Past courses

PhD Courses Descriptions 2023-2024

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

PhD-Only Courses FALL

FMST 801 Seminar in Film and Moving Image History: The Anticolonial Film Archive - Global Counterculture (1955-1975)

Instructor: Luca Caminati

Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This class investigate solidarity films shot during the decolonization period, roughly 1955-1975. The methodology for this course is based on Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray’s call for a “cinegeography,” which “indicates an interdisciplinary practice of mapping the affinities, proximities and affiliations of ciné-cultures that emerged from and participated in the conflictual and connective militant politics of anticolonial struggle and revolutionary decolonisation in the late twentieth century.” This geographical and political approach aims at connecting individuals, institutions, as well as assessing aesthetics and politics that link them transnationally to other situations of urgent struggle. The films screened in this course were intended to function as art in the service of the Third Worldist project, and therefore rejected more traditional bourgeois structure of exhibition and dissemination. For this reason, they have been mostly forgotten, or overlooked, as the political project that animated them is now dissolved.  Key readings for this class will be Ariella Azoulay, Frantz Fanon, Lisa Lowe, Anne Garland Mahler, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Vijay Prashad, Ann Laura Stoler, and Cynthia A. Young, among others.

FMST 806 Proseminar l: Cinema, Media, and Mobilities

Instructor: Masha Salazkina

Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

Room: EV 3.754

This ProSeminar’s goal is to engage students with contemporary debates on cinema and media in the context of multiple mobilities – such travel and exploration, labor migration, transnational film and media production and modes of circulation, digital platforms, transnational reception, etc. Thematically, the first half of the course will focus in particular on the questions of geography and space in relation to the study of both, historical and contemporary aspects of film and media. There will be three primary threads to the course 1) an introduction to Concordia’s research culture, with concrete focus on faculty-led and graduate-led research presentations aimed at bringing first year PhD students into conversation with the research process; 2) seminar discussions on a selection of topics pertinent to frameworks and research methods within global and transnational film and media scholarship and debates around them, and 3) “practicums” that focus on elements of the PhD program and experience.

Specific topics in the course will be chosen in consultation with the students so as to best reflect their research interests – while also introducing them to broader scholarly paradigms and new potential directions for their work. Written and oral assignments are designed to, among other things, develop research and communication skills and best ways to participate in the research culture.

PhD-Only Courses Winter

FMST 804 Seminar in Film & Moving Image Cultural Theory: Transgender Film and Media

Instructor: Cael Keegan
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course provides an overview of the body of scholarship in transgender e.g. “trans” film and media studies, with an emphasis on developments over the past decade. The course will cover transgender theoretical and methodological approaches to film (popular and experimental), television, new media, music videos (e.g. “emotion pictures”), and video games, investigating the major internal claims of this emergent field as well as interventions it poses to prior feminist and queer film/media analyses. It will also explore transgender re-assessments of a range of media texts and platforms from theoretical perspectives developed by the most recent wave of transgender scholarship and activism. Course content will emphasize intersectional discussions of how race, ability, and class stratify transgender life chances while simultaneously determining who gets to create and interpret media.

FMST 807 Proseminar II: Platform Theories and Cultures

Instructor: Marc Steinberg
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course examines the status of the moving image in the platform era. It also examines the state of platform analysis in light of existing writing on television, film and digital media. This course will offer a deep dive into research on platforms with the aim of helping students articulate their own platform-related research projects (or, alternatively, their own projects in relation to platform studies). It will also situate platform studies within longer histories of media and digital media studies, with particular attention to key works over the past four decades that help situate platform studies within a longer lineage of media analysis. In short, we will see how the platform (and platform studies) is both a window into recent discussions of media and race, geography, nation, sexualities, aesthetics, and economic transformations, as well as an opportunity to revisit previous writings in film and media studies, now newly relevant. Finally, as a proseminar, the course will also serve as an orienting place to the PhD program, offering workshops on how to write conference abstracts, how to think about book and article publication, and how to write comprehensive exams – as well as other topics of interest to students.

Combined MA/PhD Courses Fall

FMST 605/805 Topics in Canadian Cinema: “New” Canadian Documentary

Instructor: May Chew
Wednesday 8:45am-12:45pm

This seminar explores the social, political, historical, and cultural forces behind contemporary nonfiction production and reception in Canada. We will examine key modes of the genre, including cinema vérité, ethnographic, autoethnographic, reflexive, essayistic, activist, participatory, and experimental approaches, while broadening our ambit of nonfiction media to include installation, interactive documentary, and other emergent platforms. Importantly, we will consider how documentary functions as aesthetic and technological practice as well as epistemology and discourse. Using the 1960s as a departure point, the course will critically assess the role of documentary—and the legacy of John Grierson, social realism, and the National Film Board—in constructing national identity. By examining the lineage of documentary as ‘national genre,’ we will also explore how ‘new’ directions for nonfiction media production and engagement continue to adopt and adapt enduring understandings of citizenship and participation.

