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.

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. See current course listings for course description.

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

NEW YORK in the 1970s: What is a city? How might cinema enable us to understand its social dynamics, sanctioned and habitual, but also deviant and/or riotous? And how does cinema itself figure into this landscape? Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer, we will pay attention to the interplay between the disciplined activity of the workplace, what Kracauer describes at one point as “the prison of the home where intimacy has become a deadening routine” and the more open-ended, promiscuous encounters and rebellious assemblies that can take shape in the street. We will begin by viewing a wide range of examples from film history, but we will conclude by looking more specifically at the restructuring of New York City propelled by fiscal crises and moral panics in the second half of the twentieth century. We will focus in on films that address the spaces created by state-sponsored “urban renewal” projects. We will also examine films that explore what Gilles Deleuze describes as the “any spaces whatever,” the “deserted and inhabited…waste ground” created in cities in the course of their demolition and reconstruction, spaces that are no longer recognizable and where habitual action is no longer possible. How do people survive and sustain one another as they maneuver those kinds of spaces? What kinds of social activity get purged? What new kinds of activity find shelter there? How does cinema represent, interpret and sometimes even anchor them? What is cinema?

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

This course introduces and contextualizes all aspects of the field, and shows how they fit together. It discusses the media themselves (including technology, history, and contextualization within culture, politics, and economics) Topics include: conservation and preservation principles, organization and access, daily practice with physical artifacts, restoration, curatorship and programming, legal issues and copyright, and new media issues. Students will learn the importance of other types of materials (manuscripts, correspondence, stills, posters, scripts, etc.). Theories of collecting and organizing (as well as their social meanings) will be introduced.

This course explains the principles of conservation and preservation, and places moving image preservation within the larger context of cultural heritage preservation. Questions of originals vs. surrogates will be raised, and the wide variety of variant forms will be covered. The course also addresses tensions between conservation and access. Students will learn principles of collection assessment, and how to write a preservation plan. They will also learn about dealing with laboratories, writing contracts, etc. On a more pragmatic level, they will learn about optimal storage conditions and handling.

Students in this course will learn about describing and managing moving image collections through metadata, or "data about data". Metadata may be defined as "structured information that describes, explains, locates, and otherwise makes it easier to retrieve and use an information resource." Because it facilitates the access, management and preservation of moving image resources, it is crucial that metadata be created and collected throughout the life cycle of the resource. Topics include how metadata supports various functions in the moving image archives; specific metadata schemes used for describing, providing subject access to and managing moving image resources; the importance of standards for resource description; information needed for preservation of moving image resources; and how metadata is implemented and used in a variety of settings.

With the advent of new technologies, film producers and distributors and managers of film and video collections are faced with a myriad of legal and ethical issues concerning the use of their works or the works found in various collections. The answers to legal questions are not always apparent and can be complex, particularly where different types of media are encompassed in one production. When the law remains unclear, a risk assessment, often fraught with ethical considerations, is required to determine whether a production can be reproduced, distributed or exhibited without infringing the rights of others. What are the various legal rights that may encumber moving image material? What are the complex layers of rights and who holds them?Does one have to clear before attempting to preserve or restore a work? How do these rights affect downstream exhibition and distribution of a preserved work? And finally, what steps can be taken in managing moving image collections so that decisions affecting copyrights can be taken consistently? This course will help students make intelligent decisions and develop appropriate policies for their institution.

This seminar will increase students' knowledge of primary issues and emerging strategies for the preservation of media works that go beyond single channels/screens. Students will gain practical skills with identification and risk assessment for works as a whole and their component parts, particularly in the areas of audio and visual media and digital, interactive media projects that are stored on fixed media, presented as installations, and existing in networks. Examples of production modes/works to be studied are animations (individual works and motion graphics) web sites, games, interactive multimedia (i.e., educational/artist CDROMs), and technology-dependent art installations. Students will test principles and practices of traditional collection management with these works, such as appraisal, selection, care and handling, risk/condition assessment, "triage", description, and storage and will be actively involved in developing new strategies for their care and preservation. Case studies will be undertaken in collaboration with artists/producers, museums, libraries, and/or archives.

