourses the course will engage, through a combination of screenings, readings, discussion, debate, writing, and collaborative research. Rather than taking a strictly historical path, the course will examine the landscape of horror by way of the many discourses that have shaped the growth and study of the genre from 1930 to 2015. Peeping Tom, for example,  can be seen as a template for future feminist discourse on the gaze and identification, while this developing feminist discourse in turn influenced the direction of the killer (the ‘horror of personality’) in later slasher and neo-stalker films.  These and other varied ‘discourses’ (technology, fandom, violence, the internet, television) will inform the weekly course proceedings, including my own lectures/presentations and the work done in class individually and/or collectively. The range of course assignments include critical work on required readings, an in-class presentation, a study on the aesthetics of horror, and an online/Web-based/Internet project.

FMST 650D /4 Topics in Experimental Film & Video: Archival Film Practices
Instructor: Catherine Russell
Description:
Filmmakers have been raiding the archive for decades, making new work out of old. The aesthetics of this practice are extremely varied, and have undergone several phases of revision with new technologies and new artistic practices, not to mention different archival sources. In this class we will survey the history of this practice as it has evolved since the 1950s, and into the digital era. Readings from selected cultural theorists and film critics will situate this work within a larger context of archival theory and art practice. Screenings will include examples of experimental, documentary, and other forms of archival film practices including web-docs, fiction, and essay films. Together, we will explore critical questions of history and memory, collecting, compilation, techniques of montage and optical printing, as well as political and historical issues arising from an eclectic group of films. Students will be expected to do oral presentations and submit a final term paper.

FMST 665/1 Topics in Film Studies: Gender, Media, Technology
Instructor: Megan Fernandes
Description:
This course asks students to reexamine the critical practices and discourses of media and technology through the theoretical lens of gender studies. As new technologies emerge that visualize and narrate our haptic intimacy with other vital forms, the socio-political construction of gender stability is continually undermined, thwarted, and re-imagined. In this class, students will be asked to consider how conversations about gender contribute to evolving discourses around computing, animation, hacker culture, commercial surrogacy, sex organ reassignment, tissue cultures, and toxicity/contagion. Students will be expected to participate in discussion of course material, give formal presentations on assigned readings and screenings, write a research paper, and complete a creative assignment.

Megan Fernandes is an interdisciplinary affiliate faculty member. She holds a PhD in Literature from University of California at Santa Barbara and she has published widely as a scholar and a poet. She has previously taught at M.I.T., University of Boston, Lesley University, and Brown University.

FMST 665 /4 Topics in Film Studies
Curatorial Practices from Alternative Exhibition to the Festival Circuit
Instructor: Dr. Ezra Winton
Description:
This workshop/seminar will combine theory and practice in a weekly critical and creative discussion around programming and curation, as well as provide critical insight into the film festival circuit: including how it works, theoretical concerns, established conventions and new developments. Mainstream and commercial programming strategies will be compared and contrasted with alternative and grassroots curatorial approaches, with a focus on representational aspects of race, class, gender and sexuality. An exemplary film (including fiction and non-fiction) that has been programmed or rejected by mainstream festivals will be screened in class each week. Course readings will be compiled from both curatorial and festival scholarship, including from newer works like Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals (Lindiwe Dovey) and Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Festivals (Jeffery Ruoff [ed.]) and seminal texts by Liz Czach, Bill Nichols and The Moving Image’s 2004 “Film Programming” Dossier. Course assignments will include in-class presentations, curatorial projects and two short writing assignments.

FMST 804 /2 New Media Theory: Genealogies of the Digital
Instructor: Joshua Neves
Description:
This course explores key genealogies informing “new” and “digital” media studies, including the informal, residual, and “pirate modernities” that exceed dominant North-Atlantic categorizations. It introduces canonical scholarship as well as recent influential work from a range of disciplines. We will examine key historical and conceptual debates ranging from cyberspace and hypertext to networks, mobility, and data, paying close attention to how such issues have shaped understandings of cinema and audiovisual culture (such as anxieties over the image, the “disappearance” of race, video cultures, etc.). In addition to key texts in new media theory, the course will consider how parallel discourses of economic, cultural, and political transformation—such as globalization, information society, neoliberalism, etc.—animate new forms of memory, intimacy, control, exposure, affect, and empire across comparative and transnational contexts.