Our approach to the category of “Canada” will be a critical and anti-colonial one. Canadian documentary media is a contact zone wherein forces of liberalism/consensus as well as resistance frequently collide. It is often such collisions that allow the nation to momentarily coalesce as something stable and inherent. Accordingly, one of our main areas of focus will be media by Indigenous, feminist, queer, Black and diasporic filmmakers whose works advance conceptual, aesthetic, and political tools (decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, queer and racialized subjectivities, transnational imaginaries, counter-archival approaches, etc.) that can help us reconceptualize nation, cultural production, and power.

FMST 635/835 Topics in Aesthetics & Cultural Theory: Cinephilia and Gender Cultures

Instructor: Rosanna Maule
Tuesday: 6:00pm-10:00pm

The term cinephilia (literally “love of cinema”) connotes a cinematic culture expressed through idiosyncratic viewing rituals and affective responses to films. This seminar offers a conceptual as well as a historical analysis of cinephilia, focusing on its gender-informed manifestations.
The first part of the course will introduce to the concept of cinephilia and its emergence in different times and contexts of cinematic reception. The second part of the seminar will concentrate on cinephile practices produced and circulated by feminist and LGBTQ film and media collectives, filmmakers, film festivals, and fan communities.  

FMST 645/845 Topics in Film Genres: Global Melodrama

Instructor: Katie Russell
Wednesday: 1:15pm-5:15pm

Melodrama is at once an “umbrella genre” for studio-era film production, and it is a genre unto itself. Melodrama is international in scope, although it has significantly different histories in different regions. We will examine melodrama from a variety of perspectives, including narratology and aesthetics, its relationship to histories of disempowerment and social justice, and its role as a critical methodology. Films from the US, Europe, South America and Asia will be screened, and we will read a variety of writing on melodrama by critics and scholars from various global perspectives, examining the ways in which melodrama helps to negotiate social contradictions in different social formations. We will also inquire into the relations between melodrama as a film genre and writing on affect theory (Berlant) and the “Cultural politics of Emotions” (Ahmed). Students will be expected to give class presentations and write final research papers.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film & Moving Image Studies: Narrative Theory

Instructor: Martin Lefebvre
Thursday: 1:15pm-5:15pm

The aim of this seminar is for students to acquire advanced knowledge of narrative theory, as it pertains especially — though not exclusively — to filmic narratives. Students will read work in the various traditions of narratology (from studies in narrative grammar to narrative poetics ; from Russian Formalism to French structuralism) and will have the opportunity to apply narratological concepts in studies of films and excerpts of films. Narrative will be examined as a form of discourse and a way to mediate and communicate human experience. Although prior knowledge of narrative theory isn't a prerequisite, the seminar will likely be most enjoyed by students who are attracted to theory (as opposed to film history or film criticism).

Combined MA/PhD Courses WINTER

FMST 620/820 AA Topics in Non-European Cinemas: Media, Migrations, Borders

Instructor: Farah Atoui
Tuesday 6pm-10pm

Migration struggles are a global struggle against capital and empire. The logics of border formation and structures of displacement traverse seemingly disparate geographies to expel, immobilize, exploit, and criminalize historically marginalized communities including migrants, refugees, the undocumented, Indigenous and Black people, and People of Color. While bordering practices take different forms—such as fabricated migration crises in Europe, anti-Black carcerality in the US, colonial infrastructures in Palestine, export processing zones in Mexico, and urban gentrification in Canada—they all are, to quote writer and activist Harsha Walia, “the scaffolding for ordering regimes that simultaneously manufacture and discipline surplus populations while parasitically extracting land, labor, and life itself.”

The course engages with this global perspective on bordering practices as violent mediators of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism through the lens of film and moving image studies, anchoring the analysis of border struggles within film and art practices as well as processes of mediation. Rather than focusing on border spectacles emerging from Western sites of media and knowledge production, we will begin from the get-go with counter-visual media interventions that expose the logics, formation, and function of borders, and present counter-narratives, counter-images and counter-histories that oppose the ones produced by contemporary media regimes to shape public imaginaries.

We focus on media-based interventions for the following reason: we want to learn about border struggles as well as about the politics of image-making and representation from media makers as thinkers themselves. Each weekly session is centered on one or more artistic interventions that critically brings to light a particular aspect of borders and displacement. While many of the interventions we engage with are from or about the Arab World, they are put into conversation with works by filmmakers and artists from Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color communities to emphasize common struggles around borders and displacement, and to highlight the role of media in energizing transnational solidarity.  

FMST 630/830 A Topics in Film Theory: Structuralist Movement & Metz

Instructor: Martin Lefebvre
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

The heyday of structuralism in film studies lasted roughly from 1964 to 1980. However, its influence continues to this day. Indeed, 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 an emphasis on the work on Christian Metz.

FMST 635/835 A Topics in Aesthetic and Cultural Theory: Transnational Approaches to Film and Media

Instructor: Masha Salazkina
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course will introduce students to the critical debates of the past 40 years on the relationship
between geography, politics, and cultural production, focusing on some of the key conceptual
categories that have shaped them (globalization, transculturation, cultural hybridity, critical and
minor transnationalisms, decolonial option, Third World, Global South, etc). The seminar will
then turn to the theoretical and historiographic developments in the discipline of film and media
studies which emerged as responses to these questions: from post-colonialist critiques and Third
Cinema, to the “spacial turn” and World Cinema, and the more recent shifts towards
transnational approaches to production, circulation, and reception of film and media.

