2024-2025 Catalog

CMST 10100. Introduction to Film Analysis. 100 Units.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which students will discuss through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. We will consider film as an art form, medium, and industry, and cover all the major film types: silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film. We will study the cinematic techniques: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, and learn how filmmakers design their works. Films discussed will include works Orson Welles, Sergei Eisenstein, Shirin Neshat, Lucrecia Martel, and Wong Kar Wai.

Instructor(s): James Chandler, James Lastra, staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): Required of students taking a major or minor in Cinema and Media Studies.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20300, ENGL 10800

CMST 10664. Poetry and Cinema. 100 Units.

On the surface, poetry and film may seem to have little in common. But over the course of the twentieth century, many poets took a serious interest in film and engaged with it as screenwriters and critics, as well as in their poetry. Likewise, many filmmakers looked to poetry as a model for how movies could work; for some, poetry (not fiction or drama) was film's artistic next of kin. This course takes a broad, multi-national survey of poetry and film from the 1920s to the 1970s. How did writers and filmmakers understand the relationship between the two mediums? What kinds of resources and challenges did each medium pose to the other? Poets on the syllabus may include Gertrude Stein, H.D., Langston Hughes, César Vallejo, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Benjamin Fondane, Pierre Reverdy, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Likely filmmakers include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Sergei Eisenstein, Dudley Murphy, Kenneth Macpherson, Fernando de Fuentes, Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage. (All texts will be in English; films will be screened with English subtitles. The course will include weekly film screenings outside of regular class meetings.)  (Poetry, 1830-1990).

Instructor(s): Jack Chelgren     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 10664

CMST 14350. Videogame Level Design. 100 Units.

Level design is the process of creating interactive virtual environments and scenarios. Through the deliberate placement of game assets, a level designer can evoke emotions and a sense of flow for the player. Similarly, in architecture, considerations are made into how aesthetics and form impact the experience of built environments. In this course, we will explore the level design of 3D games through an architectural lens and investigate how these conditions incentivize gameplay. With a focus on theories and techniques, we will develop a language to examine and analyze virtual worlds and the purpose behind their design. Course materials include foundational architecture texts, writings on games, talks by practicing designers, and gameplay.

Instructor(s): William Chyr     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 14350

CMST 14400. Film and the Moving Image. 100 Units.

This course seeks to develop skills in perception, comprehension, and interpretation when dealing with film and other moving image media. It encourages the close analysis of audiovisual forms, their materials and formal attributes, and explores the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given film or moving image text. It also examines the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study and understanding of moving images. Most importantly, the course aims to foster in students the ability to translate this understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written. Texts and films are drawn from the history of narrative, experimental, animated, and documentary or non-fiction cinema. Screenings are a mandatory course component.

Instructor(s): Allyson Field, Richard Neer, staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): Attendance in first class is mandatory to confirm enrollment. Open only to non-CMS majors; may not count towards CMS major requirements. For non-majors, any CMST 14400 through 14599 course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CMST 14503. Cinema in Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

This class is only offered through the Study Abroad Program in Paris. This course looks at film theory through the lens of film practice. Readings, screenings, and exercises focus on fundamental cinematic parameters and their complex practical uses. We look at several masterpieces of French cinema to compare film theory to film practice, read testimonies from filmmakers, and develop sophisticated skills of film appreciation, critique, and analysis.

Instructor(s): Maria Belodubrovskaya     Terms Offered: Winter. Study Abroad in Paris
Note(s): For nonmajors, any CMST 14400 through 14599 course meets the general education requirement in the arts. This class is only offered through the Study Abroad Program in Paris.

CMST 14505. Visual Style in Still and Moving Images. 100 Units.

The aim of this course is first to introduce students to the world of French-language animation and comics (BD or bandes dessinées) by providing a historical overview of both forms. In addition, the course provides an alternative genealogy of cinema by exploring how common techniques and elements of style have emerged through ongoing processes of adaptation, coproduction, and intercommunication between still and moving images, between comics and animation. Screenings will highlight animated films inspired by popular BD as well as films directed by "bédéistes" who have moved into the world of animation production. The final unit will consider how French comics and animation in recent years have repurposed Japanese manga and anime techniques and styles, rather swiftly and resourcefully. This course will only be offered through the Study Abroad program in Paris.

Instructor(s): T. Lamarre     Terms Offered: Winter

CMST 14565. Special Topics: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. We study both his films and a variety of approaches to them. We investigate the enduring power of his movies; his contributions to genre and popular cinema; his storytelling techniques; his stylistic command; his approach to romance, suspense, and action; his status as a master and auteur; and his remarkable control over the audience's thoughts and feelings.

Instructor(s): Maria Belodubrovskaya     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.

CMST 14570. Special Topics: Animation Theory. 100 Units.

Due to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of animation in contemporary media ecologies, recent years have seen a surge of interest in animation theory. But animation theory presents a vast and turbulent domain of inquiry, because animation may be narrowly defined as a set of objects or techniques or broadly conceptualized to embrace questions about life and death, about more-than-human animals, artificial life, and animism, for instance. This topics course has two aims. The first aim is to provide an overview of the key problematics of and approaches to animation theory in a global and historical perspective. The second aim is to develop tools for doing animation theory in a more localized manner. To this end, course will highlight theories of character and characterization with an emphasis on how the inherent tension between individual and type in animation affects our understanding race and racism.

Instructor(s): Thomas Lamarre     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Not offered in 2023-24.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 14570, MADD 14570

CMST 14578. Media Technologies. 100 Units.

This class is only offered through the Study Abroad Program in Paris. This course offers tools for understanding and theorizing media by attending to technology. Students will learn to think about the materiality of media, asking how media technologies-such as television, the mp3 format, or a mobile phone app-influence the contents or meanings they transmit, as well as the ways in which discourses and practices shape the nature of media and its technical infrastructures. What forms have culture and knowledge taken as the emergence of new media has reconfigured lived experience, social life, and power relations? We will consider the ways in which technology extends beyond the realm of machinery-how practices, regulations, beliefs and environments become part of the systematic deployment of media from content moderation to the cooling of servers. Examples of media discussed in class will include student-curated collections of social media content, videogames and television by French creators, and even infrastructural systems, including a failed project to create an automated train system in Paris.

Instructor(s): Katherine Buse     Terms Offered: Winter. Study Abroad in Paris
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-2025. For nonmajors, any CMST 14400 through 14599 course meets the general education requirement in the arts. This class is only offered through the Study Abroad Program in Paris.

CMST 14580. Special Topics: Uncanny. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): James Lastra     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.

CMST 14920. Comparative Media Poetics: Horror. 100 Units.

Cinema, videogames, and VR: all moving-image media, which have at times exerted multi-directional aesthetic influences on each other. This course will investigate the raw materials and basic forms at the disposal of artists working in and across these media, with a special focus on horror as a genre. Along with fundamental questions regarding the social, psychological, and political uses (and abuses) of horror as a genre, this course will also look at how horror works across a variety of media. In what way do the possibilities available to game developers differ from those available to filmmakers, and vice versa? How are space, time, and action presented and segmented differently across moving images (cinema), interactive moving images (games), and fully-immersive virtual environments (VR)? How do techniques ranging from psychological identification to jump scares work in each medium, and what aesthetic effects are open to one that are not open to the other? Course materials will include horror cinema, horror games (video and otherwise), VR experiences, and written horror literature.

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 14920, MADD 14920

CMST 15500. Beginning Screenwriting. 100 Units.

This course introduces the basic elements of a literate screenplay, including format, exposition, characterization, dialog, voice-over, adaptation, and the vagaries of the three-act structure. Weekly meetings include a brief lecture period, screenings of scenes from selected films, extended discussion, and assorted readings of class assignments. Because this is primarily a writing class, students write a four- to five-page weekly assignment related to the script topic of the week. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 27102

Instructor(s): P. Wimp     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 15500, MADD 25500

CMST 17900. Machine, Museum, Medium: The Collections of Paris through the Eyes of the Computer. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This class is only offered through the Study Abroad Program in Paris. Not offered in 2024-25.

CMST 20122. From Bollywood to Made in Heaven: Marriage and Sexuality on Indian Screens. 100 Units.

From reality shows like Indian Matchmaking and Made in Heaven to the meme of the "Big Fat Indian Wedding" to the preoccupations of Bollywood films like DDLJ and Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani and crossover ones such as Monsoon Wedding, marriage is an obsession in South Asian culture. Focusing on Hindi cinema, this course will explore the socio-political dynamics of this cultural focus on marriage and couple formation. With examples ranging from classical Hindi films from the 1950s-60s to the star-studded melodramas of 1970s and 1980s and the "new Bollywood" era (post-1991), this cinema exhibited and analyzed the central dynamics of marriage: sexual compatibility, fidelity, reproductive futures, and so on. Debates around class, caste, diaspora, and sexuality are equally anchored in issues of marriage and couple formation. In this course, we ask why it is that marriage-its success and failure-has been so central to Indian on-screen identities. Even as screens multiply-on computers, cell phones, and in the multiplex-marriage continues to dominate. No prior knowledge of Indian languages is required, but you must enjoy watching and talking about movies and popular culture.