This course embraces a broad conception of curating as the treatment of materials from their discovery, acquisition, archiving, preservation, restoration, and reformatting, through their screening, programming, use, re-use, distribution, exploitation, and interpretation. It focuses on the practices of film and video exhibition in cinematheques, festivals, museums, archives, web platforms, and other venues. The course examines the goals of public programming, its constituencies, and the curatorial and archival challenges of presenting film, video, and digital media. We study how institutions present their work through exhibitions, events, publications, and media productions. We examine curatorial practices of festivals, symposia, screening series, distributors and others. Our guest speakers are professionals involved with an aspect of curating and programming.

This class addresses the use of digital files and infrastructure as preservation media, and will investigate current theories and practices for the conservation and preservation of both digitized and born digital materials. Students will learn the details of the functions of digital preservation environments and repositories, and what infrastructure, policies, and procedures need to be a part of a repository in order to make it preservation compliant. Students will gain practical skills with identification, analysis, handling, and risk assessment for works as a whole, their component parts, and associated software and metadata. Initiatives and R&D efforts by the national, international, regional, and cooperative organizations will be explored. Digital literacy will be emphasized, and through a combination of lectures, discussion, and hands-on activities and lab exercises, students will develop an increased understanding of digital technologies, ecosystems, and requirements.

This class prepares incoming first-year MIAP students for working with digital technologies throughout their academic and professional careers. The course focuses on web applications, databases, and data management tools — technologies that play a fundamental role in moving image collections management today. The course provides tools to students to make informed technology decisions in the future. By introducing these topics in their first semester, this course provides students with core competencies that will be utilized in subsequent classes in the MIAP program.

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

Yearlong seminar in ethnographic documentary video production using state-of-the-art digital equipment for students in the Program in Culture and Media. The first portion of the course is dedicated to instruction, exercises, and reading familiarizing students with fundamentals of video production and their application to a broad conception of ethnographic and documentary storytelling approaches. Assignments undertaken in the fall raise representational, methodological, and ethical issues in approaching and working through an ethnographic documentary project. Students develop a topic and field site for their project early in the fall term, learn to write and pitch their documentary proposals and treatments, begin their shooting, and complete a short, 5 minute video preview/trailer by the end of the semester. This work should demonstrate competence in shooting and editing using digital camera/audio and Adobe Premiere Pro nonlinear editing systems. Students devote the spring semester to intensive work on the project, continuing to shoot and edit, presenting work to the class, and completing their (approximately 20-minute) ethnographic documentaries. Student work is presented and critiqued during class sessions, and attendance and participation in group critiques and lab sessions is mandatory. Students should come into the class with project ideas already well-developed. In addition to class time, there are regular technical lab sessions on the use of equipment. Students who have not completed the work assigned in the first semester are not allowed to register for the second semester. There is no lab fee, but students are expected to provide additional memory cards as needed, and their own external hard drives for backing up their project. (Sponsored by ANTH-GA 1218)

Yearlong seminar in ethnographic documentary video production using state-of-the-art digital video equipment for students in the Program in Culture and Media. The first portion of the course is dedicated to instruction, exercises, and reading familiarizing students with fundamentals of video production and their application to a broad conception of ethnographic and documentary approaches. Assignments undertaken in the fall raise representational, methodological, and ethical issues in approaching and working through an ethnographic and documentary project. Students develop a topic and field site for their project early in the fall term, begin their shooting, and complete a short (5- to 10-minute) edited tape by the end of the semester. This work should demonstrate competence in shooting and editing using digital camera/audio and Final Cut Pro nonlinear editing systems. Students devote the spring semester to intensive work on the project, continuing to shoot and edit, presenting work to the class, and completing their (approximately 20-minute) ethnographic documentaries. Student work is presented and critiqued during class sessions, and attendance and participation in group critiques and lab sessions is mandatory. Students should come into the class with project ideas already well-developed. Students who have not completed the work assigned in the first semester are not allowed to register for the second semester. There is no lab fee, but students are expected to provide their own videotapes. In addition to class time, there are regular technical lab sessions on the use of equipment. (Sponsored by ANTH-GA 1219)

Every student will conceive, produce, direct and edit five short projects (2 silent and 3 with sound) using digital filmmaking technology. Working in crews of four, students will produce a variety of specific assignments in visual storytelling that feature a broad spectrum of technical, aesthetic, craft and logistical problems to be solved. Collaborating with other students through rotating crew positions will be a central focus of all production work. Lectures, labs, critiques, technical seminars, screenings and written production books will be an important component of this class. All student work is screened and discussed in class.

