Cinema Studies (CINE-GT)

This core course introduces the methods and areas of study in the Cinema Studies MA program. In keeping with the department's evolving profile, we'll also learn about research idioms that blend theory and practice, such as documentary, data visualization, and curation. The course is divided into modules that reflect this range of possibilities. Assignments comprise both written and practical projects and will involve some group/collaborative work.

This course examines the ways in which the history of film has been conceptualized, written, documented, researched, and revised. Readings include theoretical considerations of historiography, methodological approaches, practical guides to conducting research, and a variety of essays from the field of cinema and media history and related disciplines. We analyze social, cultural, aesthetic, economic, ideological, and technological histories of cinema. How do we frame questions about film and the historical past that are substantial, answerable, and logically sound? What evidence might help answer these questions? How should we thereby write historical analyses that answer questions posed? We will not attempt to survey the entire history of cinema. In roughly chronological sequence, we will consider particular aspects of that history: “early cinema,” “classical Hollywood cinema,” social history and exhibition, nonfiction and nontheatrical traditions, and the web-based media that cause us to reconsider what cinema is and was. This eclectic approach is indicative of the recent forms that film history has taken: de-centering Hollywood and feature films, rediscovering neglected archives, seeking “lost” works, moving past film specificity to historicize all moving images and sounds as a form of media archaeology.

This course closely examines a variety of theoretical writings concerned with aesthetic, sociocultural, and psychological aspects of the cinematic medium. Theoretical frameworks are approached thematically, rather than chronologically, in order to formulate new conceptual connections between different modes of cinematic inquiry. The course uses the innovative organizational structure of Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses to address the multisensory relationship between spectators and cinema. Sound, sight, touch, smell and taste provide a way to access and compare theories ranging from classical to digital, and to explore areas that have been marginalized from overarching canons of film analysis. Approaching film theory through the senses opens up new ways of thinking about the screen-spectator relationship as the course moves from “external” to “internal” [cognitive/mnemonic] associations. Students will study the writing of classical theorists such as Eisenstein, Metz and Bazin, as well as contemporary thinkers such as Sobchack, Mayne, and Friedberg. Questions addressed range from the nature of cinematic representation and its relationship to other forms of cultural expression, to issues of theorizing film spectatorship. Theory will also be studied alongside examples from popular culture, digital contexts, and contemporary media in order to interrogate certain ideas about cinema and spectatorship that persist despite the medium’s material and technical changes. By the end of the semester, students will acquire the critical skills to apply a broad range of analytical perspectives to films and other media.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings.

This M.A. core course examines the background, context, and history of television with an initial emphasis on broadcast and digital eras in the U.S., then expansion into case studies of international television. The approach is comparative, with a focus on television as cultural, social, and aesthetic formation. Topics include histories of technology, economics of media institutions, local and networked intersectional politics, audiences and reception, and questions of representation. We will also pay particular attention to methods and modes of historiography, especially in light of emerging opportunities for online access and digital research tools.

This interdisciplinary course will investigate the relations between experimental film, radio, music, and sound art in modernism and postmodernism. The inventions of photography, cinema and sound recording radically altered the 19th century consciousness of perception, temporality, selfhood, and death. This course will study the aesthetic and ideological effects of this epochal shift, especially as it concerns the subsequent practice of avant-garde art and aesthetics. It will specifically focus on the recontextualization of the history of avant-garde film in the broader context of the sound arts and their discursive practices, from Dada and Surrealism through Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus and the American Independent Cinema.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings.

This course surveys the cinema of Ireland from the silent period to the present day. In addition to looking at feature films, we will examine home movies, documentary, and television programming. Film and media intersect with this history of modern Ireland in complex ways, as the readings will detail. In the period spanning the beginning of the twentieth century (when film was introduced) to the present day, the Irish people lived through colonial domination, revolution, partition, civil war, mass emigration, theocracy, paramilitary sectarian violence, martial law (The Emergency Provisions Act), an unprecedented peace agreement and, finally, a contradictory sort of liberal secularism.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings.

This course traces the origins of Chinese cinema and its transformation and diversification into a multi-faceted, polycentric trans-regional phenomenon in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan up to the 1960s. We study a number of film cultures in Shanghai/China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, including the complex web of their historical kinship ties, and place them within the regional and global contexts of modernity, revolution, nation-building, and attendant socio-cultural transformations. To investigate these unique yet interrelated film cultures together raises the question of national cinema as a unitary object of study, while suggesting new avenues for analyzing the complex genealogy of a cluster of urban, regional, commercial or state-sponsored film industries within a larger comparative and transnational framework. Topics related to screenings and discussions include urban modernity, exhibition & spectatorship, transition to sound, stardom & propaganda, gender & ethnic identities, and genre formation and hybridization.

