°ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±Ô¤²â

1000 Level Courses

1022 (001) - Introduction to Film Studies POPULAR!
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

J. Wlodarz

Syllabus

1022 (002) - Introduction to Film Studies POPULAR!
What is a blockbuster? What makes a documentary a documentary? What is expressionism? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. In the first term, students will learn the basic vocabulary of film analysis. In the second term, we will study the methods and issues of film studies in general – what are genres and how do they relate to their social contexts? What is auteurism? What kind of films are there, beyond the narrative feature films we're familiar with? What is the history of the medium, and what alternatives to mainstream cinema have been proposed? By the end of the course you will have gained an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis and film studies. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

J. Wlodarz

Syllabus

2000 Level Courses

2159A/B - Disney (Disney Dream Factory) POPULAR!
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20^th and 21^st century. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Tron, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, Steamboat Willy, Fantasia, The Lion King and Frozen. 0.5 course

Fall 2023		C. Ylagan	Syllabus
Winter 2024	(Online)	J. Blankenship	Syllabus

2164A - Animation/Anime
This course explores the power of animation, with a particular emphasis on Japan. Students will study Japanese anime films and multimedia franchises as artistic expressions, as industrial products with relations to other cultural forms, and as objects through which consumers construct their social lives. This is a non-essay course, so the emphasis is on hands-on group work (analyzing images, putting together a sequence, researching anime's "media mix"), as well as regular forum posts and a final examination. The emphasis is on my own "otaku 1.0" history – science fiction, posthumanism, and apocalypse – but you will also have the opportunity to discuss your favorite contemporary animation. No prior knowledge of Japanese is required. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

M. Raine

Syllabus

2212F - Adapting across Page, Stage, and Screen (cross-listed with English 2112F and Theatre Studies 2212F)
How does the shape an artwork takes contribute to its aesthetic and political power? When artworks flex across form and media how do their messages change? What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said “the medium is the message”? How do genre and form shape social and political discourse? In this course, students explore these questions and more as they investigate texts that assume multiple cultural forms and represent a diversity of perspectives. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

A. Pero

Syllabus

2230F - Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

T. Nagl

Syllabus

2252G - World Cinema
A survey of the history of world cinema, with a focus on postwar film cultures in areas such as Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Students will study films as expressive audiovisual texts and examine larger social, economic, and cultural patterns of influence in the global cultural economy. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

C. Ylagan

Syllabus

2254F - Classical Hollywood Cinema
This course traces a history of American film from the silent period to the end of the studio era. Topics include the establishment of the Hollywood style, major directors/genres, as well as key industrial, technological, and cultural factors in the development of Hollywood cinema. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

J. Wlodarz

Syllabus

2258G - Canadian National Cinema
This course looks at Canadian cinema in relation to the category label, national cinema. What is the value of a national cinema? What is the popular imagination? How do the films speak to us about Canada, its history, its people and its politics? 0.5 course

Winter 2024

K. Younes

Syllabus

3000 Level Courses

3330F - National and Transnational Cinemas
This course offers an in-depth examination of a specific national film culture or related group of cultures. The course may address the entire cinematic history of a specific nation-state, be narrowed by a historical period, mode or region within a national cinema, or extended across national borders. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

C. Gittings

Syllabus

3335G - Contemporary German Cinema
This course introduces students to Contemporary German Cinema after unification. Topics include the "Berlin School" and transnational film production, Ostalgie, European identity, migration, and historical memory. The relationship to the auteurism of post-war New German Cinema will also be examined. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

J. Blankenship

Syllabus

3340G - Japanese National Cinema
This course studies the art and commerce of Japanese cinema, from its prehistory to the work of contemporary transnational auteurs. Students will study films in their historical and aesthetic contexts, and in relation to specific topics in film studies. Each week will cover an important development in this non-western cinema, in relation to a topic that has been important in the history of film studies. For example: the benshi and the transition to sound; the war film and propaganda; postwar melodrama; auteurism; and the horror film. By the end of the course students will have gained a nuanced understanding of how cinema as an industry and as a medium developed in a specific location outside North America – not simply different from Hollywood but "facing up" to the cultural challenge that it posed. No prior knowledge of Japanese is required. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