Instructor(s): Rochona Majumdar     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 30142, GNSE 20142, CMST 30122, SALC 30122, HIST 26616, HIST 36616, SALC 20122

CMST 20600. Gender, Race, and Horror. 100 Units.

This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.

Instructor(s): AE Stevenson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.

CMST 20602. Queer/Trans/Media. 100 Units.

This seminar stages a sustained dialogue between theories of queer, trans, and media, exploring how each of these disciplines animate and challenge one another. This course explores the possibilities of an expanded understanding of queerness, following queer scholar Eve Sedgwick's claim that "work around 'queer' spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all." More recently, queer scholars like David Eng have read "queerness as a critical methodology based not on content but rather on form and style" while trans scholars like Toby Beauchamp similarly engage "the transgender of transgender studies as a mode of critique" and "not as a predetermined category into which identities or bodies are slotted." What might it mean to consider "queer" and "trans" not as a field with a delimited object of study (sexuality or gender), but as an analytic, a methodology, a critical sensibility, a conceptual strategy, a reading practice, a politics, an aesthetic, etc. Throughout the course, we explore often-unconventional pairings of media objects and scholarly readings to work through these challenging questions. Ultimately, this course is designed to help students read for the similarities within the aesthetic forms of film/media and queer/trans theories to understand their force of expression.

Instructor(s): Basil Dababneh     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 23169

CMST 21003. Early Black Film and its Afterlives. 100 Units.

In an oft-cited statistic, the Library of Congress has estimated that over 70% of the films produced between 1912 and 1929, are now lost forever. The outcomes for black film during this period are even more stark. This course takes on the challenge of narrating a history dominated by absence, pairing careful historiographic methods with creative and speculative approaches to construct the life and afterlife of early black filmmaking. In this class, we will explore the historical development of black film and black film performance throughout the silent era and its boundaries, from the earliest fragments to the beginnings of the sound era. We will explore key figures such as Oscar Micheaux, Richard E. Norman, and William D. Foster, as well as key performers like Paul Robeson, Bert Williams, Evelyn Preer and Josephine Baker. In addition to watching and engaging with the films themselves, we will explore the contexts of their production, the theatrical and musical traditions that informed them, and material life of the celluloid that carries them. We will also attend to the films now "lost forever." What can we know about a film we cannot watch, and how? We will consider partial film material, news reporting and other ephemera in an attempt to peer into the space left behind in the absence of a surviving film print. Lastly, we will study the citation, sampling, remixing, and reimagining of this material from this era in contemporary work.

Instructor(s): Avery LaFlamme     Terms Offered: Winter

CMST 21025. Creating a Different Image: Black Women's Filmmaking of the 1970s-90s. 100 Units.

This course will explore the rich intersections between African American women's filmmaking, literary production, and feminist thought from the 1970s to the early 1990s, with an emphasis on the formation of a Black women's film culture beginning in the 1970s. We will examine the range of Black feminisms presented through film and the ways that these films have challenged, countered, and reimagined dominant narratives about race, class, gender, and sexuality in America. We will explore the power and limitations of filmmaking as a mode of Black feminist activism; the range of Black feminisms presented through film; and the specific filmic engagements of well-known Black feminist critics such as bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Michele Wallace. As many Black feminist writers were engaged with filmmaking and film culture, we will look at these films alongside Black women's creative and critical writing from the period. Approaching filmmaking in the context of Black feminist thought will allow us to examine the possibilities of interdisciplinary approaches to film studies broadly, as well as to think specifically about the research methods and theories that are demanded by Black women's filmmaking in particular.

Instructor(s): Allyson Field     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): This course is open to graduate and undergraduate students from across the disciplines; our conversations and presentations of the films will both depend on and be energized by different disciplinary perspectives.
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25. Please email Professor Field at anfield@uchicago.edu before enrolling. Course Description Continued: We will discuss the form, aesthetics, and politics of individual films and we will examine larger efforts by artists and activists to build a Black women’s film culture, asking such questions as: What does a film history of Black feminism look like, and what scholarly and creative methods does such a history demand? To begin to answer these questions, we will revisit the 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts—believed to be the first ever Black women’s film festival—organized by Michele Wallace, Faith Ringgold, Patricia Jones, Margo Jefferson, and Monica Freeman. The class will collectively participate in a homage series inspired by the 1976 festival, featuring work by filmmakers from the original festival such as Monica Freeman, Madeline Anderson, Michelle Parkerson, Ayoka Chenzira, Carol Munday Lawrence, Edie Lynch, and Camille Billops; as well as others including Julie Dash, Zeinabu irene Davis, Maya Angelou, and Yvonne Welbon. The weekly course screenings will be open to the public and students will gain experience in the public presentation of films by actively engaging in public-facing aspects of film exhibition (writing program notes, delivering introductions, participating in discussions, etc.). The class will culminate with a two-day symposium that will bring together around 35 Black feminist filmmakers and artists, including a number from the 1976 festival, to revisit the threads and legacies of the original event and discuss the present and future of Black women’s film practices.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 21025, GNSE 30128, HMRT 21025, HIST 37415, KNOW 31025, HIST 27415, CMST 31025, HMRT 31025, GNSE 20128

CMST 21301. Introduction au cinéma français et francophone. 100 Units.

Ce cours vise à donner une vue d'ensemble du cinéma français et francophone à travers une approche thématique. À l'appui de textes dont nous privilégierons ceux originellement publiés en français, nous examinerons une grande variété de films dont le point commun se situe à leur opposition à la norme, au centre, à la métropole, au mainstream. L'œuvre de cinéastes issus des rives gauche et droite de la Nouvelle Vague, tels que Chabrol, Duras, Godard et Varda, celle de cinéastes africains, et de cinéastes de l'âge classique et moderne comme Alice et Mati Diop, permettra de passer du macro au micro, du personnel à l'autoréférentiel. Nous étudierons ainsi comment ces cinéastes utilisent l'outil cinématographique pour aborder des thèmes tels que la colonisation, la géographie, le genre et la sexualité, et le medium du cinéma lui-même. En mettant en lien l'image et le texte, nous étudierons la tension entre le langage du cinéma et celui de la littérature et leur différente capacité à traiter de ces sujets.

Instructor(s): Etienne Labbouz     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): FREN 20300 or placement into 20500
Note(s): Taught in French
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 21300

CMST 21401. Refresh, Reload, Reboot, Remake: What are film remakes good for? 100 Units.

Film remakes are, and have been, a ubiquitous phenomenon in popular cinema. Film remakes take many shapes and forms: transnational (from Japan to the US), transcultural (from French to American), trans-modal (from animation to live action), and trans-medial (from games to the cinema screen). This course takes up the remake as not merely a citation, but as a new object that, in repeating, creates new meanings. It treats the remake as a repository where one can not only find new technologies of seeing and showing, but also track changing ways of imagining the world on cinema. For this course, then, the film remake serves as an emblem of difference, one which contains the situated imaginations of films past and present. By studying the remake, the goal of this class is to come out with a better understanding of cinema's difference from the other arts in its capacity to repeat the same story to produce different results.

Instructor(s): Shubham Shivang     Terms Offered: Autumn

CMST 21650. Irish Literature and Cinema. 100 Units.

Major works of poetry, fiction, drama, and film. In literature, the course ranges from Jonathan Swift and Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney and Anna Burns, and, in cinema, from silent film to Neil Jordan and Lenny Abramson. Literature and cinema are intertwined through all the weeks of the quarter in various connections (including Hitchcock's adaptation of O'Casey's JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK). (Fiction, Poetry, Drama, 1650-1830, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Jim Chandler     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 18250

CMST 22119. Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung in Performance. 100 Units.

This seminar, open to undergraduates and beginning graduate students, serves as a critical introduction to and intensive exploration of Richard Wagner's 19th century tetralogy. In addition to critical readings (e.g., by Wagner, Adorno, Nietzsche, Badiou, Dahlhaus, et al.) and screenings of a host of productions, we will travel downtown to Lyric Opera to attend performances of the Ring cycle in David Pountney's new production. Our discussions of the Chicago production will be supplemented by conversations with members of the Lyric Opera production team, including Anthony Freud, Lyric Opera's General Director. No previous knowledge is required although a curiosity about opera, German culture, media history, and/or theater & performance studies will be essential.