FMST 665/865 B Topics in Film and Moving Image Studies: Film Style: Welles and Hitchcock

Instructor: John Locke
Friday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This seminar examines the work of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Each week a film by Welles or Hitchcock is screened and then discussed using detailed analysis of video segments. The seminar is about the use of formal analysis to understand film style.

An additional aim of the close analysis of these films is to question familiar critical views about them. These films have been discussed so frequently in the literature that an effort needs to be made to break with the conventional views and look again at the films themselves.

The principal written work required is an essay about a particular Welles or Hitchcock film selected by the student at the beginning of the term. The student concentrates on this one film during the entire term. Students prepare an annotated bibliography related to their selected film and make brief presentations to the seminar.

PhD Courses Descriptions 2022-2023

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

PhD-Only Courses FALL

FMST 801 Seminar in Film and Moving Image History: Intersectional Approaches to Gender Theory

Instructor: Rosanna Maule
Monday 1:15-5:15pm

This seminar offers an overview of theories, debates, and movements that have diversified and multiplied dominant or universalizing concepts of feminism and gender-informed approaches to film and the moving image from inclusive and intersectional perspectives. While not following a strictly chronological order, the seminar will contextualize the emergence of concepts and movements in their historical and sociocultural specificity, drawing on a vast range of texts from different periods and critical frameworks.

Topics within the seminar will include: the lesbian-cultural movements of the 1960s and video activism; Black feminism and Womanism; Black Radical Lesbian Activism; transnational feminism and contemporary globalization; non-Western and post-Colonial Feminism;  New Queer Feminism and Art Global Cinema;  Indigenous Feminist movements and new media practices.

FMST 806 Proseminar l: Methodologies of Transnational Approaches to Film & Media Research

Instructor: Masha Salazkina
Thursday 1:15-5:15pm

The goal of this seminar is to familiarize students with the main developments in transnational approaches to film and media, and address the main problems and challenges facing scholars who conduct such work, as well as discuss possible solutions and applications to students’ own work.

The first 6 weeks of the course will provide an overview of the existing literature on transnationalism and comparativism in film and media over the past 20 years, with focus ranging from international flows of historical film circulation (festivals, import-export networks, translation/dubbing/subtitling practices, international reception, fandom and stardom); transnational television formats; co-productions and remakes; global media networks and streaming platforms; transnational and comparative conceptualizations of indigenous, queer and other non-mainstream cinema and media formations/audiences.

The second half of the course will consist of engaging with invited scholars (advanced PhD students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty, as well as scholars outside of Concordia) to discuss their experiences of conducting transnational research, focusing on specific methodological challenges. Rather than giving research presentations, the guests will be asked to engage with questions, formulated in advance by the class by giving specific examples from their work.

The assignments for the course will consist of relatively short-length exercises, geared towards the development of specific skills – such as annotated bibliographies, historical timelines, “keywords” compilations, and book and festival and/or conference reviews (based on the availability).

PhD-Only Courses WINTER

FMST 802 Critical Genealogies of Immersion

Instuctor: May Chew
Thursday 1:15-5:15 pm

Immersion is an increasingly ubiquitous mode of contemporary film/art exhibition and engagement. We can even argue that it structures the ways in which we navigate our material and virtual worlds, and increasingly, how we understand the relationship between technology, mediation, and agency. While acknowledging its more recent iterations, this course also aims to historicize immersion in art and media. We will examine how technologies touted as “new” can be traced to early medieval, Renaissance, and nineteenth-century visual technologies; 1960s experiments in expanded media; and more. At the same time, the course will propose ways in which we might turn to Indigenous and decolonial thinkers in order to dislodge predominantly Eurocentric and colonial genealogies of immersion, and to upend settler-colonial understandings of the relationship between body, technology, and land/space. In particular, we will draw on Indigenous theorists and practitioners who challenge new media theories predicated on Western-centric understandings of embodiment and subjectivity, and heed decolonial aesthetics’ urges for epistemic, sensory, and somatic realignments beyond colonial paradigms.

Conceptually, we will approach immersion—particularly its premise of the work/text as seamless or “total”—as a means to explore affect, atmosphere, absorption, and control. This in turn will illuminate the ways that immersion can be investigated as a social and political figure, for example in urban planning; surveillance capitalism; and current discourses around labour and attention economies. Further, this course considers the dexterous ways that immersive formats have often be offered as solutions to the crises of art, representation, and institutional power. An underlying thread throughout also concerns how, despite their promises, immersive paradigms often inscribe normative or “default” forms of embodiment while excluding others based on race, gender, class, ability, etc.