M. Raine

Syllabus

3352G - Queer Cinema: New Queer Cinema and the AIDS Epidemic
Focusing on the groundbreaking work of queer filmmakers (and activists) such as Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes, Marlon Riggs, Barbara Hammer, and others, this course examines the AIDS epidemic through the lens of New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. We will analyze mainstream modes of representing AIDS in the 1980s to help contextualize the resistant formal and political strategies of New Queer Cinema. We will also explore the emergence of ACT UP and the use of video and other visual arts by AIDS activists as a form of countering panic-based representations of the disease, informing the public about safer sex, and bearing witness to the diverse experiences of PWAs. The second half of the course will examine transitions in both AIDS activism and queer cinema in relation to the emergence of antiretroviral drug therapies. Here we will discuss issues of trauma, survival, historical memory, and global AIDS activism. Our analysis of key New Queer Cinema texts—including Tongues Untied, Poison, The Living End, Blue, and Nitrate Kisses—will grapple with their narrative and formal experimentation, their critical engagement with popular genre cinema, and their reimagination of the parameters of illness, identity, and normalcy. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

J. Wlodarz

Syllabus

3356G - Avant-Garde Cinema
An exploration of a variety of marginal film practices and modes of production through an historical consideration of the major trends and developments in European, American, and Canadian avant-garde. Films will be analyzed in relation to the theoretical issues they raise, specifically, feminist theory and practice, film formalism, and spectatorship. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

C. Ylagan

Syllabus

3357G - Science Fiction Cinema
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

C. Burnett

Syllabus

3360F - Topics in Film Genre: Medical Drama
This course examines a specific film genre or cycle, focusing on its historical contexts and development and its aesthetic, cultural and political significance. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

J. Blankenship

Syllabus

3366F - Film Noir and the Crime Genre
This course examines the narrative and aesthetic innovations of film noir in relation to its literary origins and cinematic influences. Tending to key figures such as the hard-boiled detective and the femme fatale, the course will chart the development and revision of noir from WWII to the present. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

M. Jones

Syllabus

3368F - Film Production
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through the analysis and production of films. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

G. DeSouza

Syllabus

3371F - Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

T. Nagl

Syllabus

3373G - Reframing National Cinemas
This course will introduce students to theories of nationalism and national identity, to determine how they influence our understanding of national cinemas. Issues such as colonialism, postcolonialism, imperialism, multiculturalism, regionalism, and globalization will be explored through reading political and cultural essays. The course will examine one or two national cinemas. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

V. Jara

Syllabus

3374F - Documentary Film
Historically, the dominant perception of documentary or non-fiction cinemas is that they teach us about the ‘real’ world by documenting truth transparently. However, this course will consider documentary as a form of representation and, as such, trouble its relationship to the ‘objective reality’ it seeks to represent. What is at stake in representing the ‘historical real’? What issues of selection and mediation intrude between the reality unfolding in front of the lens and the projection of that reality onto a screen? As theorists such as Michael Renov and Bill Nichols argue, although a documentary film references the historical world and actual people, it also constructs an audience’s understanding of this world and its inhabitants through point of view and the post-production process.

Early practitioners and theorists of documentary were well aware of this contradiction; John Grierson, the so-called ‘father’ of documentary film and one of its first theorists describes documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality,” but audiences were frequently unaware of this creative element, often reading documentary film as ‘true’. To begin to answer the questions posed below, the course will examine the theoretical and historical development of non-fiction filmmaking from the work of early pioneers like the Lumières in late nineteenth-century France and John Grierson in early twentieth-century United Kingdom and Canada to more contemporary and innovative filmmakers who complicate and innovate documentary’s basic conventions by questioning notions of objectivity, reality and verisimilitude. Collectively, we will pose the following questions:

• What is documentary?
• How did documentary filmmaking get started?
• Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?
• What makes documentaries engaging and persuasive?
• How have documentaries addressed political and social issues?
• What roles have documentaries played in colonization/decolonization?
• How can we differentiate between documentary modes and models? 

0.5 course

Fall 2023

C. Gittings

Syllabus

4000 Level Courses

4409E - Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Program Director. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honours Specialization in Film Studies. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

Various

Consent Form / Evaluation Form

4495FG - Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in an honours, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper. 0.5 course

Fall/Winter

Various

Internship Guidelines

Intersession (May 15-June 23)

2159A - Disney
This course offers students a survey of Disney's animated features, non-theatrical films and propaganda film shorts. Students will study Disney film's relationship to art, society and politics and examine constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Disney's filmmaking. 0.5 course

Spring/Summer

In-Person

Syllabus

1000 Level Courses

1022 - Introduction to Film Studies POPULAR!
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter			Syllabus
Fall/Winter			Syllabus