Instructor(s): David Levin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 23419, GRMN 33419, MUSI 32520, CMST 32119, GRMN 23419, MUSI 24520

CMST 22322. Introduction to Game Design. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the theories and processes underlying game design through the creation of analog projects. We will be designing for forms that include board games, tabletop games, and live-action games. No prior design experience is absolutely required though some background with game studies will enable more innovative work. This course will be project-based and collaborative in nature.

Instructor(s): Ashlyn Sparrow     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Students must have taken “Critical Videogame Studies” or another comparable game studies or design course. To apply, submit writing through the online form at https://forms.gle/k8SVfDqC9hsvHxyHA. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 22322

CMST 22440. Women in Italian Organized Crime Through Cinema. 100 Units.

In this course, we will study filmic representations of women in Italian organized crime, and the implications these portrayals have on the understanding of gender and the mafias through Italian cinema. Sociological and psychological studies have underscored the importance of female roles in relation to mafia organizations, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. One of the main goals of this class is for students to gain an understanding of different Italian mafias and to get a deeper comprehension of the construction of gender in a selection of films centered around these organizations. We will also discuss how movies contribute to the perception of organized crime. This class will draw on a variety of fields, including sociology, gender studies, and film studies.

Instructor(s): Veronica Vegna      Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Taught in English. Students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor must complete a substantial part of the course work (e.g., readings, writing) in Italian.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 22440, GNSE 22440

CMST 22500. Seeing Islam and the Politics of Visual Culture. 100 Units.

From terrorists to "good Muslims," standards in the racial, cultural, and religious representations surrounding Islam have fluctuated across U.S. media. How do we conceptualize the nature of visual perception and reception? The history of colonialism, secular modernity, gender, patriarchy, and the blurred distinctions between religion and racialization have all contributed to a milieu of visual cultures that stage visions of and arguments about Islam. Hostility towards Muslims has not abated as we venture well into the 21st century, and many remain quick to blame an amorphous media for fomenting animosity towards the "real" Islam. We use these terms of engagement as the start of our inquiry: what is the promise of a meaningful image? What processes of secular translation are at work in its creation and consumption? Is there room for resistance, legibility, and representation in U.S. popular culture, and what does representation buy you in this age? We will pair theoretical methods for thinking about imagery, optics, perception, and perspective alongside case studies from film, stage, comedy, streaming content, and television shows, among others. Students will critically engage and analyze these theories in the contexts from which these works emerge and meld into a mobile and diasporic U.S. context. Together, we will reflect on the moral, political, and categorical commitments vested in different forms of media against historical trends of the 20th and 21st century.

Instructor(s): Samah Choudhury     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 32500, RLST 27555, ISLM 37555, ARTV 20667, ENGL 22505, ENGL 32505, RDIN 22500, RDIN 32500

CMST 22510. African American Cinema. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): AE Stevenson     Terms Offered: Winter

CMST 23005. The Spirit of Reality TV in East Asia. 100 Units.

Over the last several decades, reality television has become a central ingredient in media diets all across the world. One can practically trace a line from early hits like Survivor and Big Brother, which were quickly formatted for global circulation, to the recent viral success of Squid Game, a fictionalized account of a death-game tournament that spawned its own reality show. Why do audiences everywhere find reality TV so entertaining? What moral lessons do viewers take away from these shows? And what might scholars learn by taking this popular aesthetic form, in all its cultural variation, seriously? This course brings together media studies, aesthetic criticism, area studies, and the sociology of religion to try to answer some of these questions. The course will help students to think about the moral and spiritual beliefs embedded in popular cultural forms, but also to understand how these forms are now circulated and consumed in our contemporary media environment and what they tell us about late-stage global capitalism. Course readings will introduce students to scholarship in television studies, aesthetic criticism, religious studies, and cultural studies, providing them with the necessary foundations to analyze reality TV from multiple disciplinary perspectives. We will also screen examples of reality TV and its offshoots, with a specific focus on East Asian shows and the competition or elimination format.

Instructor(s): H. Long     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Students will develop skills in visual analysis, interpretation of secular religion and belief structures, social theory, and basic research and writing methods.
Equivalent Course(s): AASR 33005, EALC 33005, RLST 27005, CMST 33005, EALC 23005

CMST 23321. Bollywood Beats: Music and Sound in Popular Hindi Cinema. 100 Units.

This course explores the music and sound of popular Hindi cinema from aesthetic, social, cultural, economic, historical, and political perspectives. Students will be introduced to the musical conventions and practices of the genre, and to changes in Bollywood musical style over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will watch select films with keen attention to music's imbrication with cinematic visuality, narrative, technology, and dance, and with consideration of issues like emplacement, gender, caste, religion, capitalism, nationalism, and transnationalism. Bollywood is a cosmopolitan music, drawing from and contributing to a range of regional and international music practices; we also venture into some of those streams.

Instructor(s): Anna Schultz     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 23321, SALC 33321, MUSI 33321, CMST 33321, SALC 23321

CMST 23930. Documentary Production I. 100 Units.

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of various modes of documentary production will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the genre, such as the ethics, the politics of representation, and the shifting lines between "the real" and "fiction" will be explored. Story development, pre-production strategies, and production techniques will be our focus, in particular-research, relationships, the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing. Students will work in crews and be expected to purchase a portable hard drive. A five-minute string-out/rough-cut will be screened at the end of the quarter. Students are strongly encouraged to take CMST 23931 Documentary Production II to complete their work. Consent of instructor is required to enroll.

Instructor(s): Marco Ferrari     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Prior or concurrent enrollment in CMST 10100 recommended for undergraduate students.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 33930, HMRT 25106, CHST 23930, HMRT 35106, ARTV 23930, ARTV 33930, MADD 23930

CMST 23931. Documentary Production II. 100 Units.

Documentary Production II focuses on the shaping and crafting of a non-fiction video. Enrollment will be limited to those students who have taken CMST 23930 Documentary Production I. The class will discuss issues of ethics, power, and representation in this most philosophical and problematic of genres. Students will be expected to write a treatment outline detailing their project and learn about granting agencies and budgeting. Production techniques will concentrate on the language of handheld camera versus tripod, interview methodologies, microphone placement including working with wireless systems and mixers, and lighting for the interview. Post-production will cover editing techniques including color correction and audio sweetening, how to prepare for exhibition, and distribution strategies. Consent of instructor is required to enroll.

Instructor(s): Marco Ferrari     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): CMST 23930, HMRT 25106, or ARTV 23930
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 33931, MADD 23931, HMRT 25107, ARTV 23931, CHST 23931, CMST 33931, HMRT 35107

CMST 24110. India on Film. 100 Units.

This course introduces you to the different ways in which we might think about India through films. What was/is India on-screen? To what extent was India produced by these filmic imaginations? To be sure, there was/ is no monolithic India represented in film. Over the course of the quarter, we will focus on some important films to chart the idea of India they constructed and held up for critique. We will also focus on the region within the nation. In what ways does "Bombay" cinema overlap with "Tamil" "Bengali" and/ or Malayalam cinemas? What are its overlaps with "Lahore" cinema both before and after India and Pakistan became sovereign states? Our films will cover a wide temporal range: from the classical period of Indian cinema into the era of globalization in the 21st century. They will include popular , documentary, and art films. Our goal will to be understand the relationship between films and emergent ideas of nationhood, modernity, and citizenship in a decolonial world. Open to all students, both undergraduate and graduate.

Instructor(s): Rochona Majumdar     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 34110

CMST 24405. Kieslowski's French Cinema. 100 Units.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique catapulted the Polish director to the international scene. His subsequent French triptych Blue, White, Red turned out to be his last works that altered his image and legacy to affirm his status as an auteur and a representative of the transnational cinema. We discuss how in his virtual universe of parallel histories and repeated chances, captured with visually and aurally dazzling artistry, the possibility of reconstituting one's identity, triggered by tragic loss and betrayal, reveals an ever-ambiguous reality. By focusing on the filmmaker's dissolution of the thing-world, often portrayed on the verge of vague abstraction of (in)audibility or (un)transparency, this course bridges his cinema with the larger concepts of postmodern subjectivity and possibility of metaphysics. The course concludes with the filmmaker's contribution to world cinema. All along, we read selections from Kieślowski's and Piesiewicz's screen scripts, Kieślowski's own writings and interviews, as well as from the abundant criticism of his French movies. All materials are in English.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): REES 31002, REES 21002, CMLT 24405, CMST 34405, FNDL 25312

CMST 24507. Soviet Cinema and the Avant-Garde. 100 Units.

This course examines some of the most ambitious claims about what cinema as a medium can do by early Soviet filmmakers. We look at the extraordinary flourishing of cinema in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s including films by Eisenstein, Vertov, Shub, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, their theoretical writings, their collaborations with avant-garde artists and theater designers, and their far-reaching influence on film and film theory. We will also consider the political and historical context of the films and their creators.