FMST 806/2, Pro-Seminar
Instructor: Martin Lefebvre
Description:
The first part of the Pro-Seminar offers a forum for discussing problems of disciplinarity with regards to the study of film and cognate areas. The central objective is to sensitize Ph.D. students to problems facing film studies disciplinarity as part of their training. The course will be divided into two (unequal) sections: Part I: Film Studies Looks at Itself: Some Historical Developments; and Part II: The Idea of Disciplinarity: Institutional, Cultural, Epistemological Issues.    

FMST 807 /4 Film Education: Historical ?
Instructor: Haidee Wasson
Description:
This class will familiarize students with debates about knowledge-creation using a case-study method. We will focus on how archives, theory, evidence, periodization, method and the process of writing dynamically undergird scholarship. Each week will focus on research questions concerning how to theorize and research topics/phenomena that are both familiar and new or “expanded” about cinema studies. This may include examining specific films that lie outside of the established film canon (amateur, institutional, experimental), expanded technologies (portable projectors, television, youtube) and spaces (homes, fairs, galleries, factories). In short, we will seek to answer the question: how do scholars make knowledge? “Hands-on” exercises will accompany critical and theoretical debates. Attention will be paid to recent challenges to film historiography including the expanded geographies of North American Cinema Studies as well as the diversified institutions, viewing platforms, technologies and types of objects now being considered integral to film research. 

FMST 880 /4 Textual Troubleshooting: Reading
Instructor: K. Dickinson
Description:
Textual Troubleshooting allows doctoral candidates to nominate Film Studies and related literature with which they are having difficulty. This material then becomes the reading list for the term, each week dedicated to collectively working through scholarship that is central to one or more students' projects. Class members will be asked to frame their chosen texts both orally and via moodle and then, following the session, everyone will feed back responses to these selections with the aim of helping the proposer get a firmer grip on their field of study.

MA Course Descriptions 2014-2015

FMST 600/3 A (6 credits, fall and winter)
Methods in Film Studies
Instructors: Luca Caminati / Marc Steinberg
Monday: 13:15 -17:15, FB-250

This is a mandatory course in the MA in Film Studies Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions by examining those that guide quality research in the field. The screenings and readings provide the ground for an analysis of the tools and methods of film studies. Course materials examine the ways that film history, criticism and textual analysis have been and can be written, encompassing a range of ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding cinema.

Written and oral assignments are designed to develop research and communication skills appropriate to the field. The course also works to facilitate an esprit de corps within the M.A. class. The first term, taught by Luca Caminati, will cover issues of aesthetics and film analysis, including questions of authorship, genre and national culture. The second term, taught by Marc Steinberg, will address issues of film reception, exhibition, institutions and technologies. Final grades will be calculated on the basis of all assignments and presentations in both semesters.

FMST 610I/2 A (3 credits, fall) / FMST 810I/2 A (3 credits, fall)
Topics in Cinema Quebecois
Instructor: Thomas Waugh
Wednesday: 13:15 -17:15
Quebec Cinema: the Sexual Revolution

A seminar on the historiography, theory and criticism of a specific period in Quebec cinema, 1963 to 1980, which coincided and engaged with the international historical phenomenon known as the Sexual Revolution. Although “maple syrup softcore” is a cliché of Quebec film history, scholarship on Quebec cinema has seldom explored in any depth the intersection of its modernization during the “Quiet Revolution” era and its encounter with the rapid liberalization of sexual mores and values. The seminar is based on the traditional Concordia pedagogical format of weekly screenings anchored in critical and theoretical readings, plus active online and in-class discussions. Our emphasis is on fiction feature films in French, by both art cinema “auteurs” and industry directors, and some documentaries and films in English are represented.

The films of this period are notoriously inaccessible to students, teachers and researchers of Quebec film—even on video and especially with English subtitles. Archival 35mm prints with English subtitles are accessed at special screenings at the Cinémathèque québécoise. Because our topic is the representation of sexuality within Quebec’s national cinema within a turbulent and iconoclastic period, we will encounter imagery and language that are frank, sometimes graphic and perhaps even offensive to some. The projected outcome of the seminar for each registrant will be a publishable research paper on a subject of her/his choice pertaining to the seminar corpus and approved by the instructor.

FMST 615C/4 AA (3 credits, winter) / FMST 815C/4 AA (3 credits, winter)
Topics in European Cinemas 
Special Subject: European Cinemas since the 1980s 
Instructor: Rosanna Maule
Monday: 18:00 -22:00

This course surveys practices and trends in European cinemas since the 1980s, a period characterized by the crisis of national film industries within Europe and the emergence of alternative modes of production and distribution, as well as aesthetic trends. Topics include: trans-national and macro-regional production; the politics of cultural subsidy; transnational film movements and phenomena (Dogma 95); film genres (the heritage film; the neo-polar film); diasporic and immigrant filmmakers; European cinema and neo- or post-colonial identity.