2000 Level Courses

2159B - Disney (Disney Dream Factory) POPULAR! Second section added
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20^th and 21^st century. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Tron, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, Steamboat Willy, Fantasia, The Lion King and Frozen. 0.5 course

Winter 2023			Syllabus
Winter 2023			Syllabus

2164A - Animation/Anime
This course explores the power of animation in film, with a particular emphasis on Japan. Students will study Japanese anime franchises as artistic expressions, as industrial products with relations to other cultural forms, and as objects through which consumers construct their social lives. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

Syllabus

2197B - Special Topics in Film Studies: Spaghetti °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±Ô¤²âs: Origins and Legacy from the Samurai Film to Sergio Leone, Bollywood, and Quentin Tarantino (cross-listed with Italian 2281B and Complit 2294G) - CANCELLED
Why was the Italian take on the genre so at odds with earlier °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±Ô¤²âs? This course considers the departure from the conventions, visual style, and myths of the "classic" °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±Ô¤²â; origins of the Italian °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±Ô¤²â in the European °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±Ô¤²â; the influence of Kurosawa's Samurai pictures; the legacy of the genre on global cinema and pop culture (Peckinpah, Bollywood, pop music, Tarantino, Netflix). 0.5 course

2198A - Special Topics in Film Studies: Cinemas of Dystopia
Dystopia is, according to the OED, “[A]n imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible.” It is the opposite of Utopia. Dystopian literature and cinema take contemporary social and political concerns and displace them to fictional universes, sometimes imagined futures, to better illuminate and interrogate real-world perils facing viewers in their present. Beginning with Thomas More, this course will consider the concept of dystopia in select cinema and television through the vectors of philosophy, history, aesthetics, genre studies, and ideology, and with reference to nation, race, class, gender and sexuality. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

C. Gittings

Syllabus

2212F - Adapting across Page, Stage, and Screen NEW! (cross-listed with English 2112F and Theatre Studies 2212F)
How does the shape an artwork takes contribute to its aesthetic and political power? When artworks flex across form and media how do their messages change? What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said “the medium is the message”? How do genre and form shape social and political discourse? In this course, students explore these questions and more as they investigate texts that assume multiple cultural forms and represent a diversity of perspectives. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

Syllabus

2230F - Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema. 0.5 course

2252G - World Cinema
A survey of the history of world cinema, with a focus on postwar film cultures in areas such as Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Students will study films as expressive audiovisual texts and examine larger social, economic, and cultural patterns of influence in the global cultural economy. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

Syllabus

2254F - Classical Hollywood Cinema
This course traces a history of American film from the silent period to the end of the studio era. Topics include the establishment of the Hollywood style, major directors/genres, as well as key industrial, technological, and cultural factors in the development of Hollywood cinema. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

Syllabus

2258G - Canadian National Cinema
This course looks at Canadian cinema in relation to the category label, national cinema. What is the value of a national cinema? What is the popular imagination? How do the films speak to us about Canada, its history, its people and its politics? 0.5 course

Winter 2023

Syllabus

3000 Level Courses

3309G - Film and Popular Culture
In this course students are encouraged to develop a critical understanding of the role film plays in shaping popular culture. Topics may include: children's film, dystopian film, and fantasy film. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

Syllabus

3311G - Special Topics in Film Studies: Hispanic Culture on Film (cross-listed with Spanish 3511G)
Description TBA. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

C. Burucua

Syllabus

3335F - Contemporary German Cinema
This course introduces students to Contemporary German Cinema after unification. Topics include the "Berlin School" and transnational film production, Ostalgie, European identity, migration, and historical memory. The relationship to the auteurism of post-war New German Cinema will also be examined. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

Syllabus

3357G - Science Fiction Cinema
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”. 0.5 course

3361F - Stardom
This course examines stardom in its cultural, historical, industrial, and national contexts. The course may examine the development of the star system in a specific national context, focus on a particular star or stars, a historical period or movement, or a specific theoretical aspect of the star phenomenon. 0.5 course

3362F - The Musical
Musical films are one of the most enduring forms of cinema, in Hollywood and around the world. This course explores the range of musical films, from all-singing, all-dancing extravaganzas to the eruption of "musical moments" in popular films, art cinema, and the avant-garde. 0.5 course

3363G - Screening Race
In the history of Black cinema, seldom has a body of filmmaking been as controversial and as rife with contradiction as the so-called blaxploitation films of the early 1970s. An outgrowth of the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, the civil rights and Black Power movements, the counterculture, feminism, and gay liberation, the blaxploitation films embody the cultural crises of ‘70s America. Although the short-lived era remains tainted in the eyes of many due to valid charges of opportunism and exploitation, the cultural significance of blaxploitation cinema cannot be overestimated given its influence on both hip-hop culture and contemporary filmmaking. The primary goal of this course will be to unpack the culturally loaded term “blaxploitation” in terms of its relationship to economics, audience, identity politics, art, music, stardom, and genre.