Instructor(s): Anne E. Moss     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 36603, REES 26603

CMST 24603. Ghosts & the Fantastic in East Asia. 100 Units.

What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments and how do these change as stories travel between cultures? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and the fantastic in traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tales, plays, and films . Issues to be explored include: 1) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 2) the confrontation of death and mortality; 3) collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past 4) and the visualization (and exorcism) of ghosts through performance.

Instructor(s): J. Zeitlin     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 10600, SIGN 26006, GNSE 24602

CMST 24608. Beijing through the Lens. 100 Units.

This class offers an introduction to the development of mainland Chinese cinema through films that depict, negotiate, and critically respond to the capital city of Beijing. Together, we will examine the symbiosis between film and urban space, with a particular focus on the Chinese experiences of globalization and urbanization, taken as part of a broader problematic concerned with representations of space and spaces of representation.

Instructor(s): Cassandra Guan     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 34608

CMST 24910. INSECT MEDIA. 100 Units.

How have insects affected ways of knowing and relating to the world? This course opens a dialogue between insects and Japanese audiovisual cultures, including fiction, poetry, visual art, manga, anime, and film. We aim to address the important and profound challenge that recent trends in animal studies, environmental humanities, and eco-criticism pose to received ways of studying human cultures and societies. The challenge lies in offering alternatives to the entrenched reliance on a nature-culture divide, which gives culture explanatory preference over nature. In the case of Japan and insects, for instance, there exists a fairly significant body of scholarship on how Japanese people respond to, interact with, and represent insects, and yet priority is generally given to culture, and Japan is treated monolithically. To offer alternatives to this monolithic culturalism, in this course we will (a) open dialogue between culture accounts of insects and scientific accounts and (b) explore different forms of media offering different milieus where human animals and more-than-human insects come into relation without assuming the ascendency of one over the other.

Instructor(s): Chelsea Foxwell and Thomas Lamarre     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Consent of Instructor required: interested students should submit one paragraph of interest to Professors Foxwell and Lamarre.
Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 34910, ARTH 24910, EALC 34910, CDIN 24910, CMST 34915, ARTH 34910

CMST 24935. Introduction to Immersive Environments. 100 Units.

Virtual reality is expanding from just being utilized for games into an exploration of extendedrealities. Introduction to Immersive Environments will explore the theory and applications of virtualreality environments. Students will learn how to construct their VR environments using Blender and Unity. Students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques of their works throughout this course. Students will also explore the genre with readings and discussions. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different developmental processes to create.

Instructor(s): Crystal Beiersdorfer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 24935

CMST 25025. Mexican Cinema. 100 Units.

This course is intended as an overview of Mexican cinema, from its famed "Golden Age" in the 1940s and 1950s, up to contemporary productions. The aim is to reflect simultaneously on Mexican culture, history, and society, and on the language of film and its interpretation. Our goal is to expand what we know about Mexico through the way its cinema has tackled questions of difference (class, gender, regional, and race-based), modernization, political unrest, inequality, violence, and love. Crucial to our academic setting, we will ask what films offer as objects of knowledge in their own right, and not merely as illustrations. What does it mean to analyze a film? What are the tools we use to read and write about them as cultural products? We will consider classic fiction features along short, experimental, and documentary films. Works discussed include Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953), Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960), Canoa (Felipe Cazals, 1975), Perfume de violetas (Marisa Sistach, 2001), Tempestad (Tatiana Huezo, 2016), among others.

Instructor(s): Luis Madrigal     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 25025, SPAN 25025

CMST 25121. Intimacy and Desire in German Cinema. 100 Units.

This seminar explores representations of intimacy, sensuality and private life through the lens of German- language cinema from the Weimar period to New German Cinema of the 1960s. Departing from Richard Wagner's revolutionary darkening of the auditorium in the late 19th century, this course considers the emergence of cinema as a social institution and site of desire, fantasy and fulfilment in the broader German cultural context. Close readings of canonic films including Der blaue Engel, Die Büchse der Pandora, La Habanera and Die Ehe der Maria Braun will be guided by literary and theoretical texts on the formation of the film viewer as a sensuous subject. We will integrate journalistic writings on sexuality, degeneracy and bourgeois morality in the public sphere and the historical phenomenon of modern stardom associated with the careers of Marlene Dietrich, Louise Brooks and Zarah Leander. Films by Joseph von Sternberg, G. W. Pabst, Douglas Sirk, Helmut Käutner and Rainer Werner Fassbinder are accompanied by texts by Irmgard Keun, Lotte H. Eisner, Siegfried Kracauer, Thomas Elsaesser and Erica Carter. Class will be conducted in English.

Instructor(s): Nicole Burgoyne     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 25121, GRMN 25121

CMST 25363. Experimental Cinema. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): James Lastra     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 35363

CMST 25450. Writing the Feature Film. 100 Units.

This course is designed to help the emerging writer focus their creativity into a viable feature film project and screenplay. This includes structure, format, exposition, characterization, dialogue, voice-over, and other aspects of visual storytelling for the screen. Weekly meetings include a brief lecture period, screenings of scenes from selected films, extended discussion, assorted readings and writing assignments. Because this is primarily a writing class, students should expect to deliver four to five pages of written material-including story development materials or screenplay pages-each week.

Instructor(s): K. O'Brien     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 25450, MADD 25450

CMST 25507. Gender, Race, and Horror. 100 Units.

This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.

Instructor(s): AE Stevenson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 10507, CMST 35507, GNSE 20132

CMST 25602. Animation: Practices & Principles. 100 Units.

Sitting at the intersection of fine arts and filmmaking, animation has held a unique place in visual culture since its inception and has more recently become a ubiquitous presence in our society. Through a combination of workshops, screenings, and discussions, this course will examine the advantages and particularities that come with the art form as well as the diverse range of technologies and techniques that it can include. Students learn both analog and digital animation methods-including cut-out, hand-drawn, and stop motion, among others-to explore their own artistic voice through moving image, culminating with a final project in the medium of their choice. Works screened for discussion will range from the traditional and studio-based to the experimental and alternative. No previous drawing experience required.

Instructor(s): Elizabeth Rogers     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 20602, CMST 35602, ARTV 20035

CMST 25603. What Is Animation? 100 Units.

This course will provide students with an introduction to the objects and theories of animation.

Instructor(s): Cassandra Guan     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 10603, CMST 35603

CMST 25604. How to Draw Things on the Computer. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 25604

CMST 25610. Line, Trace, Motion: Computation and Experiment in Animation. 100 Units.

Interpreting what we mean by animation broadly, this course will investigate computational moving-image making through the lens of experimental animation. We will take as our point of departure the films of Rettinger, Ruttmann, Fischinger, McLaren, and Breer, but will also draw upon artifacts and 'animated lines' taken from further afield: found footage films and algorithmic editing, dance drawings of Trisha Brown, kinetic sculptures of Bit International, early plotter art, avant-garde music notation, and contemporary techniques of motion and performance capture. This course will develop theoretical lines of inquiry that run in two directions: an excavation of a "pre-history" of contemporary new media and a reinterpretation / re-invigoration of our understanding of early animation. Any film production, hand-animation or computer programming experiences are welcome - but none are perquisites for the course. Students will be expected to complete regular short creative "sketches" of techniques culminating in a final short animated project.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 20610, CMST 35610

CMST 25620. Japanese Animation: The Making of a Global Media. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to Japanese animation, from its origins in the 1910s to its emergence as global culture in the 1990s. The goal is not only to provide insight into Japanese animation within the context of Japan but also to consider those factors that have transformed it into a global cultural form with a diverse, worldwide fanbase. As such, the course approaches Japanese animation from three distinct perspectives on Japanese animation, which are designed to introduce students to three important methodological approaches to contemporary media - film studies, media studies, and fan studies or cultural studies. As we look at Japanese animation in light of these different conceptual frameworks, we will also consider how its transnational dissemination and 'Asianization' challenge some of our basic assumptions about global culture, which have been shaped primarily through the lens of Americanization.

Instructor(s): Thomas Lamarre     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 15620, SIGN 26070, EALC 35620, EALC 25620, CMST 35620

CMST 25954. Alternate Reality Games: Theory and Production. 100 Units.

Games are one of the most prominent and influential media of our time. This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "alternate reality" or "transmedia" gaming. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. These games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of video games, and the team dynamics of sports. Beyond the subject matter, students will design modules of an Alternate Reality Game in small groups. Students need not have a background in media or technology, but a wide-ranging imagination, interest in new media culture, or arts practice will make for a more exciting quarter.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda, Heidi Coleman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing through online form: https://forms.gle/QvRCKN6MjBtcteWy5; see course description. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Questions: mb31@uchicago.edu
Note(s): Note(s): English majors: this course fulfills the Theory (H) distribution requirement.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 25970, ARTV 30700, CMST 35954, ENGL 32314, MADD 20700, TAPS 28466, BPRO 28700, ARTV 20700

CMST 26043. The Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence. 100 Units.