The course teaches students to look at their world and to develop the ability to create compelling and dramatic stories in which real people are the characters and real life is the plot. Through close study and analysis of feature length and short documentaries, as well as hands on directing, shooting filming, sound-recording and editing, students rigorously explore the possibilities and the power of non-fiction storytelling. for video. Special emphasis is put on the way editing shapes a story. The course is a dynamic combination of individual and group production work in which each student will be expected to complete up to four projects.

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. For Fall 2024: WHEN WE SEE US: ASIAN AMERICAN AND BLACK DOCUMENTARY TRADITIONS OF RESISTANCE While decades of Asian American filmmaking has engaged and critiqued the manifold ways that anti-Asian policies, rhetoric, and violence have impacted Asian American and Asian immigrant communities in the U.S., mainstream media discourse still too frequently centers conversations on the topic of "race" in black/white binaries. It has taken multiple pandemics in the past years to bring about increased discussion of racism and racial violence against Asian/Asian American and Pacific Islander communities and yet the conversations still tend to happen in silos as if racial violence directed at African Americans and Asian Americans bears no relationship. In this course we will take a comparative and relational look at recent (1990s to the present) documentaries produced by Asian American and Black Independent filmmakers (Including but not limited to Marissa Aroy, Damani Baker, Vivek Bald, Garrett Bradley, Yance Ford, LisaGaye Hamilton, Grace Lee, Tadashi Nakamura, Spencer Nakasako, Michelle Parkerson, Marlon Riggs, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Renee Tajima-Pena) to explore convergences and contrasts in style, themes, practices of resistance, and strategies of media activism/programming/education across the two communities.

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 its beginnings (and even its pre-history) up to 1960. 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.

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

This course introduces advanced undergraduates and graduate students to the study of nonfiction film. It explores the history and historiography of nonfiction cinema, including – but not limited to – documentary film. We will examine the established milestones of the international tradition of documentary – from the romances of Robert Flaherty to propaganda projects of the 1930s and 1940s, through cinema verité of the 1960s and the activist, institutional, and personal styles of recent decades. However, the course also places documentary in a context that includes forms of nonfiction typically segregated from the traditional conception of documentary. Some are familiar forms, such as travelogues and newsreels. Others have been neglected by scholars until recently: sponsored, industrial, educational, and science films; home movies and other amateur films; outtakes and other archival footage. Viewed both as discrete works of cinema and as artifacts of social and cultural significance, such orphaned films pose problems of history, culture, and aesthetics that challenge traditional conceptions of making, viewing, and studying films. We will read primary sources, as well as scholarly approaches to the history of nonfiction film and to the possible uses and meanings of this vast archive. Students will participate actively in discussions, make in-class presentations, and complete historical research projects on topics developed in consultation with the instructor.

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.

This course examines a range of activities entailed in being in the Cinema Studies doctoral program and preparing for a career in cinema and media studies. Most class meetings will include a guest speaker, as most of the full-time faculty in the Department of Cinema Studies will discuss their own research methodologies and careers. The class will also read recent influential work in the field. The professional activities to be examined include things such as participating in professional organizations, answering a call for papers, giving a conference presentation, “dissertating,” book reviewing, teaching, and publishing one’s research. We will consider the process of choosing a research focus for a scholarly project and tackling its research problems. We will study protocols followed for research in specific locations, and also consider techniques of conducting and organizing research. Among the practical exercises that may be assigned are: evaluating journals, presses, and websites associated with cinema and media studies; reporting on libraries, archives, and research resources; attending professional talks and special events; delivering a short scholarly talk; and/or composing a book review, a report or blog entry on a cinema studies or other event you attend or a paper based on the talk or a research portfolio.