While the core of the course will focus on key films such as Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Shaft, Coffy, Superfly, Cleopatra Jones, and Black Caesar, the contexts surrounding (and informing) these films will be given equal critical attention. For example, we will examine key texts from the Black Power period and look at the rise and fall of the Black Panther party in relation to the films discussed. We will also explore the complex reception of blaxploitation cinema, the pimp figure in the genre, the relationship of feminism to the blaxploitation heroine, counter-blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s, and the genre’s representation of urban space. Throughout we will be concerned with analyzing the complicated intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they play out both on screen and in the culture of the era. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

Syllabus

3368F - Film Production
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through the analysis and production of films. 0.5 course

3371F - Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed. 0.5 course

3373G - Reframing National Cinemas
This course will introduce students to theories of nationalism and national identity, to determine how they influence our understanding of national cinemas. Issues such as colonialism, postcolonialism, imperialism, multiculturalism, regionalism, and globalization will be explored through reading political and cultural essays. The course will examine one or two national cinemas. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

Syllabus

3374F - Documentary Film
Historically, the dominant perception of documentary or non-fiction cinemas is that they teach us about the ‘real’ world by documenting truth transparently. However, this course will consider documentary as a form of representation and, as such, trouble its relationship to the ‘objective reality’ it seeks to represent. What is at stake in representing the ‘historical real’? What issues of selection and mediation intrude between the reality unfolding in front of the lens and the projection of that reality onto a screen? As theorists such as Michael Renov and Bill Nichols argue, although a documentary film references the historical world and actual people, it also constructs an audience’s understanding of this world and its inhabitants through point of view and the post-production process.

Early practitioners and theorists of documentary were well aware of this contradiction; John Grierson, the so-called ‘father’ of documentary film and one of its first theorists describes documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality,” but audiences were frequently unaware of this creative element, often reading documentary film as ‘true’. To begin to answer the questions posed below, the course will examine the theoretical and historical development of non-fiction filmmaking from the work of early pioneers like the Lumières in late nineteenth-century France and John Grierson in early twentieth-century United Kingdom and Canada to more contemporary and innovative filmmakers who complicate and innovate documentary’s basic conventions by questioning notions of objectivity, reality and verisimilitude. Collectively, we will pose the following questions:

• What is documentary?
• How did documentary filmmaking get started?
• Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?
• What makes documentaries engaging and persuasive?
• How have documentaries addressed political and social issues?
• What roles have documentaries played in colonization/decolonization?
• How can we differentiate between documentary modes and models? 

0.5 course

Fall 2022

C. Gittings

Syllabus

3375G - Japanese New Wave
This course focuses on Japanese cinema as part of a global `new wave' of films in the 1960s that scandalized audiences with unsettling representations of sex, violence, and politics. Students will debate the ethics and aesthetics of new wave films, and discover the role of the films in creating film studies. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

Syllabus

3397G - Berlin to Hollywod:  German Exile Cinema - CANCELLED
This course focuses on German directors and actors who emigrated to the U.S. before and after the Nazi seizure of power, including Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich and Ernst Lubitsch. Topics include: expressionism, film noir, diaspora/exile, historical trauma, the anti-Nazi film/anti-fascist aesthetics, the Hollywood studio system, importing/exporting entertainment. 0.5 course

4000 Level Courses

4409E - Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

Various

Consent Form / Evaluation Form

4495FG - Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper. 0.5 course

Fall/Winter

Various

Internship Guidelines

Intersession (May 16-June 24)

2159A - Disney
This course offers students a survey of Disney's animated features, non-theatrical films and propaganda film shorts. Students will study Disney film's relationship to art, society and politics and examine constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Disney's filmmaking. 0.5 course

1000 Level Courses

1022 - Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.

Fall/Winter	(Evening)		Syllabus
Fall/Winter	(Evening)		Syllabus

2000 Level Courses

2159B - Disney (Disney Dream Factory)
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20^th and 21^st century. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Tron, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, Steamboat Willy, Fantasia, The Lion King and Frozen.