FMST 807 Proseminar ll: Emergence: Histories of the New Media

Instuctor: Haidee Wasson
Tuesday 1:15-5:15 pm

This seminar offers an overview of theories, debates, and movements that have diversified and multiplied dominant or universalizing concepts of feminism and gender-informed approaches to film and the moving image from inclusive and intersectional perspectives. While not following a strictly chronological order, the seminar will contextualize the emergence of concepts and movements in their historical and sociocultural specificity, drawing on a vast range of texts from different periods and critical frameworks.

Topics within the seminar will include: the lesbian-cultural movements of the 1960s and video activism; Black feminism and Womanism; Black Radical Lesbian Activism; transnational feminism and contemporary globalization; non-Western and post-Colonial Feminism;  New Queer Feminism and Art Global Cinema;  Indigenous Feminist movements and new media practices.

We will also engage in practical discussions about conducting historiographic research on film and media, examining the dynamics of using primary sources and navigating relevant institutions such as archives. Invited guests.

Combined MA/PhD Courses FALL

FMST 610/810 Topics in Cinema Quebecois

Thursday 6:00pm-10:00pm

FMST 630/830 Topics in Film Theory: Classical Film Theory

Instructor: Martin Lefebvre
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

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 in some instances to filmmakers themselves, who worked 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 on the writings of 5 important figures of Classical Film Theory:  Hugo Münsterberg, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. Students will be asked to read the works of these theorists which will then be discussed in 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 screened so as to contextualize and/or exemplify the work of each of the theorists considered.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film & Moving Image Studies: Platform Cultures

Instructor: Marc Steinberg
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course examines the streaming platforms and their cultural impacts. Grounding the course in readings from film, media, and communication studies, we will examine the general state of writings around platforms, as well as the blind-spots of platform research. This will include attention to geopolitics (platform imperialism), attention to the new manners in which film and media industries globalize (in both production and circulation), the ways that nations or regions are born out of particular media platform configurations, and the impact of earlier formats such as broadcast television on streaming platforms. This course will introduce students to crucial texts in the expanded field of platform studies (from analyses of Netflix to theories of platform capitalism), while also extending debates from film and media studies to address lacunae in current platform analyses.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film & Moving Image Studies: Opacity - A Poetics of Feeling

Instructor: Erin Manning
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

In Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, there is a startling scene on the beach, that very beach which still carries the resonances of the middle passage, of bodies lost to the count. Walking along it on his daily stroll, Glissant remarks on a presence, a man. This presence is oblique, opaque, one might say, following Glissant’s important work on what registers infrathinly, making a difference without “counting.” The man is neurodiverse, a presence “unhinged,” a figure troubling the “peace.” Glissant remarks briefly on the figure and continues his walk. But the figure remains, haunting his magnificent book on the poetics of feeling that shimmers in the interstices of what counts for existence.

The opaque in Glissant is many things. In an important sense, it is a critique of transparency, of Enlightenment principles. But to hold it to this would be to miss its force. For the opaque is precisely what cannot fit into a pre-ascribed sense-making theory. The opaque is the relational, the poetics that insists that there be a “consent not to be a single being.” What is it to make sense in this poetics of feeling?

Feeling, in process philosophy, is not subjective. It is not what a subject does. Feeling is what propels subjectivity into act. Alfred North Whitehead speaks of his philosophy as a “critique of pure feeling,” doing so in a necessary riposte to Immanuel Kanta’s “critique of pure reason.”

To have a world motored by feeling is, arguably, to displace the transparency of the colonial project, to shift the contours of what has been made to count.

The class is a proposition to enter into this complexity and to read and think carefully across its interstices. To do so will be to read slowly and carefully into problematics that will be considered to be “approximations of proximity”, not adjacencies given in advance. What I mean by that is that to read Glissant beside Whitehead is not to make sense of Whitehead through Glissant or vice versa but to engage in an ethics of the differential where thought produces inflections that are irresolvable (infinitely opaque).

Three main texts will be read: Edouard Glissant Poetics of Relation, Alfred North Whitehead “Objects and Subjects” from Adventures of Ideas, and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives. Woven through these three texts (of which the Whitehead is but a chapter, but will be returned to in our rethinking of what a feeling might be that is excised from a subject as given in advance), we will turn to extracts from Fred Moten’s Stolen Life, Sylvia Wynter’s “On Being Human as Praxis”, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s All Incomplete. My own work on neurodiversity and blackness from For a Pragmatics of the Useless will also be proposed as a way to consider the role the figure of neurodiversity is in an approximation of proximity to blackness not only in Glissant’s account, but more broadly.

Combined MA/PhD Courses WINTER

FMST 620/820 Topics in Non-European Cinema: Arab Cinema - The Palestine Question

Instructor: Terri Ginsberg
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

Notwithstanding the historical importance of Arab resources to neocolonial economies, and despite the sustained violence perpetrated by developmentalist countries against the Arab world, Arab cinema is one of the least taught and understood within Cinema Studies.  Shifting global power configurations vis-a-vis an international resurgence of militant labor has produced conditions for altering this veritable invisibilization.  In this seminar, we will analyze and theorize the ensuing change in critical focus, lending particular attention to the representation of Palestine.  A studied juxtaposition of selected readings and films will problematize cooptive as well as socially transformative tendencies.  Student presentations; final research paper.