A student wishing to conduct independent research for credit must obtain approval from a full-time faculty member in the Department of Cinema Studies who will supervise an independent study for up to 4 credits. This semester-long study is a project of special interest to the student who, with the supervising faculty member, agrees on a course of study and requirements. The proposed topic for an Independent Study project should not duplicate topics taught in departmental courses. This is an opportunity to develop or work on a thesis project. Course registration is open to Cinema Studies MA only and requires completion of an independent study form.

A student wishing to conduct independent research for credit must obtain approval from a full-time faculty member in the Department of Cinema Studies who will supervise an independent study for up to 4 credits. This semester-long study is a project of special interest to the student who, with the supervising faculty member, agrees on a course of study and requirements. The proposed topic for an Independent Study project should not duplicate topics taught in departmental courses. This is an opportunity to develop or work on a thesis project. Course registration is open to Cinema Studies MA only and requires completion of an independent study form.

A student wishing to conduct independent research for credit must obtain approval from a full-time faculty member in the Department of Cinema Studies who will supervise an independent study for up to 4 credits. This semester-long study is a project of special interest to the student who, with the supervising faculty member, agrees on a course of study and requirements. The proposed topic for an Independent Study project should not duplicate topics taught in departmental courses. This is an opportunity to develop or work on a thesis project.

This course is centered on supervised internships at cultural institutions in the New York metropolitan area. During the Spring semester, each student completes 182 fieldwork hours at an internship site (generally 13 hours per week for 14 weeks). The internship provides hands-on experience with moving image material, as well as deep exposure to the various types of institutions that handle this material. Students meet bi-weekly as a group with an instructor to contextualize the internship experience.

This course is centered on supervised internships at cultural institutions in the New York metropolitan area. During the Fall semester, each student completes 182 fieldwork hours at an internship site (generally 13 hours per week for 14 weeks). The internship provides hands-on experience with moving image material, as well as deep exposure to the various types of institutions that handle this material. Students meet bi-weekly as a group with an instructor to contextualize the internship experience.

This course is centered on supervised internships at cultural institutions in the New York metropolitan area. The internship provides hands-on experience with moving image material, as well as deep exposure to the various types of institutions that handle this material. The class includes MIAP students currently interning and those students preparing for future internships. First year students who are preparing for a future internship register for this section of the course.

In the summer between the first and second year, each student must complete 280 fieldwork hours at an internship site (generally 35 hours per week for 8 weeks). Though summer interns may specialize in one particular department/project area within a larger organization, over the course of the summer they are expected to obtain a broad knowledge of how the various departments of that institution work together. Work done during the summer internship may include a variety of different tasks. At times, the internship or a project related to it may serve as the core research and preparation for the student’s final thesis project. Summer internships are typically placed outside of New York City in order to view how repositories operate differently around the country and abroad.

This course is a companion to Introduction to Moving Image Archiving and Preservation and is required for all first semester MIAP students. Designed to prepare students for internships and class projects, the course provides hands-on training with moving image materials. This course discusses the physical and chemical structures of media and the history and development of media formats. It covers basic media handling techniques and tools, media inspection and documentation, assessment and storage. Students enrolled in this course will also attend additional lab sessions.

A student wishing to pursue an internship must obtain the internship and submit the Learning Contract before receiving a permission code. Internship grades are pass/fail.

A student wishing to pursue a second internship must obtain the internship and submit the Learning Contract before receiving a permission code. Internship grades are pass/fail.

This course will explore Cinema Studies within the interdisciplinary context of the Digital Humanities (DH). Digital tools and platforms, along with the databases they create, have expanded the ways we study moving images and filmmaking traditions. Despite Cinema Studies’ important contributions to the expansion of DH, the study of moving images and time-based media is usually not at the forefront of DH-related inquiry. One of the course objectives is to therefore place Cinema Studies research at the center of DH methodologies in order to diversify interdisciplinary approaches to both DH and Cinema Studies. In this course, students will study DH practice alongside related critical frameworks in order to explore the profound historiographical, philosophical, sociocultural, and institutional imperatives that drive the need for digital tools and computational methods in the study of moving images. This approach will help students establish in-depth connections between theory and practice, and will assist them in planning, prototyping, and creating their own final projects to address significant research questions related to Cinema Studies and other related fields.