With the emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney, the production of computer-generated content has become accessible to a wide range of users and use cases. Knowledge institutions are particularly challenged to find adequate responses to changing notions of authorship as the mainstreaming of 'artificial' texts, audio-visual artifacts, and code is transforming our paradigms of communication in real-time. This course offers a survey of scholarship from the nascent field of critical AI studies to investigate the impact of AI, machine learning, and big data on knowledge production, representation, and consumption. In addition to theoretical discussions, we will conduct research-creation experiments aimed at documenting and evaluating emerging methods of AI-augmented content creation across text, image, and sound. Prospective students should demonstrate a substantial interest in media art and design and its connections to digital humanities, critical theory, and pedagogy. Experience with artistic and/or engineering practice is a plus. Please submit a 300 word max statement of interest to uhl@uchicago.edu by12/22 in order to be considered for enrollment.

Instructor(s): Andre Uhl     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIPS 26043, KNOW 26043, KNOW 36043, ANTH 36043, MACS 36043, CMST 36043, ANTH 26043, MADD 12043, CHSS 36043

CMST 26074. The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. 100 Units.

Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) is widely considered to be one of Soviet cinema's great auteurs, a fiercely independent creative artist and thinker. Known for his long takes, visual imagery, intertextuality, and philosophical self-reflectiveness, Tarkovsky has profoundly shaped the evolution of modern art cinema over the past fifty years and his legacy is still very much alive in both the Slavic world and the west. In this course, we will study Tarkovsky's major films focusing particularly on their aesthetic characteristics, spiritual and philosophical dimensions, and cultural and political context.

Instructor(s): David Molina     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 36074, REES 26074, CMST 36074

CMST 26089. Movies and Mind: What Science Can Tell Us About Movies. 100 Units.

This course provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge on how human minds and brains engage with and respond to film and media. Using such interdisciplinary approaches as neuroscience, experimental psychology, linguistics, analytical philosophy, film theory, and cognitive film studies, we will try to understand why we like to watch movies; how we process what we see and hear on the screen; why some movies attract more than others; how identity, politics, and culture may affect the viewer response; and what the nature of the mind's engagement with art might be.

Instructor(s): Maria Belodubrovskaya     Terms Offered: Autumn

CMST 26505. Straight-line sensibilities. A hidden history of 20th Century Art. 100 Units.

The proliferation of straight lines in 20th Century art and architecture is generally associated with rational and universalist procedures and perspectives, and closely associated with the rise of industrial society. This course will look at straight lines in modern art from a very different perspective. We will study a hidden genealogy of straight lines that all seem to evoke the vagaries of sensory realities and capacities and that are aesthetic through and through. These type of straight lines are all, in their various ways, related to the close interaction between bodies and media technologies - one of the major themes in modern art. The question, of course, is how and why straight lines comes to express this relationship. To look at this question, we will study artworks and ideas that extend from the mid 19th-century to 21st century art and that includes a wide range of media and expressions, including architecture, painting, drawing, film, video and computer art.

Instructor(s): I. Bloom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 26501, ARTH 36501, MADD 26501, CMST 36505

CMST 26603. The Cinema of Miloš Forman. 100 Units.

The films of Miloš Forman (1932-2018) reflect the turbulence of the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s, and 2000s by focusing on the underdog, the pariah, the eccentric. The subject matter to which Forman was drawn translated into his cinema with a signature bittersweet tone, emphatic narrative cogency, and lush spontaneity. This course is an intensive study of Forman's work from his "New Wave" work in Czechoslovakia (Loves of a Blonde, The Fireman's Ball) to his U.S. studio successes (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus), to his idiosyncratic and parabolic last films (Man on the Moon, Goya's Ghosts). Among other topics, the course contemplate the value of a dark sense of humor, cinematic gorgeousness, and artistic dissidence.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): REES 22010, CMST 36603, FNDL 22010, REES 32010

CMST 27006. Cinema and Incarceration. 100 Units.

With case studies that include fiction films, documentaries, and personal filmmaking by presently or formerly incarcerated filmmakers, this course examines the relationship between cinema and the carceral state. Major animating questions include: How do the fantasies of incarceration presented in fictional films emerge from and feed into societal-wide ideologies around mass incarceration? How can the relationship between cinematic technologies and surveillance society best be interrogated? Can documentary filmmaking affect radical change around issues of incarceration-and how can incarcerated people tell their own stories and represent their own lives?

Instructor(s): Ian Jones     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37006

CMST 27021. Performance Captured. 100 Units.

Technologies that turn human action, appearance and performance into data for storage, transformation and redisplay have a long history inside and outside of moving image arts. This class will look at the opportunities, aesthetics and politics of these approaches running through contemporary special effects, traditional and experimental animation, dance on camera and live performance at a moment when boundaries between these categories have become especially porous.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 67021, MADD 20721

CMST 27105. Mediating War. 100 Units.

This course will explore the reciprocal relationships between war and media. At the core of this class we will ask: how is war itself a medium? In doing so, we will consider not only the technologies used to wage war, but also how war operates as a material and conditioning substrate for experiences of time, space, and power. Indeed, war is not simply a state of armed conflict, but a mode of aesthetic and political communication that shapes modern sensoria. Beginning with key frameworks for war in media studies, we will proceed by examining a range of medial sites used to wage war, as well as documentary and entertainment practices that represent war for the public. Along the way, we will interrogate how the mediating processes of war conflate civilian and soldier, violence and entertainment, weapon and communication device. With historical references, this course will focus primarily on global experiences of armed conflict in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to specific war technologies like drones, we will also analyze key media forms like photography, cinema, television, computers, and video games.

Instructor(s): G. Kafer     Terms Offered: Autumn

CMST 27208. Screenings of the Dark: Topics in Black Feminist Film Theory. 100 Units.

This course will address historical and contemporary arcs in the expansive field of Black feminism by centering on representations by and of Black woman on screen. The central pursuit off this course will be to elevate the theories of Black feminism that exist within and outside of film studies to anticipate future ruptures in creative output and emerging epistemologies. The course will center around such topics as performance, refusal, aesthetics, transness, and girlhood.

Instructor(s): AE Stevenson     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37208, GNSE 30140, GNSE 20140

CMST 27299. Intensive Track - Written Thesis Workshop. 100 Units.

This series of workshops - comprised of approximately 10 meetings - will provide support for thesis writers across the entire academic year. It is taught by the Director of Undergraduate Studies and supplemented by regular meetings with a designated preceptor. The workshops are intended to guide students through the process of thesis writing from developing a research question to determining the most appropriate research method for its exploration to integrating suitable theoretical insights to writing compellingly about media objects to the nuts and bolts of exposition.

Instructor(s): Maria Belodubrovskaya     Terms Offered: Autumn. Enrollment takes place only in Autumn Quarter, but the workshop is held throughout the academic year
Note(s): Course is only open to students completing a Written Thesis Project in their final year in the College. This course counts towards major coursework requirements for Intensive Track students.

CMST 27301. Philosophy of Comedy: Classic Hollywood Film. 100 Units.

What does comedy do to us? What is the nature of our corporeal response of laughter and how does it relate to our intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional responses? What kind of philosophical perspective does the mode of comedy provide on issues of self-knowledge, agency, identity, taste, free will, gender, race, the relation of body to mind? In this course, we will use classic Hollywood film comedies as a field for exploring these questions. From the slapstick acrobatics of Chaplin and Keaton in the silent comedies, to the madcap horseplay of the Marx Brothers and the tapdancing of the Nicholas Brothers in the musical comedies, to the spitfire exchanges on the topic of sex and love in the screwball comedies and the metatheatrical Nazi impersonations in the wartime comedies, these films of the first half of the 20th century offer a wealth of performances, narratives, and gags for philosophical investigation. The course will provide an introduction to the major comedic directors and performers of this period. We will engage closely with the formal construction of individual films as well as on the nature of comedy itself. A major theme will be the contradictory power of the film comedy, its capacity for transgression and its reliance on stereotypes, its utopian transformative potential and its entanglements with death, despair, and violence.

Instructor(s): Tanya Desai     Terms Offered: Spring

CMST 27302. Acting on Film. 100 Units.