2164A - Animation/Anime
This course explores the power of animation in film, with a particular emphasis on Japan. Students will study Japanese anime franchises as artistic expressions, as industrial products with relations to other cultural forms, and as objects through which consumers construct their social lives.

Fall 2021

Syllabus

2191G - Special Topics in Film Studies: World Cultures, Global Screens (cross-listed with Spanish 2700G and CLC 2700G)
America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, this course aims to expose students to a wide range of questions and debates around culture and identity, while also relating these matters to circulating discourses about the Global. Depending on each case study, the consecutive units will focus on different critical approaches, alternatively addressing questions concerning the representation of racial, ethnic and cultural identities, matters of gender and female authorship, and issues of genre and stardom.

Winter 2022

C. Burucua

Syllabus

2194B - Special Topics in Film Studies | World Literature and Film: Women and the Environment (cross-listed with CLC 2108B and GSWS 2246B)

2195B - Special Topics in Film Studies: The Horror Film
Although marked by a consistently disreputable status, horror has long been one of the most popular and enduring global genres in the history of film. With deep roots in mythology, fairy tales, Gothic literature, and Freudian psychoanalysis, horror cinema continues to shock and delight audiences through tales of vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, serial killers, and other monstrous icons. And yet the basic function of the horror film—to elicit unsettling emotions of fear, shock, anxiety, and disgust—has also made the genre a frequent target of censorship and a convenient scapegoat for broader social crises and moral panics. Such controversies also speak to the crucial ways that horror cinema both explores and negotiates cultural tensions and anxieties about identity, technology, religion, difference/Otherness, and the environment. Providing an introduction to the history of horror cinema, this team-taught course will explore the key forms, styles, and thematic elements of both classic and contemporary horror films from around the world. It will also frame the analysis of major films such as Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1957), Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), and The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) in relation to their specific industrial and cultural contexts, paying close attention to both the perception and reception of horror audiences as well as the genre’s allegorical potential.

Key topics to be discussed include: fears and anxieties addressed by horror cinema; cultural traditions of horror; horror and repression/the unconscious; bodily horrors; supernatural vs. psychological horror; normality and monstrosity; gender and sexuality in horror cinema; horror and technology; fandom and the pleasures of horror.

2230F - Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema.

2254F - Classical Hollywood Cinema
This course surveys the central industrial, technological, aesthetic, and ideological developments in the history of classical Hollywood cinema. Given the global prominence and influence of Hollywood cinema, much of the course will be focused on the establishment of the Hollywood studio system and its many transformations over the course of the 20th century. We will begin with an analysis of the origins of the medium and its place in American culture at the turn-of-the-century. We will then examine the development of narrative cinematic standards and the rise and consolidation of the Hollywood studio system, paying close attention to genre, stardom, marketing, and popular reception from the 1920s to the 1960s. In addition to key technological developments such as the coming of sound and the emergence of widescreen cinema, we will also explore social anxieties about cinema's effects, the institution of the Production Code, and the complex relationship of Hollywood film to key social crises (The Depression, WWII, McCarthyism, Civil Rights) of the period.

Potential screenings include: Stagecoach, Rebel Without a Cause, It Happened One Night, Little Caesar, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Best Years of Our Lives, Rope, Imitation of Life, Double Indemnity, The Reckless Moment, The Cheat, The Birth of a Nation, Baby Face, My Son John, and others.

Fall 2021

(Evening)

Syllabus

2258F - Canadian National Cinema(s)
Beginning in the silent period and extending into the twenty-first century, this course seeks to answer historical, cultural, ideological and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema. We will explore how cinema has reflected the complex and unstable notion of Canada as a nation, focusing upon issues of representation as well as problems of production, distribution and exhibition as these are grounded in political economy. Additionally, we will consider the transnational flows between the Canadian film industry, Hollywood, and other global film industries through co-production and casting. Questions addressed include: What is the influence of the documentary tradition on Canadian cinema as a whole? Is there an innate division between Canadian “art” cinema and popular cinema? What are the relationships of First Nations, regional, diasporic and queer cinemas to a Canadian national cinema? Does Canadian cinema embody two linguistic, cultural and industrial “solitudes” or are there in fact a range of Canadian cinemas? How have history, immigration and economics shaped Canadian cinema? What roles can genre play in understanding Canadian cinema? How do gender, sexuality, race and class inflect the representation of Canadian nation on screen?