This course studies the different kinds of institutions that collect and manage cultural materials such as archives, museums, libraries and historical societies. It compares and contrasts these types of institutions to reveal how they differ from one another, paying particular attention to how institutional missions affect their administrative structure and services. It examines theories of collecting, the history and ethics of cultural heritage institutions, the organizational structures of institutions that house collections (including trends in staffing and the roles of individual departments), and their respective missions and operational ethics while also tending to current discussions on decolonizing, repatriation, restitution and reparation practices. Students will work with a variety of local cultural organizations, and will have working professionals talk about their organizations, duties and current projects.

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.

Topics vary by semester. For Fall 2024:SINOPHONE DOCUMENTARIES: HISTORY, THEORY & PRACTICE The new Chinese documentary as an independent film practice emerged around 1989. Prior to that, documentary film in China was exclusively produced and distributed within a state-controlled media system. Paralleling and bearing witness to decades of rapid and large-scale economic and social transformations in post-Mao China, the new documentary has also transformed itself into a multifaceted social movement involving filmmakers, critics, curators, and publics on a variety of platforms including the internet, and has caught the attention of both domestic and international film and arts festivals. An integral aspect of the course will inquire into issues of technology, distribution, exhibition and reception. The seminar has two interconnected components: 1) Tracing multiple historical genealogies of the movement and to explore conceptual frameworks for understanding the dynamic relationships between aesthetic experimentations, socio-political exigencies and ethical responsibilities in the Chinese independent documentary; 2) Placing the evolving phenomenon in the PRC within a broader Sinophone context and regional globalization, the course brings in parallels or alternative developments in Taiwan and Hong Kong, analyzing their connections and divergences. A crucial component of the course requires active participation in the 11th Reel China Biennial.

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.

This course examines the daily practice of managing collections of film, video, audio, and digital materials. Topics discussed include appraisal, collection policies, inventorying, and physical and digital storage. Students will learn how to prioritize preservation and access activities by weighing copyright, uniqueness of content, format obsolescence and deterioration, and financial considerations. An emphasis is placed on digital project planning and budgeting. Fundraising strategies are also discussed. Coursework includes students completing a collection assessment as well as a grant proposal for prioritized activities associated with their collection.

This class gives students practical experience with the process of film preservation including understanding and recognizing film elements, making inspection reports, repairing film, making preservation plans, understanding laboratory processes and procedures for making new film preservation elements, and writing preservation histories. The course will teach students how to work with vendors, increase knowledge of archival standards, introduce problems of decision–making, technical requirements, preparation and workflow, and overall project management. The class will undertake and complete an actual film preservation project and follow the steps from start to finish.

This is the first course in a two-course sequence that gives students direct experience with the process of reformatting video materials for preservation and access. Addressing in-house systems and work with vendors, the class increases knowledge in areas of archival standards; prioritization and decision-making; source and destination formats; technical requirements and systems; preparation and workflow; documentation and metadata capture; quality assurance; and overall project management. Students have hands-on experience with tape preparation and re-formatting using equipment in the MIAP Lab, and interact with experts from preservation companies and from other NYU departments.

Video Preservation II is the second of two courses that give students direct experience with the process of reformatting analog video materials for preservation and access. This course focuses primarily on lab work, deepening the skills and principles introduced in Video Preservation I. The course also emphasizes the management of preservation projects through assignments involving both the outsourcing of collections to vendors and the use of in-house labs. In addition, a series of off-campus excursions expose the students to preservation practices for formats unavailable in the NYU labs.

Through small–group study, the seminar will address advanced and/or special topics, and will focus on successful completion of student thesis or portfolio projects. In addition, the class will address preparation for employment, publishing and professional engagement upon graduation.

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/

Seminar on the methods and procedures of writing the doctoral dissertation in Cinema Studies. The course guides students in preparing their dissertation proposal through in-class debate, written feedback from the instructor, shared readings, and visits from guests with experience in the process. Students will make regular presentations of work-in-progress, to meet the goal of finishing their proposal by the end of the semester in readiness for their upcoming oral exam defending it (usually in late May/early June). The course stresses mutual aid in class discussion. By the end of the semester, you should have settled who is advising your dissertation, and possibly also have identified another member of your dissertation committee (5-person in total).

Directed reading and research with full time faculty member, typically your advisor.