In this course, we will study the topic of acting on film through the perspective of the major twentieth century philosophical movements like phenomenology (what is the nature of our being in the world?), existentialism (is to be a self simply to play a role?), feminism (how is gender performed?), behaviorism (can the inner be accessed only through the outer?), psychoanalysis (are we driven to act in ways we don't control?), and moral philosophy (how should we apprehend and understand other people?). How have these philosophical debates around agency, will, consciousness, emotional expression, social roles, and personhood, influenced the methods and practices of film acting? How does the medium of film add to and mediate our understanding of these concepts? How have individual films self-consciously explored and interrogated the concept of acting? Readings will include philosophical texts, film theory, as well as actor manuals, star interviews and fan magazines, and screenings will range across different movements and styles of film, such as classic Hollywood, neo-realism, and modernist film.

Instructor(s): Tanya Desai     Terms Offered: Autumn

CMST 27806. Algorithmic Culture. 100 Units.

The term algorithm has existed for centuries. However as technical systems, algorithms have only more recently started to shape contemporary social relations. From PredPol to ChatGPT, algorithms have inserted themselves into human knowledge and social experience across global information systems. In doing so, they have become the new site of culture insofar as they modulate human experiences and construct normative ways of meaning-making by correlating new relations among data, optimizing outputs, and automating decisions. Through the lens of digital media studies, this class will track how algorithms have reshaped culture relations by reconfiguring received frameworks of objectivity, identity, and power. Beginning with historical and technical accounts of algorithms, we will explore their impact through key issues including: personalization, discrimination, violence, labor, infrastructure, and the environment. The course will conclude by examining how algorithms open up new paths for resistance and sovereignty. Along the way, we will engage algorithms through vectors of social identity, including race, gender, class, and sexuality. As algorithms are a complex and multifaceted concept, our study of it will be interdisciplinary. In addition to foundational texts in digital media studies, we will engage a variety of materials from computer science, critical race studies, social sciences, queer and feminist studies, history, communications, and more.

Instructor(s): Gary Kafer     Terms Offered: Spring

CMST 27807. Work and Play in the Digital Age: Video Games and Social Media. 100 Units.

Digital media has changed what work looks like across all sectors while simultaneously facilitating more play than ever before. The particularities of mediation are key to the current blurring of work and play: in our play time, video games and social media are feeling more and more like work, as gamification and content creation increasingly become the primary modes of interaction. And work feels more like a game as bosses are replaced by algorithms and all anyone wants to do is 'game the system.' Surveillance ecosystems abound, capturing our data and quantifying our actions, rendering us all working players in a socially mediated video game of life. Making video games for a living or becoming a social media star are jobs that, while fun and highly sought after, are paradigmatic of the contemporary work environment: precarious, aspirational, passion driven, and full of work and play. What happens to us when we're working and playing, at the same time, all the time? How can the frameworks of mass gameplay and ubiquitous sociality help us theorize the contemporary moment?

Instructor(s): Bret Hart     Terms Offered: Spring

CMST 27817. Sonic the Hedgehog. 100 Units.

In this course, we will use a single franchise - Sonic the Hedgehog - as an access point to study media history, aesthetics, social and cultural practice, and the relationships between games, film, and other artforms. Originally released in 1991 for Sega's Genesis console, the Sonic series has spawned over three decades of games, cartoons, manga, novels, films, music, board games, action figures, fan art, cosplay, and merchandizing. Both the volume and the variety of these texts allow the Sonic corpus to be a focal point for questions with broader stakes for the study of games and media in general. Some of the questions we will be considering in this course include: What has been the relationship between particular videogame characters and franchises and the business practices and strategies of entertainment industries? What form does stardom take in the world of digital games, and is it an appropriate concept to apply to a mascot like Sonic? How have established game franchises responded to major technological and aesthetic shifts in the medium? How might we understand the concept and practice of adaptation as applied to the digital games, and what does it reveal about the medium specificity of and the relationship between games, film, comics, novels, and other forms? What can a game franchise that has taken a wide variety of generic forms (platforming, racing, fighting, and pinball, to name just a few) tell us about how genre works as concept and system in digital games?

Instructor(s): Chris Carloy     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 37817, MADD 17817, CMST 37817

CMST 27830. A Workshop on Creative Coding for New Media. 100 Units.

This project-based, workshop-style course will offer a close look at how we can be creative with code at a crucial moment in the always-shifting relationships between computation, creativity, material, and audience. En route, we'll examine a dizzying array of contemporary creative-coding environments in both production and live performance, explore historical dead-ends, half-baked visions, long-forgotten programming languages, as well as yet-to-emerge interfaces and altogether imaginary futures. And we'll draw on examples from new media, music and sound art, cinema and VR, computer games, architecture and CAD/CAM. Our work together will be done in the context of extending and reworking Field --- an open-source environment for creative coding developed for use in a teaching role here at UChicago. As the barriers between making things with computers and consuming content served up by them grow, we'll step into today's computational surplus and reclaim some viable space for creation.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.

CMST 27845. The Transmedia Franchise: Alien (1979) and Its Offspring. 100 Units.

We live in a franchise era where popular narratives unfold across multiple different media platforms: cinema, television, games, comics, novels, theme park rides, and more. This course explores the cultural, industrial, and technological factors driving this situation, as well as the opportunities and challenges that it presents for media creators. As our main example, we will delve into the Alien franchise, launched by the science fiction-horror film Alien (1979) and continuing across an increasing number of extensions, including a new film (Alien: Romulus [2024]), television series (Alien: Earth [2025]), and VR video game (Alien: Rogue Incursion [2024]). Each week, we will watch one of the Alien feature films, analyze its visual and narrative style, situate it in the historical development of transmedia strategies, and connect it to related works in other media. Screenings will be complemented by game play sessions at the Weston Game Lab. Readings will survey the vast literature on the Alien franchise while also introducing key theoretical concepts (e.g. transmedia, remediation, intertextuality, subcreation, convergence etc.). Therefore, although it is organized around Alien media, by the end of this course students will be prepared to think critically and creatively about the many franchises that structure our media environment.

Instructor(s): Cooper Long     Terms Offered: Winter

CMST 27867. 1990s Videogame History. 100 Units.

This course will trace developments in the videogame medium and videogame cultures in the final decade of the 20th century, discuss the unique possibilities and difficulties arising from the study of recent history, and put these discussions into practice through research-based assignments. Questions that will guide our study include: what was the relationship between technological innovations and stylistic changes in the videogame medium? How did the entry of new corporate and creative players into the business affect industrial structures and strategies? What do we make of "freedom," "realism," and other concepts that dominated videogame press coverage - and how were they connected to broader cultural discourses? How did understandings of what it meant to play videogames, and the types of experiences that videogames could offer, change over the course of the decade? What was the relationship between developments in the videogame medium and other media - from film and fiction to virtual reality and the Internet? How has this decade been remembered, conceptualized, preserved, and repackaged in subsequent decades?

Instructor(s): Chris Carloy     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 15416, MAPH 34516, CMST 37867

CMST 27880. Videogame Consoles: A Platform Studies Approach. 100 Units.

While videogames' mix of art, play, and advanced technology gives game studies much of its vitality, the technological and computational aspects of the medium can be daunting for many would-be students and designers. And yet no approach to the study of videogames can be exhaustive without some consideration of the material and technological grounds that make games possible. With this in mind, this course will introduce approaches to videogame studies that emphasize the platforms - the hardware, operating systems, etc. - on which games are played, and is intended for students with all levels of familiarity with the technological side of videogames. How do the various components of game platforms, from computer architecture to controllers to the underlying code, affect how games look, sound, and feel, how they are played, who designs them and how, how they are marketed and to whom, and how they are preserved? How do platforms emerge from particular technological, industrial, social, and cultural contexts, and how do they in turn affect the course of game history and culture? Classroom lectures and discussions of readings will be accompanied by weekly gameplay sessions at the MADD Center, which will provide close, hands-on engagement with game platforms. Possible objects of study include the Atari 2600 (1977), ColecoVision (1982), Sega Game Gear (1990) and Genesis/CD/32X (1988-94), Panasonic 3DO (1993), Nintendo 64 (1996) and Wii (2006), and PlayStation 4/VR (2013-16).

Instructor(s): Christopher Carloy     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required.
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 17880, MAPH 37880, CMST 37880

CMST 27887. The Platformer: History and Theory of a Videogame Genre. 100 Units.

This course will provide an introduction to genre history and theory in videogame studies through a focus on the "platformer." Though not a common name outside of videogame culture, the platformer has introduced or popularized some of the medium's most recognizable figures (Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong) and gameplay mechanics (running, jumping, avoiding enemies, and collecting items). The genre has also been instrumental in and reflective of changes across the videogame medium. This course will cover two decades (roughly 1990 - 2010), emphasizing both historical details and theoretical questions, such as: How have game genres been defined? How do distinct genres emerge and change over time? How do broader trends (technological, formal, industrial, discursive, experiential, etc.) influence individual genres, and what roles do individual genres play in these broader trends? What resources and methodologies exist for studying videogame genres? Throughout the course we'll see the platformer alternate between an emphasis on linear, acrobatic movement across two-dimensional spaces and the free exploration of three-dimensional virtual worlds; between providing mascots for the biggest game companies and becoming a marker of independent, small-team production; and between being hailed as "revolutionary" and epitomizing the retro-nostalgic. Classroom lecture and discussion of readings will be accompanied by weekly gameplay sessions on original hardware at the MADD Center.