FMST 630E/2 A (3 credits, fall)/FMST 830E/2 A (3 credits, fall)
Topics in Film Theory 
Special Subject: Classical Film Theory 
Instructor: Martin Lefebvre
Tuesday: 13:15 -17:15, SGW, FB-250

This seminar will focus on some of the major figures of what is now referred to as "Classical Film Theory". The seminar is addressed first and foremost to students interested in the history of film theory and in the development of ideas about cinema from the silent period to the 1960s.

Classical Film Theory concerns a period in the study of the cinema that pre-dates the full-blown emergence of a discipline of film studies, one that, for the most part, precedes the full-blown development of a film studies curriculum in universities, the emergence of specialized academic journals, and the rise of professional film studies associations. Thus film theory was produced by a group of individual thinkers who were initially trained in either philosophy, psychology, art history, sociology, or other disciplines within the Humanities and working in isolation, but whose vision nonetheless introduced some of the most important and lasting debates about the nature of film and its relation to reality and the other arts.

The course will center for the most part on the writings of 5 important figures of Classical Film Theory: Hugo Münsterberg, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. We will investigate the sources of their ideas (philosophy, psychology...), their place in the history of film theory as well as their reception, all the while situating the different theories in their intellectual context. And since film theory does not develop out of "thin air", but in relation to films, films and film excerpts will be screened so as to further contextualize and/or exemplify the work of each of the theorists considered.

FMST 635I/2 A (3 credits, fall) / FMST 835I/2 A (3 credits, fall)
Topics Aesthetic/Cultural Theory 
Special Subject: Cinema and the City
Instructor: Catherine Russell
Thursday: 13:15 -17:15

The interpenetration of cities and cinemas takes place on many levels, and has shifted considerably over the 120 years of film and media history, from nickelodeons to digital displays. The study of cities and cinema is a means of better understanding the relations between the social world and cultural imagination, memory and the built environment. Themes of utopia and dystopia are pervasive, as well as themes of political activism and alienation; the analysis of visual style likewise extends to architecture and urban planning.

This course will look at a wide range of filmmaking, including fiction and documentary, to better understand the close affinities between urban space and film practice, spectatorship, and global film history. Screenings will include early cinema, city “symphonies,” film noir, European art cinema, essay films, Asian cinema, science fiction, and web-based media art. Readings will include key works of modernity theory by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer; cultural theorists such as Lefebvre and deCerteau, film theorists Giuliana Bruno and Edward Dimindberg, and a selection of contemporary urban theory. The course will examine the critical tools that emerge from the “cities and cinema” approach to film and media; it will also look at the role of cinema in producing cities as cultural discourses with significant implications for the public sphere. Students will be asked to do projects on specific cities and their cinematic personalities.

FMST 635J/2 AA (3 credits, fall) / FMST 835J/2 AA (3 credits, fall) 
Topics Aesthetic/Cult. Theory 
Special Subject: Sounds of Struggle
Instructor: Kay Dickinson
Wednesday: 18:00 -22:00, FB-250

What are sound and cinema’s positions within how “the global” is understood? This course’s objective is to fathom how sound and cinema spring from, inhabit, represent, catalyze and respond to the movements of global capital and the political struggle it ignites. Topics will include: the global market; deregulation and privatization; sonic torture and warfare; employment precarity; environmental protest; voicing dissent and alternatives; appropriation and the dialectic; student uprisings; and the notion of the commons.

Methodologically, the course is driven by the belief that one of the most exciting aspects of studying sound’s associations with cinema is the potential this interaction creates for drawing different disciplinary traditions into alignment. By bringing disparate, sometimes divergent theoretical writings into dialogue, both sound studies and film studies can thereby benefit from an invigoration of their canons, epistemological conventions and even modes of perception. Taking this principle one step further, most weeks, “The Sounds of Struggle” introduces one key reading that lies outside the typical boundaries of both sound and film studies. In this way, the course aims to encourage MA students to fulfil one of the main criteria of graduate research: to look beyond their subject area for scholarship that will expand its current scope.