FMST 650/850 Topics in Experimental Film and Video - Archives, Found Footage, Remix

Instructor: Katie Russell
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

The art and practice of recycling moving images and sounds has proliferated in the 21st century, and in the process, notions of media archives have become destabilized and expansive. Archives have become charged with the task of remaking history for marginalized communities and identities and have thus become far more fluid than they once were. The aesthetics and politics of making new work out of old 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 found footage and archiveology as they have evolved since the 1950s, and into the digital era. We will examine the sensory properties of archives, dissecting their material vulnerabilities and their relation to cultural histories. Readings from selected film theorists and critics will situate a diverse body of work within the history of the avant-garde, documentary film and new media practices. Together, we will explore critical questions of history and memory, collecting, compilation, techniques of montage and remixing, as well as the ethical, political and historical issues arising from an eclectic group of media works. The archive and the counter-archive are rich concepts as well as actual practices that are intertwined and constantly undergoing shifting senses of purpose and form.   

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film and Moving Image Studies: Cavell - Film Philosophy and Beyond

Instructor: Kate Rennebohm
Thursday 8:45am-12:45pm

Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) was a major, if contrary, voice in the last half century of western philosophy, as well as a thinker consistently concerned with film and moving image media. Indeed, Cavell’s work (in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema) was formative for the birth of the interdisciplinary sub-field of “film philosophy” in the 1990s and early 2000s, and different aspects of his “ordinary language philosophy” have been taken up by various thinkers in recent years as relevant for a broad range of theoretical concerns in the humanities. The primary goal of this course will thus be to gain a wide-ranging, if non-exhaustive, understanding of Cavell’s corpus. We will focus particularly on his film and media-related writings, framing his approach as a test case for the promise (and limitations) of film philosophy.

Cavell’s interventions cannot be understood without grasping his larger philosophical concerns, however, and so the early weeks of the course will gloss Cavell’s engagements with thinkers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud. This will give us the necessary grounding to tackle Cavell’s path-breaking books The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971/79), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996), as well as his writings on film through the early 2000s. As such, this middle section of the course will cover the topics most associated with Cavell’s thought—the ordinary, ethics, skepticism, the modern, aesthetics, genre and medium—in order to draw out their relevance for contemporary issues.

The final third of the course will double down on this latter goal, as we will here trace aspects of Cavell’s work that have not been explored to the same extent in his reception in Film and Media Studies. These include his relevance for recent turns in media theory, his sometimes-controversial engagements with questions of race, queerness, and feminist film theory, and his belief in film and aesthetics’ integrality to politics. Here, as we bring the voices of other thinkers into contact with Cavell’s work (or discover the conversation already happening between them), we will put Cavell’s work under pressure, finding what resources it offers for thinking our current, troubled world.

PhD Courses Descriptions 2021-2022

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

PhD-Only Courses FALL

FMST 801 Seminar in Film and Moving Image History: Global Socialist Film Cultures

Instructor: Masha Salazkina
Thursday 1:15-5:15pm

When we think of leftist political filmmaking, we often think of films which critique capitalism and neo-liberalism. Rather than following such critiques, this seminar instead will address the question of what socialist film and media culture means – and how it has been envisioned and realized in different moments in the history of the 20th and 21st century in different parts of the world, from Russia in the 1920s to Cuba in the 1960s, but also from Egypt and India of the 1950s to the 1970s Chile, to Romania and China in the 2000. 

More specifically, the seminar will focus on what cinema – in practice and in theory – could offer in answering the question “what is socialist culture.” Cinema’s function as an audiovisual archive of the past, as the witness to the present, and as a utopian imaginary of the possible futures (as well as alternative pasts and presents) – as well as the medium’s unique capability to shape the sensory and analytical perceptions of people – have made it an important field for the socialist imaginary. The class will explore how socialist filmmakers at different moments in history have engaged cinematic expression and means of production.  

Rather than taking Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a presumed center of socialist culture, the course will attempt to consider the history of socialism in cinema from the perspective of the Global South. Particular attention to be given to questions of internationalist and solidarity and the forms that these took through international meetings of filmmakers and activists, film festivals, collectives and collaborations among anti-imperialist socialist artists, and the circulation of cinematic forms and texts across the world, especially as part of a Thirdworldist project in the 1960s-70s.

FMST 806 Proseminar l: Histories of Newness: The Productivity of Emergence in Film and Media History

Instructor: Haidee Wassson
Wednesday 1:15-5:15pm

This course will address the question of ‘newness’ and change in film and media theory and historiography.  There have been a spate of media histories written over the last 15 years founded on the premise that everything old was once new. In other words, even newness has a history. Crucially, these works also tend to forward a critique of the rhetorics and ideologies of “the new,” bringing historical analysis to bear on the present as much as the past. “Newness” has also fueled a long history of film and media theory, and also experimentation, capturing the imagination of enthusiasts and critics alike.   Using a case study model, this course will frame a wide range of film and media scholarship around responses to newness and the change that undergirds it. This will include examining key moments of emergence of particular media technologies (photography, film, television, video, the internet) but also select format changes within presumably established media (color and sound film, hand-held cameras and portable projectors, home video machines, miniature music players, drones, and on-line distribution systems).