Instructor(s): Christopher Carloy     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 37887, MADD 17887, CMST 37887

CMST 27910. Virtual Ethnography: Encounters in Mediation. 100 Units.

From everyday social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and WeChat, to more complex real-time immersive social and gaming sites, virtual realms are propagating at a fantastic rate while transforming what it means to live and interact in the physical world. As such virtual world, communities, and spaces increasingly command our attention, time, and money, scholars from various fields have begun to tackle questions concerning the ethics, logics, patterns, and social specificity of the virtual through experimental forms of virtual ethnography. This advanced undergraduate course introduces students to some these recent ethnographies and corresponding theoretical interventions into the nature of collective techno-life within virtual realms. Students will build on this material in order to develop an ethnographic inquiry into a virtual world of their choosing. In so doing, they will work individually and as a class through the processes of pre-field planning, fieldwork, and post-field analysis and writing.

Instructor(s): Thomas Lamarre and Michael Fisch      Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor required; email Professors Fisch and Lamarre a paragraph long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.
Note(s): Enrollment limit: 25
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 27910, MADD 12910, CDIN 27910, EALC 27910

CMST 27911. Augmented Reality Production. 100 Units.

Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of augmented reality, this class will explore and interrogate each stage of production of AR works. Students in this production-based class will examine the techniques and opportunities of this new kind of moving image. During this class we'll study the construction of examples across a gamut from locative media, journalism, and gameplay-based works to museum installations. Students will complete a series of critical essays and sketches towards a final augmented reality project using a custom set of software tools developed in and for the class.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 37921, CMST 37911, MADD 22911, ARTV 27921

CMST 27916. Critical Videogame Studies. 100 Units.

Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College. (Literary/Critical Theory)

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda     Terms Offered: Autumn Summer
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 12320, GNSE 22320, SIGN 26038, ENGL 12320

CMST 27920. Virtual Reality Production. 100 Units.

Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of virtual reality, this class will explore and interrogate each stage of production for VR. By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical experiences, students will design, construct and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new strategies and interactive logics for placing images into virtual spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging VR "canon" that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative "VR cinema." Film production and computer programming experience is welcome but not a prerequisite for the course. Students will be expected to complete short "sketches" of approaches in VR towards a final short VR experience.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Film production and computer programming experience is welcome but not a prerequisite for the course. Students will be expected to complete short "sketches" of approaches in VR towards a final short VR experience.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 27920, MADD 24920, ARTV 37920, CMST 37920

CMST 27931. Re-imagning Health in Immersive Media Environments. 100 Units.

Virtual Reality (VR) as a storytelling medium is often discussed in terms of immersion and presence and how these media specificities tend to instill greater empathy. The common argument suggests that VR allows participants to experience someone else's lived reality as if it were their own. This capacity of VR to increase empathy has been contested by scholars in various fields. In light of this critique, we will examine the potential of VR to tell stories of illness and debility beyond empathy. Using concepts from critical disability studies, phenomenology, narrative medicine, and media theory, we will learn to distinguish the roles that VR narratives offer their participants, ranging from being a witness to becoming the first-person experiencer of non-normative embodiments. Exemplary questions are: what are the limitations of empathy in VR illness narratives? How can illness narratives in VR critically reflect on binaries between healthy/ill? Each week, we will focus on particular health issues as they are taken up by VR artists. We will delve into the ways VR enables experiences of pain in the absence of tissue damage or offer multisensory and nonlinear stories to give a sense of the ups and downs of living with bipolar disorder. The literature provided will help guide us through the exploration of these VR experiences. We will also try out some of these VR experiences ourselves.

Instructor(s): Desiree Foerster     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37931, MADD 24931

CMST 28103. Popular Music on Film. 100 Units.

The rockumentary, concert, or popular music film remains an enduring object across the 20th and 21st centuries. From Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back to Wattstax to Taylor Swift: The Era's Tour, these films stage an essential encounter between two key forms of mass media: popular music and cinema. Starting with this relationship, this class asks, "What can popular music and cinema teach us about each other?" Across readings borrowed from cultural studies, music, and cinema-in addition to weekly film screenings-this course will help students develop a robust understanding of the common ground the popular music film constructs. We will explore how this genre exposes a network of concepts relating to media technology, race, and music culture through close reading and focused film analysis. While this class expects participants to have a basic awareness of the language of film analysis, this class does not assume its students to have formal musical training. Instead, this course encourages and teaches to develop basic skills in competently writing about music on film from a cultural studies perspective. Beginning with common theoretical and cultural concerns shared between film and music, we will learn to describe on-screen music and sound using focused, meaningful, and accurate language. As an extension of this project, we will also learn approaches to incorporating discussions of media culture that reflect and embrace an enduring legacy of popular writing on music.

Instructor(s): Joel Sutherland     Terms Offered: Winter

CMST 28205. Feminist Documentary Filmmaking. 100 Units.

This course examines the ways that women-identifying documentary makers have given cinematic form to feminist thought. Drawing from film and media theory and history, we will focus on the formal and narrative techniques that have been employed by filmmakers to reflect on questions pertaining to gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on the specific ways that non-fiction filmmaking expanded feminist theoretical frameworks and research methodologies. Considering topics such as cinematic realism, film spectatorship, viewing pleasure, counter-cinema, and theories of intersectionality and diaspora, we will ask questions such as: What are the stylistic devices that feminist documentary films have mobilized, and for what purposes and ends? What is documentary's relation to the history of fiction film, particularly of Hollywood cinema? How have women documentary makers understood cinema's role in social processes of transformation? What are the possibilities and limitations of collaborative methods, appropriation strategies, and oppositional techniques? We will watch films with a critical eye and engage closely with academic and popular writings to survey the aesthetic, social, and political genealogies operating in the history of feminist documentary production. In this discussion-based course, we will cover a variety of non-fiction film and media forms: film diaries, docu-fictions, home-movies, video essays, auto-ethnographies, ethno-fictions, collage, and found-footage films.

Instructor(s): Cinta Peleja     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 23164, MADD 18205

CMST 28360. Screendance: Movement and New Media. 100 Units.

This course will explore the evolving relationship between moving bodies and video technologies. From early filmmakers using dancers as test subjects, to movie musicals and contemporary dance for the camera festivals, mediatization of the body continues to challenge the ephemerality of live dance performance. This course focuses on the growing field of screendance, videodance, or dance-on-camera, working to define this hybrid genre and to understand the collaborative roles of choreographer, director, dancer, cameraman, and video editor. This course is both a practical and scholarly approach to the genre of screendance, each component essential to a full understanding and mastery of the other. Course work will be divided between the studio and the classroom. For the studio component, students will learn basic video editing and filming techniques. For the classroom component, students will be asked to watch screendance and read a cross-section of criticism. Assignments will be both technological and choreographic (making screendance) and scholarly (written reflections and a seminar paper).

Instructor(s): L. Leopold     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Attendance at first class is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 38360, MADD 23860, TAPS 28360

CMST 28500-28600-28700. History of International Cinema I-II-III.

This sequence is required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies. Taking these courses in sequence is strongly recommended but not required.

CMST 28805. Politics and Cinema under Authority. 100 Units.

Why do authoritarian regimes take interest in art and culture? How do citizens respond to these efforts? Between authoritarian propaganda and outright contestation of authoritarianism is a wide niche of art and media production that is just independent enough to capture the attention of the citizens and yet subtle enough to not alarm authoritarian rulers. This is relevant for film and television in particular, which cannot function under authoritarian regimes without official approval. In this course, we explore the compromises filmmakers make to continue their creative practice and the concessions state actors grant to accommodate artistic work using the 10-episode television series, Dekalog (1988), by the acclaimed Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. To answer our questions, we draw on literature and methodology from political science and film and media studies. We investigate what is to be gained by combining approaches from two disciplines that are rarely in conversation with each other.

Instructor(s): Maria Belodubrovskaya and Monika Nalepa     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Enrollment limit: 18
Equivalent Course(s): REES 38800, CDIN 28801, CDIN 38800, CMST 38800, PLSC 28805, PLSC 38801, REES 28800

CMST 28906. Contemporary Cinematic Special Effects. 100 Units.