FMST 650E/4 (3 credits, winter) / FMST 850M /4 A (3 credits, winter)
Topics in Experimental Film and Video
Instructor: Anthony Klinik
Wednesday: 13:15-17:15, FB-250

Since the 1920s, when Dziga Vertov began to theorize the political aesthetics of actualities, newsreels, and other non-fiction films, before pushing his practical experiments with “non-fiction film things” to even greater limits, experimental filmmaking and non-fiction filmmaking have been closely tied. Indeed, in many ways the example of Vertov was pivotal. Afterwards, even former specialists in abstract filmmaking like Walter Ruttmann and Hans Richter began to pursue the representation of objective reality, albeit according to modernist aesthetics and “within the matrix of geometric laws,” and the experimental documentary became a fixture of film history.

This course provides a survey of the experimental documentary and the discussions and debates that have surrounded it, from the pioneering work of the modernist filmmakers of the 1920s and the 1930s to the idocs and “post-digital” experiments of the present. Topics covered will also include the Left Bank Group (Marker, Varda, etc.), the New American Cinema/Underground Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s (Mekas, Brakhage, etc.), Canadian experimental filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s (Snow, Wieland, etc.), Godfrey Reggio and the Qatsi Trilogy, and the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and its legacy (Smith, Keiller, etc.). While the emphasis will be on experiments in celluloid, formats covered will also include video, digital filmmaking, and “post-digital” filmmaking.

FMST 665M/4 (3 credits, winter) / FMST 865M /4 A (3 credits, winter)
Topics in Film Studies
Special Subject: Media and Cultural Theory in the Global Asias
Instructor: Joshua Neves
Tuesday: 13:15 -17:15, FB-250

This course considers multiple genealogies of postcolonial and global cultural theory, with a particular focus on Asian media cultures. We will engage key texts in colonial/postcolonial theory, inter and trans-Asian cultural studies, theories of media and globality, as well as issues of race, sexuality, visuality, and political society. Key examples will include film/video movements across the region – from video formats, media events and Internet cultures, to documentary, film festivals, and myriad street-level practices. In short, the course explores how the afterlives of colonialism continue to affect so-called “rising Asia.” We will also examine shifting regional and “post-Western” imagined futures that are not singularly rooted in Euro-American frameworks and cultural politics.

FMST 665N/4 AA (3 credits, winter) / FMST 865N/4 AA (3 credits, winter)
Topics in Film Studies
Special Subject: Film Criticism
Instructor: TBC
Thursday: 18:00 -22:00, FB-250

Seminar: “The Art and Practice of Film Criticism”
This course comes at a crossroads moment in film criticism, with the growth of the internet in the process of revolutionizing how film criticism is written and performed (blogs, online film journals, online academic research engines, video essays, interactive writing, video streaming, etc.). This impact is especially felt because film criticism, more than other forms of writing, has always been closely tied to the medium in which it has appeared (newspapers, fanzines, magazines, cultural journals, radio, museum and art galleries, Laserdisc/DVD/Blu ray liner notes, online, etc.).

The goal of this seminar course is three-fold: 1) a study of film criticism in its historical development (looking at some leading figures and key critical debates); 2) a theoretical analysis of its style and form (an attempt to distinguish film criticism from other forms of film writing, such as film reviewing, film theory, and film history) and; 3) the literary qualities of film criticism (yes, the actual writing itself!).

Assignments will include brief written reports, an in-class presentation and an online project. Writers whose works will be read and discussed can include Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Robert Warshow, James Agee, Otis Young, Stanley Kauffmann, Manny Farber, Victor Perkins, Molly Haskell, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag, Otis Ferguson, Vernon Young, Robin Wood, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Yvette Biro, Jim Hoberman, and Manohla Dargis. The textbook for the course is The Language and Style of Film Criticism ed. Andrew Klevan, Alex Clayton, 2011. Other reading excerpts will be from Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp and American Film Criticism by Greg Taylor, 1999, Nine American Film Critics by Edward Murray, 1978, The Complete History of American Film Criticism by Jerry Roberts, 2010, and the special issue of the online journal Amodern #1, “The Future of the Scholarly Journal”.

MA Course Descriptions 2013-2014

FMST 600/3 A (6 credits, fall and winter) 
Methods in Film Studies
Instructors: Prof. Masha Salazkina / Prof. Marc Steinberg
Monday: 13:15 -17:15, FB-250

This is a mandatory course in the MA in Film Studies Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions by examining those that guide quality research in the field. The screenings and readings provide the ground for an analysis of the tools and methods of film studies. Course materials examine the ways that film history, criticism and textual analysis have been and can be written, encompassing a range of ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding cinema. Written and oral assignments are designed to develop research and communication skills appropriate to the field. The course also works to facilitate an esprit de corps within the M.A. class. The first term, taught by Masha Salazkina, will cover issues of aesthetics and film analysis, including questions of authorship, genre and national culture. The second term, taught by Marc Steinberg, will address issues of film reception, exhibition, institutions and technologies. Final grades will be calculated on the basis of all assignments and presentations in both semesters.