PhD-Only Courses WINTER

FMST 802 Platform Cultures

Instuctor: Marc Steinberg
Wednesday 1:15-5:15 pm

This course examines the streaming platforms and their cultural impacts. Grounding the course in readings from film, media, and communication studies, we will examine the general state of writings around platforms, as well as the blind-spots of platform research. This will include attention to geopolitics (platform imperialism), attention to the new manners in which film and media industries globalize (in both production and circulation), the ways that nations or regions are born out of particular media platform configurations, and the impact of earlier formats such as broadcast television on streaming platforms. This course will introduce students to crucial texts in the expanded field of platform studies (from analyses of Netflix to theories of platform capitalism), while also extending debates from film and media studies to address lacunae in current platform analyses. This course will focus on streaming platform research in particular, across a number of geographical and regional contexts. Adopting a case study model, this course will include, as possible case studies: YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, AbemaTV, APTN lumi, iQiyi, Alibaba, and Twitch, as well as challenges to the case study model of streaming research.

FMST 807 Proseminar ll: Global Approaches to Media and Migration

Instructor:  Ishita Tiwary
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course treats the issue of Media and Migration focusing on the specific site of borderlands and delineating its relationship with media infrastructures. On one level, the material in the class will focus on border and media representation (fiction, nonfiction, art works), circulation of counterfeit and legal media across borders (VCD/DVD routes, Streaming on demand platforms), and its attendant effects on copyright censorship regimes. On another level, the course will explicate how the migratory media object teases out issues of lived experiences (migrant workers, asylum seekers, refugees), bazaar ecologies (pirate markets), sensorial transformations and media pandemics. 

This broader goal of the course is to de-center the Euro centrism of migration studies by turning its attention towards Global South contexts such as Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Moreover, it will focus on developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches towards studying borders and media.

Combined MA/PhD Courses FALL

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film Studies : Animation Ecologies

Instructor: Marc Steinberg
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course treats animation within its expanded field of practices, applications, and milieus. It takes stock of recent scholarship on animation as performance, animation as industry, and animation as the focal point for an ecology of media practices. It examines animation as metaphor (the bringing-to-life of something inanimate) from which to interrogate planetary ecologies; animation as oppositional moving image practice (animated documentary and experimental animation); animation as object of theoretical investigation (animation theory); animation as a set of labour practices pioneering global outsourcing (television animation and special effects); animation as a site of moving image geographies and fandoms (anime); animation as an intellectual property engine and empire (Disney). We will read new strains of critical theory that place the moving image in relation to planetary ecologies; we will also read theories of ecology and view animated films that question the extractive regimes that characterize human behaviour today. Through it all, we will pay particular attention to the political nature of animation as a contested set of visual regimes, labour practices, industrial organizations, built architectures, and medial and terrestrial ecologies.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film Studies: TBD

Instructor: TBD
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

Combined MA/PhD Courses WINTER

FMST 625/825 Topics in Film History: Archival Film Practices and Feminist/LGBTQ+ Approaches

Instructor: Rosanna Maule
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course offers an analysis of a growing area of critical interventions in film and media archival practices, as well as of gender-informed best practices in the preservation of film and media works produced within feminist and LGBTQI+ contexts. Its focus is on practices, actors, and institutions that have expanded and redefined the concept of the archive. 

Case studies considered will include feminist/LGBTQ+ organizations that have developed their own archives (e.g., Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, bildwechsel), individual filmmakers’ own archives (e.g., Sally Potter’s SP-Ark, Yvonne Welbon’s Sisters in Cinema), key figures in archival history and historiography (e.g., Maria Adriana Prolo, Beti Ellerson, Jenni Olson), and archives or online projects that preserve films by women filmmakers or about women from within areas overlooked by traditional archives  ( e.g., The Women Film Pioneers Project, The Woman behind the Camera, The Lesbian Home Movie Project, the Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images). Finally, we will consider the use of the archival image as a form of political criticism, identitarian strategy, and decolonizing practice, examining the work of Zineb Sedira, Mariam Ghani, and some of the artists featured in the Matri Archive of the Mediterranean project.

FMST 665/FMST 865 Topics in Film Studies: Cinema/Media in the Age of Smart Technologies

Instructor: Josh Neves
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm
Room: LB 250

FMST 625/825 Topics in Film Studies: American Cinema of the 1950s

Instructor: Katie Russell
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

Hollywood in the 1950s was an industry in transition, 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, transformations of the urban environment, popular Freudianism, and censorship. Screenings will include examples of social problem films, revisionist Westerns, and film noir; readings will include analyses of race and gender within this transitional era and a variety of historiographic approaches to the period. Students will be required to do research projects and presentations.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film Studies: TBD

Instructor: TBD
Thursday 6pm-10pm

PhD Courses Descriptions 2020-2021

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

PhD-Only Courses - FALL

FMST 801 Seminar in Film and Moving Image History - Cinema/Media and Race Critical Theories