The course offers a historical survey of Chinese-language cinema from the emergence of the new waves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China in the 1970s-1980s to the more recent formations around the turn of the new century. The distinctiveness of the three important Chinese cinemas and their increasing convergences after the Hong Kong handover in 1997, and under the impact of globalization, offer ideal laboratories for reconsidering the premises and usefulness of the concepts of national and transnational cinema. Along the same axis, we will also probe questions of cultural nationalism, neo-regionalism, a persistent cold war culture within the trans-Asian context, and the tension between the state's cultural policy and film industry, commercial cinema, and art or independent cinema. Given the massive transformations in media technology and industrial organization in the last two decades, we will also consider the ramifications of new media for film and screen culture, including new documentary movements, amateur and activist film/video practices, and queer and feminist cinema.

This course will examine the history and practice of film criticism as a means of helping students to sharpen their own critical thinking and writing. We'll focus on the finer points of film scholarship and film criticism, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of theory as applied in criticism. We'll also examine the role of criticism in the age of the internet, and the specific demands of covering the festival circuit. Students will explore the practicalities and challenges of writing about film across all genres—including mainstream comedies and action films, art cinema and avant-garde film, political films and documentaries—and we’ll discuss modes of critical practice useful in addressing those films.

The class explores major issues in African cinema from the politics of representation, decolonization, to authorship and aesthetics. A special focus will be on film language, apparatus ideology, politics, and reception. The main area of concentration will be the cinemas of sub-Saharan Africa. We will look at the aesthetic and political evolution of African film from the social, radical neo-realist cinema of Sembene Ousmane to the present. With the view of defining new aesthetics, since Sembene’s groundbreaking films, we will analyze films by such directors as Djibril Diop Mambety, Souleymane Cisse, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Abderrhamene Sissako, Safi Faye and Mati Diop, among others.

For January 2022: Archives and Counter-Archives in Latin American Cinema A critical overview of Latin American diverse cinematic legacies that analyzes the history and access to archives and holdings of major national film archives, and minor archives (regional film archives, private film collections, community archives, border archives, and centros de la memoria).

Directors vary per semester. Check departmental listings.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings.

This course will focus on representative films from all stages of Hitchcock’s career as a director, including his work in the silent era, his sextet of thrillers in the 1930s, his early films in Hollywood, and the films of his "major phase" in the 1950s and ‘60s, including his television work. Recurrent topics of discussion will include Hitchcock’s visual style; analysis and presentation of human weakness, wickedness, and sexuality as well as his critical examination of social institutions and political issues; representations of women; and reflections on the act of watching and the art of cinema.

This course will focus on the New York City films of Martin Scorsese. We shall approach several of the films (e.g. Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence) as filmic examples of historical fiction and most of the other films in terms of their socio-cultural representation of New York City phenomena (e.g. immigration, crime, the art and entertainment industries). As well, we will be concerned with exploring Scorsese’s “narrative method” – his usages of film form and style – in relation to the above issues.

Whether one understands film noir as a genre, cycle, or style, one cannot deny that it has become an important cultural mythology. Using a broad array of historical and critical frameworks, this course explores why film noir has been so significant, beginning with its roots in 1930s European cinema, moving through its "classic" period in 1940s and 50s Hollywood films, and concluding with the current success of neo-noir.

“Neo Noir” explores the multiple ways that films made beyond the classic period reference, appropriate, extend, pay homage to, and even define that amorphous category called “film noir”: from nostalgia to escalation; from remakes to meta discourse retroactively constructing a “genre;” from genre hybridization to the dispersion of disconnected noir elements (crime, paranoia, the femme fatale, subjective flashback, existentialism); from realist-expressionist black and white to blatantly stylized color; from censorship’s dark sexuality to hyperreal violence; from national to international. To support our study of neo noir, we will simultaneously reference classic film noir from the 1940-50s and its scholarship, considering visual aesthetics, historical/cultural resonances, international/interdisciplinary influences, philosophical/psychological references, and gender relations. However, rather than attempting to rein in Neo Noir insisting on fidelity to film noir, the course celebrates Neo Noir’s exponential extrapolations.

This course explores the rise and fall of Hollywood's "Blaxploitation" period and genre. We will look at the genre's continuing influence on American commercial cinema and popular culture. We will locate the fifty-odd films of the period in the cultural, political, ‘black identity and liberation' contexts at the end of the Civil Rights Movement, and at the rise of the Black Power and Black Aesthetics movements of the mid-‘70s. Also, we will explore what Blaxploitation was ‘saying' to (and about) its audience; how Blaxploitation draws upon black literary convention; the black crime novel; and black music and film noir. We will also examine Blaxploitation's niche in, and contribution to, Hollywood's political economy, and how Blaxploitation's aesthetic and cultural conventions and formula have crossed over to address a broad popular audience in a number of popular contemporary films and popular cultural expressions.