The highest-grossing films of the twenty-first century are, without exception, showcases for special effects. How did special effects become so central to mass-audience movies? What are the consequences of this shift? In this course, we will track the historical and stylistic development of contemporary effects-driven filmmaking, bridging practitioner discourse by effects industry workers with the theories of cinema and media scholars. While our screenings will primarily comprise narrative feature films, we will also explore how special effects draw upon diverse media forms and practices, including experimental cinema, installation art, amusement parks, television advertising, and, above all, digital technologies. Screenings will include Hollywood blockbusters (e.g., The Matrix [1999]), "failed" blockbusters (e.g., Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within [2001]), and effects-driven films from other national/regional cinemas (e.g., The Mermaid [China, 2016]).

Instructor(s): Cooper Long     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 10906

CMST 28910. Planetary Media. 100 Units.

This course is about how planets are imagined through media as environmental and social systems, with a focus on exchanges between science fictional "world building" practices and scientific ways of knowing. We study the history of science fiction and science borrowing from one another to explain how Earth and other planets work, and how both fields have used media to depict planets. When science fiction creates imaginary worlds, are its tools similar or different to those used by exoplanet astronomers or Mars rover teams? How do these shared planetary imaginaries affect the public's understanding of the climate crisis? Examples will be drawn from both fiction and nonfiction, and both technical and aesthetic media, including climate models, video games, television, pulp magazines, and film. The course culminates with a creative, group planetary world building assignment.

Instructor(s): Katherine Buse     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 12980

CMST 28915. Short Form Digital Storytelling: Creating a Web Series. 100 Units.

This course examines the short form storytelling of the digital web series. Through lectures, viewings and discussions in weekly meetings students will determine what makes a strong web series and apply the findings to writing and polishing the pilot episode of their own web series. Students will write weekly 4-5 page assignments building toward the creation of a 5-6 episode series.

Instructor(s): P. Wimp     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Attendance at first class session is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 24910, TAPS 25910

CMST 28921. Introduction to 16mm Filmmaking. 100 Units.

The goal of this intensive laboratory course is to give its students a working knowledge of film production using the 16mm gauge. The course will emphasize how students can use 16mm technology towards successful cinematography and image design (for use in both analog and digital postproduction scenarios) and how to develop their ideas towards constructing meaning through moving pictures. Through a series of group exercises, students will put their hands on equipment and solve technical and aesthetic problems, learning to operate and care for the 16mm Bolex film camera; prime lenses; Sekonic light meter; Sachtler tripod; and Arri light kit and accessories. For a final project, students will plan and produce footage for an individual or small group short film. The first half the course will be highly structured, with demonstrations, in-class shoots, and lectures. As the semester continues, class time will open up to more of a workshop format to address the specific concerns and issues that arise in the production of the final projects. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies. Students will need written permission to enroll in the course. To bid for entry into the class, please email the instructor with your name, major and year -- and please list any other media production or photography experience.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Students will need written permission to enroll in the course. To bid for entry into the class, please email the instructor with your name, major and year -- and please list any other media production or photography experience. Enrollment priority will be given to graduate and undergraduate CMS students, beginning with seniors, then to DoVA graduates and undergraduates, then to students in other departments.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 38921, MADD 23808, ARTV 23808, ARTV 33808

CMST 28922. Intermediate 16mm Filmmaking. 100 Units.

This course will allow students to continue working on projects begun in the Intro to 16mm Production course (or developing a new small-scale project), in addition to developing skills with the following: sophisticated approaches to cinematography (comparative and reflective light metering, color negative exposure); varying workflows for post-production editing (analog and digital); and sound recording and design. Students will meet as a group for lectures, technical demonstrations and a shooting workshop. Course meeting time will also be set aside for individual conferences with the instructor to address project development and completion. Students should expect to budget between 120.00-500.00 for their filmstock and processing costs, depending on the project. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies. Permission from instructor is required for registration. Students will bid for entry to the class by emailing the instructor, listing their year, major and previous production experience. Priority will be given to students who have previously completed the Intro to 16mm course, followed by CMS and DOVA majors, from graduate students to first-years. Students whose bids are accepted will be registered officially by the instructor at the first class meeting.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Permission from instructor is required for registration. Students will bid for entry to the class by emailing the instructor, listing their year, major and previous production experience. Priority will be given to students who have previously completed the Intro to 16mm course, followed by CMS and DOVA majors, from graduate students to first-years. Students whose bids are accepted will be registered officially by the instructor at the first class meeting.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 28001, ARTV 38001, CMST 38922

CMST 28925. Expanded Cinema. 100 Units.

Though often overlooked, the act of projection is at the heart of cinema (the act or process of causing a picture to appear on a surface). This studio course focuses on the creation of moving image-based work, exploring how time and space are used as materials to create form and inspire content within the contemporary film genre known as expanded cinema. The technical, historical and political aspects of the projected image will be studied in order to re-think cinema as a group and investigate how the projected image can find meaning outside the black box of theaters or the white cube of galleries. Two personal experimental video projects will lead to a third final collective video installation that will use the environment within the vicinity of UChicago's campus to inspire the work while also become the location of the final outdoor projection event. Note(s): Students will need written permission to enroll in the course. To bid for entry into the class, please email the instructor with your name, major, year, and list any other media production experience. Enrollment priority will be given to graduate and undergraduate CMS students, beginning with seniors, then to students in other departments.

Instructor(s): Marco Ferrari     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 23861, CHST 28925, CMST 38925, ARTV 33861

CMST 28999. Intensive Track - Production Thesis Workshop. 100 Units.

This series of workshops-comprised of approximately 10 meetings-will provide support for students working on production theses across the entire academic year. It is taught by a production faculty member and supplemented by regular meetings with a designated preceptor. The workshops are intended to systematically guide students through the necessary steps in the realization of a film project from pre-production to production to post-production.

Instructor(s): Thomas Comerford     Terms Offered: Autumn. Enrollment takes place only in Autumn Quarter, but workshop is held throughout the academic year
Prerequisite(s): Approval to complete a Production Thesis Project.
Note(s): Course is only open to students completing a Production Thesis Project in their final year in the College. This course takes the place of CMST 23907 and CMST 23908, and counts towards major coursework requirements for Intensive Track majors. Two sections of this course will be taught - one focusing in film production and one focusing in new media. Please ensure you enroll in the appropriate section.

CMST 29000. Cinema and the Speculative Archive: Theory & Practice Seminar. 100 Units.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of work by experimental filmmakers that imaginatively engages with absences in the historical record, especially around the visual history of African Americans. How might scholarship adapt methodologies from these creative practices? How can scholarly methods, in turn, inform art making (as the formation of another kind of history)? Engaging theory and practice, this course investigates these questions through-and against-African American media history's precarious archival condition. Students interested in enrolling should contact Professor Field at anfield@uchicago.edu.

Instructor(s): Allyson Nadia Field & Christopher Harris     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 39000, RDIN 29000, RDIN 39000, CHST 29000, CMST 39000

CMST 29201. Advanced Seminar - Autumn. 100 Units.

The 'Advanced Seminar' functions as a capstone course for CMST majors. It will allow students the opportunity to explore in more depth key disciplinary and methodological questions related to the study of cinema and media. Particular topics will be determined by the individual faculty instructor, and will vary from the Autumn to Spring Quarters and from instructor to instructor.

Instructor(s): AE Stevenson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Only open to students in year 3 and year 4 majoring in CMST.

CMST 29202. Advanced Seminar - Spring. 100 Units.

The Advanced Seminar will be offered twice during each academic year - as CMST 29201 in Autumn and CMST 29202 in Spring. Students majoring in CMST are required to enroll in one section (preferably during Spring Quarter of Year 3) but are welcome to use the second as an elective for their major requirements if the subject-matter is of interest.

Instructor(s): Salomé Skvirsky     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Only open to students in year 3 and year 4 majoring in CMST.
Note(s): The Advanced Seminar will be offered twice during each academic year - as CMST 29201 in Autumn and CMST 29202 in Spring. Students majoring in CMST are required who wish to enroll in one section (preferably during Spring Quarter of Year 3) but are welcome to use the second as an elective for their major requirements if the subject-matter is of interest.

CMST 29700. Reading and Research, CMST. 100 Units.

This course is primarily intended for students who are majoring in Cinema and Media Studies and who can best meet program requirements by studying under a faculty member's individual supervision. The subject matter, course of study, and requirements must be arranged with the instructor prior to registration.

Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of faculty instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies required.
Note(s): Students must submit the College Reading and Research Form to register. This course may be counted toward distribution requirements for the major.

CMST 29900. Senior Thesis. 000 Units.

Students in the CMS Intensive Track - both Written and Production streams - must enroll in CMST 29900 during the quarter they intend to graduate. Students enroll in 29900 using the section number of their BA thesis adviser which can be obtained from the department staff in CMS or the student's College advisor. This course can not be counted toward requirements for the Intensive Track major.

Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor. Required of students in the Intensive Track majors in Cinema and Media Studies (Written Thesis and Production Thesis)