Fall 2020

Tuesdays 13:15-17:15

Room: Online

Instructor: Dr. Joshua Neves

This course will explore a broad range of approaches to the study of race and racism, paying particular attention to recent scholarship in Black cinema, media, and critical practice. It introduces important debates in North America and the North Atlantic, asking what it means for research in Film and Moving Image Studies to struggle to integrate racial epistemologies in ways that transform the field itself. The seminar will focus on race critical theories since the ~1980s, including key interventions regarding racial capitalism, the Black Atlantic, whiteness, primitive accumulation, settler colonialism, and Afropessimism, as well as problems related to the national and global, surveillance, borders, aesthetics, affect, and changing models of power. While the course takes as its starting point many research fields associated with U.S. (or Euro-American) universities – e.g. critical race studies, ethnic studies, Black studies, African American studies, cultural studies, (post)colonial studies, etc. – it also seeks to locate these paradigms and to consider racial asymmetries and global dynamics outside of these frameworks. This includes examining tensions between North American histories, on the one hand, and what Denise Ferreira da Silva frames as the global idea of race, on the other. Finally, in addition to examining the centrality of critical race and ethnic studies for the field of film and media studies, students will develop course syllabi and critical essays that collectively reimagine our course –  including its many elisions, failures, and parochialisms – by foregrounding their own areas of research, life experience, and/or political commitments.

FMST 806 Pro-Seminar I: Digital Platforms

Fall 2020

Thursday 1:15-17:15

Room: Online

Instructor: Dr. Marc Steinberg

This course examines the status of the moving image in the platform era. It also examines the state of platform analysis in light of existing writing on television, film and digital media. Debates around digital platforms could benefit from a greater engagement with writing from film and media studies, including attention to geopolitics (platform imperialism), attention to the new manners in which film and media industries globalize (in both production and circulation), the ways that nations or regions are born out of particular media platform configurations, and the impact of earlier formats such as television on platform-mediated moving images. This course will introduce students to crucial texts in the expanded field of platform studies (from analyses of Netflix to theories of platform capitalism), while also extending debates from film and media studies to address lacunae in current platform analyses. This includes, for instance, addressing adjacent work in network theory in Wendy Chun’s work on homophily; work on media infrastructures; aesthetic theory as treated by of Sianne Ngai; and the overlaps in finance and big tech as tracked by Arjun Appadurai and Neta Alexander. As a Proseminar, this course will also impart practical knowledge about academic work including grant application workshops; conference application; mock comprehensive exams; and other skill-based workshops.

PhD-Only Courses WINTER

FMST 802 - Seminar in Film and Moving Image History - Feminist and Queer Media: A Counter-Lineage in Moving Image History

Winter 2021

Wednesdays 13:15-17:15

Instructor: Dr. Rosanna Maule

This seminar examines a vibrant yet overlooked area within the history of the moving image, that of practices, activities, and works produced, circulated, and promoted by film and video media associations, groups, and festivals associated with feminist, lesbian, queer, and LGBTQ identity politics and activism. The common purpose of these gender-oriented media centers and activities was to create new spaces for women and gendered subjects in society and in visual culture, using grassroots systems and networks and drawing on changing technologies available in film and video.

This course will illustrate the trajectory of feminist and queer media through the analysis of a series of case studies selected among the many organizations that have emerged since the 1970s, worldwide. Another focus will be the discussion of methodological difficulties involved in doing research about feminist and queer media groups and associations, due to the ephemerality of these institutions and their practices. Finally, the course will highlight past and present examples of gender-specific radical protest and civil disobedience through the analysis of US Black feminist and queer groups and non-Western instances of grassroots globalization.

While primarily based on the weekly discussion of assigned readings and on students’ presentations of their own projects, the seminar will host guest lectures and group discussions with members of local and international feminist and queer associations such as, for instance, GIV, bildwechsel, Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Women Make Movies, as well as with scholars expert in this area of study.

FMST 807 Pro-Seminar II : Academic Labour

Winter 2021

Thursday 1:15-17:15

Instructor: Dr. Kay Dickinson

This section of the course situates higher education within broader global trends in cognitive labour, the marketization of knowledge, competition and product
differentiation, and policy decisions around public provision. It will scrutinize dimensions of academic work such as teaching, grant writing and conference
presentation with an eye not simply to developing the requisite skills for entering these domains, but also for critiquing their formations. As such, the course will engage with the literature on questions of “immaterial” and casualized labour, the outsourcing andoffshoring of academic work, free education models, and radical pedagogy.

Combined MA/PhD Courses FALL

FMST 630/830 Topics in Film Theory: Christian Metz and the Structuralist Moment in Film Theory

Fall 2020

Wednesday 13:15-17:15

Room: Online

Instructor: Dr. Martin Lefebvre

The heyday of structuralism in film studies lasted roughly from 1964 to 1980. However, its influence continues to this day. Indeed, 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 an emphasis on the work on Christian Metz.

