Course Offerings

This course explores audiovisual production and video editing, not only as creative tools, but as modes of critical inquiry. It is a highly creative, hands-on course designed for students to reflect critically on their own habits of media production and reception while consolidating their audiovisual skills and digital literacy. Students will develop foundational skills in audiovisual production, from image composition to the principles of montage, video editing, sound mixing, audiovisual remix… With each new skill acquired, students will discover alternative ways of weaving criticality and reflexivity into their media practices. They will use the audiovisual medium to ask questions and produce knowledge on the social, cultural and political issues of our times. Students will be encouraged to create videographic projects shaped by their (inter)disciplinary interests and engage creatively with media linked to their other ongoing courses or final thesis. No filmmaking or editing experience required.

This course surveys the richest and most alluring
period of cinema from its peak following the end of World War II, through the global movements that revitalized its decline, to its subsequent reformation by digital technologies at the turn of the century. It was by no coincidence that cinema was dubbed the art of the 20th century: taking advantage of technological advancements, newer generations of filmmakers reinvented the expressive possibilities of cinema by turning their cameras directly onto social realities and into individual psyches. Each week, the course will explore key developments in international film cultures by situating films within broader social, political, and cultural contexts. The course will also map the influential aesthetic trends,significant critical developments, and fundamental institutional factors that altogether configured cinema as a voice for political comment as well as a medium of entertainment. Through weekly readings and class discussions, students will learn about the irresistible power of international cinemas and the differing national traditions that resisted the ideological and commercial
dominance of Hollywood.

This course explores the key features and prominent themes of horror cinema from a variety of critical perspectives, while navigating through its foremost subgenres. Students will investigate horror’s allegorical potential by discussing major classic and contemporary films and by considering the films’ cultural, industrial and aesthetic contexts.

Documentary filmmaking enables a creative mode of inquiry about the world, a person, a landscape, an issue, or even ourselves. It encourages an open-ended layering of observations: visual, auditory, movement-based, historical and even fictional, as a rich backdrop to researching a topic. This workshop class will introduce students to a range of documentary video practices and impart technical skills to create their own documentary shorts. We will ask questions, watch, play, experiment, respond and explore how form contributes to content. We will engage issues in contemporary documentary practice from the avant-garde to commercial production as inspirations for your own inquiry into your ideas. Students will use research, framing, sound, duration, juxtaposition and different editing strategies to explore their ideas. While we will cover "traditional" documentary genres (interview-based, observational, essay, etc), we will also explore expanded and experimental documentary strategies.