FMST605H (3 credits, winter)/FMST 805H (3 credits, winter)
Topics in English Canadian Film: The Works of John Greyson.
Instructor: Prof. Thomas Waugh
Wednesday: 13:15-17:15, FB250

A seminar on the career of controversial Toronto film and video-maker/interdisciplinary artist/enfant terrible John Greyson (born 1960). Building on the screening of a selection of Greyson’s works, the seminar approaches a corpus ranging from prizewinning “fiction” features (Lilies, Fig Trees) to online provocations like BDS Bieber (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RasbjkjyNI), from multiple complementary vantage points and conceptual handles: national identity, activist, queer, musical, postmodern, essay, eroticism, pastiche, collaboration. The principal text is the instructor’s new anthology: The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (co-edited with Brenda Longfellow and Scott MacKenzie, 2013). Seminar requirements are comprised of the processing of weekly assigned readings, a short seminar presentation on an aspect of a screened film, and a longer research paper on a related topic of the student’s choice.

FMST 620E/2 (3 credits, Fall)/ FMST 820E (3 credits, Fall) 
Topics in Non-Euro Cinema: Arab Revolutions. 
Instructor: Kay Dickinson
Tuesday: 18:00-22:00, FB250

Our online repositories are awash with filmed material detailing, debating and promoting the compulsions and tactics of the current insurrections in the Arab world. Yet this body of work stands as simply the latest in a long line of alliances within the region between the capacities of film production and broader revolutionary praxis. For instance, Layla – purportedly Egypt’s first ever feature film – erupted out of and fortified the feminist anti-colonial campaigns of the 1920s. Since then, a significant majority of Arab moviemaking has engrossed itself in similar struggles against injustice. This course seeks to acknowledge and analyze cultural-activist engagements with a history of revolt in countries like Egypt, Palestine, Algeria and Syria, alongside related exilic, diasporic and internationalist endeavors. More particularly, this class will ask: how have various revolutions been conceptualized and enacted, and what role has, and can, cinema play within them? The corpus of films onto which this course opens comprises everything from guerrilla ventures to state-sponsored industrial output. In terms of reading matter, the meager Film Studies writing on these topics will be supplemented with political treatises, historical accounts, poetry, and anti-colonial theory.

FMST 625C/2 (3 credits, Fall)/ FMST 825C/2 (3 credits, Fall)
Topics in Film History: American Cinema of the 1950s.
Instructor: Prof Catherine Russell
Wednesday: 13:15-15:15, VA 114

Hollywood in the 1950s was an industry in decline, even while it produced some of the strongest films of its history. With the rise of independent productions, the competition of TV, and major shifts in the social fabric, American cinema was dramatically changed during this decade. In this course we will examine the social and cultural climate of the HUAC trials and the Cold War, the civil rights movement, suburbanism and popular Freudianism. We will focus on three key genres of the decade: the family melodrama, the Western, and film noir in order to examine how the changing social formation was negotiated ideologically through narrative cinema. We will look at films by key auteurs such as Anthony Mann, Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray and Vincent Minnelli. This decade of American cinema has become a central focus of nostalgic discourses on American culture. One of the questions that will be addressed in the course concerns the relationship of film style (including performance, mise en scene and film aesthetics) to the social anxieties that are so dramatically represented during this period. Students will be required to do a class presentation and complete one term paper on topics of their choice.

FMST 625H/4 (3 credits, Winter)/ FMST 825H/4 (3 credits, Winter)
Topics in Film Theory: The Structuralist Moment in Film Theory.
Instructor: Prof. Martin Lefebvre
Wednesday: 18:00-22:00, FB-250

This course looks at a key moment in the history of film theory and criticism in the light of the development of structuralist thought in the humanities and social sciences starting in France the late 1950s. Indeed, the rise of structuralist film studies coïncides with the rise of film studies in academia and the development in our discipline of so-called ‘methodological theories’. We will examine the genealogy of structuralism and its impact on our field and on the study of film from the early 1960s to the late 1970’s.

