Film and New Media Criticism

This is a survey course designed to introduce you to the broad range of theoretical, formal, and historiographic issues specific to cinema & new media. We will pay careful attention to how the film medium differs from other media as a condition of its stylistic and formal properties, its institutional production, and its historical reception. There will be a heavy emphasis on watching short and feature films such that we can more rigorously dissect their formal grammar in light of historical context. By the end of the course, students can expect to be familiar with: the basic language of film analysis and composition; a range of scholarship and epistemology specific to film (auteur theory, documentary, genre, star studies, etc.); and the broad social, institutional, historical developments of the medium over the last 120 years in this country. This course maintains film form and history as truly interdependent, and we will use that overlap at the end of the course as a tool with which to theorize the current and future status of a still nascent, but ever-decaying cultural form.