Fall 2021

C. Gittings

Syllabus

3000 Level Courses

3340G - Japanese National Cinema
A survey of Japanese cinema from its prehistory to the work of contemporary transnational auteurs. Students will study films in their historical and aesthetic contexts, and in relation to specific topics in film studies. For example: traditional aesthetics; the war film and propaganda; postwar melodrama; J-Horror; and anime.

3342G - Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema (1960-Present)
This course examines the economic, aesthetic, and ideological transformations in American film from the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s to the contemporary era of conglomeration, globalization, and digital media. Topics include the fall of the Production Code, the Hollywood Renaissance, American independent cinema, and the global blockbuster.

Winter 2022

(Evening)

Syllabus

3356F - Avant-Garde Cinema
An exploration of a variety of marginal film practices and modes of production through an historical consideration of the major trends and developments in European, American, and Canadian avant-garde. Films will be analyzed in relation to the theoretical issues they raise, specifically, feminist theory and practice, film formalism, and spectatorship.

3357G - Science Fiction Cinema
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”.

3360G - Topics in Film Genre - Medical Drama: Cine-Biology
This course examines a specific film genre or cycle, focusing on its historical contexts and development and its aesthetic, cultural and political significance.

3368F - Film Production
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through the analysis and production of films.

3371G - Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed.

3373G - Reframing National Cinemas
This course will provide students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema informed by theories of identity, nation, and globalization developed by such figures as Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Roland Robertson and Edward Said. Students will trouble notions of nation as an organic, homogeneous, unitary entity before shifting into a study of ideology and cinematic representations of nation, distribution and the political economies that structure the production of national and transnational cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of history, class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various colonial, postcolonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes the terrain of national cinema. To this end we will read essays by such leading national cinema scholars as Stephen Crofts, Andrew Higson, Susan Hayward, Marsha Kinder, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Philip Rosen, Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino.

3374F - Documentary Film
This course will examine the development of film documentary, from Lumière in the 1890s to the modern docudrama.

Fall 2021

C. Gittings

Syllabus

3377F - Haunted Screen: Early German Cinema
This course will focus on the sensational origins of cinema in Germany. We will examine cinema as part of a wider social and technological exhibition culture that includes phantasmagoria ghost projection, magic lanterns, and the “edutainement” of microscopes, X rays and stereoscopes. Our “media archaeology” of German cinema starts with hand-tinted shorts and Max and Emil Skladanowsky’s 1895 Wintergarten film program (projected to a paying audience several months before the Lumière Brothers in Paris) and ends with Weimar horror classics (Caligari, Genuine, Nosferatu). Rare glimpses into the Skladanowsky retrospective of the Third Reich and a screening of New German cinema representations of forgotten film pioneers also illuminate the act of creating a national film history and archive. Other topics include the transition from “attractions” to narrative; modernity and the city symphony; the early star system; gender and genre; early film theory and the auteur/art film.

4000 Level Courses

4409E - Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies.

Fall/Winter

Various

Consent Form / Evaluation Form

4495FG - Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper.

Fall/Winter

Various

Internship Guidelines

The Registrar is using the phrase “Distance Studies/Online” on the Timetable to designate any course that is not fully in-person. Below is a fuller explanation of English and Writing Studies course delivery modes. Check individual course syllabi for delivery details.

In-Person: As long as the university considers face-to-face instruction with proper social distancing measures safe, these courses will be taught in-person in a classroom on campus with strict adherence to public health protocols.

Synchronous Online: These courses will offer an online component in which students will participate at the same time (synchronously). Some or all lectures, tutorials, film screenings, discussion groups or tests will require mandatory attendance during scheduled online meeting times. Other components of the course may be offered asynchronously, (i.e., with no requirement for attendance at a designated time). Consult individual course outlines for details.

First year courses have both on-line and in-person tutorials.
As long as the university considers face-to-face instruction with proper social distancing measures safe, the designated in-person component will be offered in a classroom on campus with strict adherence to public health protocols. Students may choose in-person or on-line delivery mode when they register.

Asynchronous Online: In this course type, all teaching activities will take place online with no timeslot assigned (asynchronously). You may access the course material any time you wish; there are no mandatory synchronous activities at a specified time during the week.

Blended: There are a small number of courses that were designed for both in-person and online delivery. Blended courses have both face-to-face and online instruction.

Students who are not available to attend classes on campus should not choose courses with a required in-person component. If students become unable to attend in-person classes they should consult with their course instructor and seek accommodations.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.