FMST 630G/2 (3 credits, Fall)/830G/2 (3 credits, Fall)
Topics in Film Theory: Media Theory.
Instructor: Prof. Marc Steinberg
Thursday: 13:15-17:15, FB250

A proliferation of theoretical approaches to contemporary media has accompanied the recent proliferation of digital media forms. This course introduces students to recent developments in theories of film, video, television and new media, offering a succession of texts that seek, each in their own way, to engage the central questions of this course: What is a medium in this age of digital mediation? And by what theoretical avenues may we approach the issues of medium specificity, the multiplicity of media formations, and the emergent, culturally specific uses of media forms?

FMST 635G/2 (3 credits, Fall)/ FMST 835G/2 (3 credits, Fall)
Topics in Aesthetic and Cultural Theory: Postcolonial Theory and Cinema.
Instructor: Anthony Kinik
Tuesday: 13:15-17:15, FB407

This course will introduce students to many key concepts in the field of postcolonial theory in relation to cinema and other media practices. It will do so through a close analysis of this theory as it applied to Montreal in the 1960s and early 1970s, and how the documentary, narrative, and industrial cinema that emerged from Montreal during this period captured and reflected upon these discourses. Our point of departure will be Sean Mills’ The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (2010), and we will use this text both as an introduction to key works on the topic (such as Edward Saïd’sCulture and Imperialism and Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized), as well as a guide to the struggles, debates, and texts that defined the political scene (and, by extension, the politicized filmmaking scene) in Montreal at the time. The result will be a study of postcolonial thought in theory and praxis, as well as a probing investigation of Montreal as a cinematic city.

FMST 640C/4 (3 credits, Winter) FMST 840C/4 (3 credits, Winter)
Gender Issues in Film: Women and Authorship.
Instructor: Prof. Rosanna Maule
Tuesday: 18:00-22:00, FB 250

This seminar examines women’s relation to the concept of authorship in film as a type of textual enunciation and professional agency. The focus is on theories and practices that address authorship as a strategy of meaning formation and cultural orientation set against dominant, normative or naturalized notions of subjectivity, meaning, and expression in film. From this perspective, the course will consider women’s association with authorship not as a source of intentional or transcendental signification, but instead as an interventional or resistant type of cultural production and critical discourse, conceived both outside of and within feminist frameworks of discourse. We will consider authorship as a performative tactic or a “technique of the self” (using Janet Staiger’s definition) within a variety of sociocultural context of film production and reception. The film author has traditionally been identified with the film director. While we will adopt this arbitrary equivalence, we will acknowledge its conceptual limitations and will also discuss authorship in relation to other forms of agency, as well as to collaborative or anonymous creativity in remixing and cinephiliac practices.

FMST 650D/4 (3 credits, Winter)/ FMST 850D/4 (3 credits, Winter)/ ASEM 654E/4 (3 credits, Winter)
Topics in Experimental Film & Video: Archival Film Practices.
Instructor: Prof. Catherine Russell
Thursday: 13:15-17:15, FB 250

This course is on archival film practices, including found footage filmmaking, essay films, compilation films and new media. It includes an historical overview of the use of archival footage in experimental and documentary film. Readings will include key texts in the theory and criticism of found footage filmmaking, essay films, archive theory and documentary theory. Screenings will include classic works by Ernie Gehr and David Rimmer, as well as works by Godard and Thomas Andersen. The class will work through a series of theoretical problematics of this mode of film practice, including memory, history, technology, appropriation, subjectivity and the data base. Students will be asked to do presentations and to write term papers on topics of their choosing.

FMST665L/4 (Winter)/FMST865L/a (Winter)
Topics in Film Studies: Theories of Perception, 1910-2010. 
Instructor: Dr. Erin Manning
Tuesdays, 13:15-17:15, FB407

This course will engage closely with work on perception that emerges alongside the development of moving images. Our goal will be to explore how perception is defined over the last 100 years, how it is taken up philosophically, and what effects philosophies of perception have had (and continue to have) on our perception of the cinema. The course will be structured around close readings, which will begin with Vertov and Bergson, continuing with Boccioni, James, Benjamin, Husserl, Whitehead, Merleau- Ponty, Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi. Alongside the readings, we will look at a series of films, video, animation, and video- based art installations. These works will be selected by the students and presented on a weekly basis through short presentations that highlight how the films/artworks engage/ open up/question the reading at hand. The goal will not be to explicate cinema through philosophical readings. Rather, philosophy will be considered as a mode of thought that opens the way for a conceptual exploration of the limits of perception and its effects on a changing medium. Final papers will be encouraged to work closely from the film/artwork to understand how it opens itself to questions of perception, using philosophy to develop a vocabulary to articulate these effects.