FMST 640/FMST 840 Gender Issues in Film: Women's Cinema and Digital Platforms 

Fall 2020  

Thursday 13:15-17:15

Room:  Online

Instructor: Dr. Rosanna Maule

Drawing on a growing scholarship in film and new media studies, this seminar investigates Web-based and streaming practices, phenomena, and actors that are re-articulating the concept of women’s cinema within  a digital media ecology and a moving image industry dominated by multinational media corporations and streaming platforms. Through the examination of TV series, streaming companies, and Web-based organizations or professional figures, this course proposes a critical assessment of cinematic forms, circuits, and discourses associated with women, gendered issues, and feminist/LGBTQ practices within this new context of audiovisual production, distribution, and reception.
Some of the topics addressed will be: cyberfeminism and women's digital activism; gender-oriented crowdfunding companies; feminist/LGBTQ festivals and social media; “women’s “ TV series; feminist/queer authorship on digital platforms; 'feminist pornography' and social networks; feminist/LGBTQ online cultures and archives.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film Studies:

Internet & Video Graphic Research/Digital Media Ethnography

Fall 2020

Wednesday 13:15-17:15

Room: Online

Instructor: Dr. Joshua Neves

This course combines audiovisual practice with critical approaches to digital media. Drawing on cultural studies, sensory ethnography, internet studies, among others, the course will both examine digital media practices and technologies, and consider how to use digital media to do media studies (including considering critiques of the "dark side of the digital humanities"). Class meetings will combine seminar style reading, writing, and debate with audiovisual exercises and “crit” style workshops. We will examine research methodologies and interpretive frameworks from a number of fields, including cinema/media studies, visual anthropology, urban studies, interface studies, as well as genealogies of ethnographic and experimental media. The course will be organized around three distinct approaches of practice based research important for graduate students in film and media studies: (1) media ethnography and related approaches to site-specific research; (2) internet, social media and interface research methods; (3) video essays as a mode of research and dissemination. Students will gain basic facility with video shooting, sound recording, editing, and online capture, participate in multiple digital ethnography projects, and develop video essay projects for publication.​

Combined MA/PhD Courses WINTER

FMST 605/805 – Topics in English Canadian Cinema: New Canadian Documentary

Winter 2021

Wednesdays 8:45-12:45

Room: FB 250

Instructor: Dr. May Chew

This seminar explores the social, political, historical, and cultural forces behind contemporary nonfiction production and reception in Canada. We will examine key modes of the genre, including cinema vérité, direct cinema, ethnographic, autoethnographic, reflexive, essayistic, activist, participatory and experimental approaches, and also broaden our ambit of nonfiction media to include installation, photography, radio, podcasting, VR and interactive documentary. Using the 1960s as a departure point, the course will critically assess the role of documentary in national identity; and the legacy of John Grierson, social realism and the National Film Board. The genealogy of documentary as ‘national genre’ will allow us to explore our key problematic surrounding new directions for nonfiction practice and engagement through emerging platforms. Our main focus will be on media recently produced by Indigenous, feminist, queer, black and diasporic filmmakers whose works advance certain conceptual, aesthetic and political tools (counter-publics and counter-archives, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, queer and racialized subjectivities, transnational imaginaries, etc.) to help us reconceptualize nation, cultural production and power. 

FMST 650/850 - Topics in Experimental Film & Video: Expanded Cinema

Winter 2021

Tuesdays 13:15-17:15

Room: FB 250

Instructor: Dr. Randolph Jordan

This course explores a longstanding impulse in film history and practice: to expand cinema. Throughout the 20^th Century and up to the contemporary moment, artists, entrepreneurs, futurists, designers and technophiles have worked to reject conventional forms of cinema and to seek out more immersive, nimble, adaptable audio-visual scenarios that defy the limits of the singular, static film screen. This has included the use of unique spaces (picture palaces, domes, factories, galleries, expositions, black boxes), as well as the development of particular technologies (surround-sound, widescreen, IMAX, portable projectors, 3D). The resulting "films" constitute compelling case studies for exploring cinema at its limits, but also for understanding the ways in which cinema has long been crafted as a hybrid and elastic form. We will consider these works and also examine the particular debates and ideas they engender. Students will be introduced to a range of audio-visual materials, as well as critical readings relating cinema to ideas about space, projection, entertainment, experience, ideology, information, architecture, technology, art and experiment.   

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film Studies:   Genre Crossings: From Asia to Hollywood

Winter 2021

Thursday 13:15-17:15

Room: FB 250

Instructor: Dr. Ishita Tiwary

This seminar seeks to de-center genre studies by its Hollywood centric vantage by examining the migration of film genres from East and South Asia to Hollywood. Specifically, it will delineate how these genres mutate formally and topically in their migration towards Hollywood. Taking inspiration from Kuan Tsing Chen's formulation of Asia as Method, the course, through the south-north genre flows will interrogate questions of aesthetics, pleasure, the popular and national cinema.  Traversing from Japanese horror, to South Korean thrillers , the Hong Kong Martial arts film, the Chinese Wuxia film and the Indian Masala film, the seminar will offer alternative perspectives on genre formations, transformations, and modes of knowledge production.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film Studies:  TBA

Winter 2021

Wednesday 13:15-17:15

Room: FB 250

Instructor: TBA