This course surveys the film musical genre from the coming of sound to the present. We examine the musical’s relation to technological changes (the use of optical sound, dubbing, widescreen, motion capture) and also to social, cultural, and economic transformations (the Depression, rise of teen audiences, changing priorities in casting, innovations in music). By paying close attention to editing, cinematography, lighting and other aesthetic elements as well as to the multiple aspects of performance that contribute to the musical’s milieu, we uncover both its utopian and its grittier sides. The course engages the musical’s rich critical literature about: early all-Black cast musicals; the history of classical Hollywood titles of the 1930s-1950s (Maurice Chevalier, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, etc); a range of genre appropriations and deconstructions by non-Hollywood and often non-American filmmakers (Julie Dash, Chantal Akerman, Jacques Demy, Lars von Trier); and weighs more recent musical titles within this history (eg. La La Land, A Star is Born). Coursework: short written responses; a presentation; a short final paper.

What might it mean to consider avant-garde and experimental film and video with attention to the art of blackness? With a focus on Black artists from around the world, the course examines the history, politics, culture, and aesthetics of avant-garde and experimental film and video. With a concentration on new methodologies of black study and interdisciplinary scholarship devoted to black visual and expressive culture, the course will challenge and expand canonical conceptions of avant-garde and experimental cinemas.

This course offers a critical revision of the history of the genre of ethnographic film, the central debates it has engaged around cross-cultural representation, and the theoretical and cinematic responses to questions of the screen representation of culture, from the early romantic constructions of Robert Flaherty to current work in film, television, and video on the part of indigenous people throughout the world. Ethnographic film has a peculiar and highly contested status within anthropology, cinema studies, and documentary practice. This seminar situates ethnographic film within the wider project of the representation of cultural lives, and especially of natives. Starting with what are regarded as the first examples of the genre, the course examines how these emerged in a particular intellectual context and political economy. It then considers the key works that have defined the genre, and the epistemological and formal innovations associated with them, addressing questions concerning social theory, documentary, as well as the institutional structures through which they are funded, distributed, and seen by various audiences. Throughout, the course keeps in mind the properties of film as a signifying practice, its status as a form of anthropological knowledge, and the ethical and political concerns raised by cross-cultural representation.

In the last decade, a new field–the ethnography of media–has emerged as an exciting new arena of research. While claims about media in peoples’ lives are made on a daily basis, surprisingly little research has actually attempted to look at how media is part of the naturally occurring lived realities of people?s lives. In the last decade, anthropologists and media scholars interested in film, television, and video have been turning their attention increasingly beyond the text and the empiricist notions of audiences (stereotypically associated with the ethnography of media), to consider, ethnographically, the complex social worlds in which media is produced, circulated, and consumed, at home and elsewhere. This work theorizes media studies from the point of view of cross-cultural ethnographic realities and anthropology from the perspective of new spaces of communication focusing on the social, economic, and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice, whether in production, reception, or circulation.

This course is designed to center the work of the writer by analyzing the storytelling techniques employed by a mix of Hollywood, independent, and international screenwriters from Waldo Salt to Dee Rees, Bill Gunn to Guillermo Arriaga, Julie Dash to Sooni Taraporevala and more (this list of writers is subject to change and in several cases we will screen at least two different films by the same screenwriter).

This course offers an historical and critical overview of the French New Wave. Along with examining the philosophical underpinnings of the movement in philosophical existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir), the artistic underpinnings in modernism, and the theoretical underpinnings in the film theory/criticism of Cahiers du Cinema, we will examine key films and directors. We will explore the work of the three core groups that together formed the New Wave, notably 1) the Cahiers critic-directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer); 2) the Left Bank directors (Resnais, Duras, Varda, Marker); and 3) Cinema Verite (Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin), along with 4) precursors like Jean-Pierre Melville and Roger Vadim, and 5) mavericks like Jacques Demy and Louis Malle. While we will focus largely on the films themselves, we will also situate New Wave films within a broader artistic, historical, and social context. Some key themes in the course will be: first-person auteur cinema; artistic modernism and the New Wave; the relation between film and the other arts; the revolution in film language; the question of adaptation; treatment of love, romance, and adultery; representations of race, gender and sexuality; the theory of style and aesthetics; the impact of Brecht; the hauntologies of war, collaboration, and colonialism; and the political changes, reflected in film, that led to the near-revolution of May 1968 and to dramatic changes in the film world.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings for current description when offered: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/courses/ma-in-cinema-studies

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings for current description when offered: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/courses/ma-in-cinema-studies

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings for current description when offered: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/courses/ma-in-cinema-studies

This class applies forms of anthropological, historical, gender, and cultural studies theory to a range of genres: countercolonial, cinema verité, direct cinema, ethnographic, instructional, historical, and auteurist documentaries. It is designed for cinema studies graduate students interested in documentary film or working toward the Ph.D. exam in cultural theory and/or history of the documentary and for students in the M.A. Certificate Program in Culture and Media.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings.

Summer 2022: This class examines a small number of films in great detail with the intention of enhancing student comprehension of the multiple levels at which films are made and engage us. Among the film scenes that we may analyze are examples taken from: Touch of Evil (1958), Do the Right Thing (1989), In the Mood for Love (2000), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Run, Lola, Run (1998), Fish Tank (2009), Whisky (2004), Power of the Dog (2021), and Gilda (1946). The course encourages the intensive, and comparative study of film, and concentrates on a discrete number of tasks: the formal analysis of the sound and image tracks; examination of the shape of the scenario and the segmentation of the narrative; consideration of techniques of stylistic analysis; and a consideration of a film’s surrounding documents, such as studio papers, posters, blogs, trailers, and critical reviews. Students will acquire vocabulary and tools through which to describe the textual patterns and forces by which a film produces its meanings and effects. Students complete a central project for the class: the close analysis of an individual film that they have chosen, including a final presentation on their findings.

This class focuses on the theories, strategies, and consequence of adapting novels, comics, histories, and memoirs to film and television. Rather than measuring adaptations in terms of successful fidelity to their source work, the course will emphasize adaptation with attention to narrative, genre, historiography, and affect. Pairing an interdisciplinary framing of film theory with historical and cultural contexts, the course centers the formal and textual properties that shape the art of film adaptation.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings.

This course offers a broad survey of American cinema from 1960 up to the present. While the emphasis will be on the dominant, narrative fiction film, there will be attention to other modes of American cinema such as experimental film, animation, shorts, and non-fiction film. The course will look closely at films themselves -- how do their styles and narrative structures change over time? -- but also at contexts: how do films reflect their times? how does the film industry develop? what are the key institutions that had impact on American film over its history? We will also attend to the role of key figures in film's history: from creative personnel (for example, the director or the screenwriter) to industrialists and administrators, to censors to critics and to audiences themselves. The goal will be to provide an overall understanding of one of the most consequential of modern popular art forms and of its particular contributions to the art and culture of our modernity.

The films of Stanley Kubrick constitute one of the most innovative bodies of work in the cinema. This course investigates Kubrick’s films in detail with emphasis on their narrative conceptions and structures. The course will explore the uses of irony and voiceover, the relationship between humans and technology, the centrality of the topic of war, and questions of genre in his films.

Topics vary per semester. Check departmental listings for current description when offered: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/courses/ma-in-cinema-studies

Summer 2022: New York City, long mythologized in fiction film and television, has an equally rich and long-lived relationship to documentary media. From Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s celebrated 1921 city symphony film Manhatta, to Beatrice Glow’s ongoing Mannahatta VR (2016-present) exploring the city’s Indigenous past and present, NYC has served as site and subject for multiple generations of documentary filmmakers, artists, and activists. In this course, we explore an eclectic range of non-fiction media produced in and about the city, to consider the ways that documentary — with its own particular histories, conventions, affordances, and limitations — may enrich and complicate our understanding and experience of NYC. At the same time, this course serves as an introduction to the dynamic world of documentary production, distribution, and exhibition in New York today, through weekly visits to some of the city’s most vital documentary organizations and venues.

This course concerns the racial and cultural debates that have come in the wake of centuries of conquest, colonialism, postcoloniality, and cultural mixing of all kinds, as reflected in the cinema, the media, and popular culture generally. The course transnationalizes issues that are too often seen only in a narrow national frame of the U.S. All the debates about (the much censured) Critical Race Theory, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, White Supremacy, indigenous genocide and discrimination are transnational debates which go at least as far back as Columbus and the Conquest of the Americas. The course examines how these issues have been apprehended through a number of national histories and traditions, and how all those debates are refracted in film, media and popular culture.

Paying special attention to the contemporary hybridization of the arts, this seminar will investigate the following topics in relation to both avant-garde and popular cinema: anguish, eros and the landscape as symbolic form; landscape, film and the Gesamtkunstwerk; imaginary landscapes and alternate worlds; ecological and technological soundscapes; the aesthetics of dilapidation.

Critically evaluating select influential scholarship in Asian film studies from the last two decades, this seminar aims to reconsider and move beyond existing paradigms such as national cinema, world cinema, and transnational cinema, in addition to categories or assumptions derived from traditional area studies with origins in the cold war cultural politics. While critically reviewing literature on specific cases of national and regional cinemas (e.g.; China, Japan, India), we will explore alternative perspectives on trans- Asian and trans-hemispheric film culture histories (for example, film policy, censorship, co-production, traveling genres, festivals), as well as contemporary formations.

MA Writing Workshop description may vary. View departmental website for up to date information: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/courses/ma-in-cinema-studies/