GRADUATE COURSES
(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise indicated)

PRODUCTION AND SCREENWRITING

210 Media Production
Graduate level instruction in film or video pre-production, production, and post-production, undertaken in conjunction with one of our existing core undergraduate courses: Film Technology (104), Video Technology (105), or Animation (107).

213 Autobiographical Screenwriting (Allison Anders)
Explores the creative process in autobiographical screenplay construction through writing exercises as well as film viewing. Seeks innovative means of character and story development including but not limited to internet personas and autobiographical tourism. (Offered concurrently with Film Studies 113AU.)

CRITICAL AND ANALYTICAL PRACTICES

220 Textual Analysis (required course)
Explores various models for the close analysis of film and media texts and the critical frameworks these models explicitly or implicitly employ.

222AA-ZZ Special Topics in Film Analysis
Close examination of an element of film style – such as, sound, color, or camera movement – and its impact on interpretation.

223 Black Film Criticism
Explores the social, cultural, aesthetic and economic contexts of black critical writing on film over the past century. Studies the black critique of racial representation in Hollywood and other cinemas, the black independent cinemas, and black spectatorship.

224 Genre Analysis
Genre criticism illuminates the artistic and popular appeal of film, and explores the relation of aesthetics to ideology. This course analyzes genre criticism through the lens of genre theory, reexamining conventional approaches to the nature and history of formulaic films.

225 Film and Media Authorship
Examines theories of authorship in film and television, and how these ideas are redefined and questioned in a poststructuralist and postmodernist paradigm as well as with the evolution of interactive technologies.

226 National Cinemas
Close analysis of the leading concepts behind theories of nation, nationalism, and national cinema within a specific cultural context and how these concepts are redefined within a post-colonial and post-national context. Offered concurrently with Film Studies 187AA-ZZ.

HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

230 The Philosophy of History (required course) (Charles Wolfe)
Studies works and concepts in philosophy of history that have informed the researching and writing of film and media history. Will also consider the ways in which film and media texts have extended debates about and concepts of historiographic practice.

231 Media Historiographies (required course)
Comparative analysis of various historical accounts of cinema, television and digital media that have shaped the field of film and media studies. Emphasis on issues and debates that have dominated efforts to write rigorous, methodologically explicit histories of different media.

232AA-ZZ Special Topics in Film and Media History
Close examination of a topic in film and/or media history.

233 Histories of Film Style
Examines different explanatory models for patterns of historical continuity, influence, and change in film style. Also includes comparative study of influential models for the history of style in other art forms, such as painting, photography, architecture, music, and literature.

234 History, Memory and Media
Explores how visual and acoustic media have influenced the writing of public histories and the formation of collective memories, and the possibilities and limitations of representing historical events in both fiction and nonfiction audio-visual forms.

235 (Auto)biographical Documentary (Janet Walker)
Studies modes of documentary filmmaking in the context of literary and cinematic self-representation including the relationships among personal and collective history and identity construction.

236 Historicizing New Media:From Plato’s Cave & the Kinetograph to Wireless Communication
Looks at issues of media production and consumption along an historical continuum including changing patterns of media literacy, types of apparatuses, ideologies, ethics, and aesthetics.

THEORY

240 Film Theory (required course)
Examines the history and rhetoric of thinking about the ontology, epistemology, ideology, and aesthetics of film.

241 Television and New Media Theory (required course)
Explores important theoretical writings concerning electronic and digital media. Course readings will define the unique properties of these mediums, consider their ontological status, and discuss how they differ from one another and other cultural forms.

242AA-ZZ Special Topics in Film and Media Theory
Close examination of a topic in film and/or media theory.

243AA-ZZ Special Topics in Critical Thinkers
Explores in depth the work of one particular thinker relevant to the field of media and cultural studies, for example, Freud, Barthes, Benjamin and others.

244 The Rhetoric of Film Theories (Edward Branigan)
Examines the forms of language and conventions of reasoning that sustain major film theories.

245 Narrative Theory and Memory
Theories of narrative and their relationship to the human mind, traumatic experience, and the evocation of emotion.

246 Television Theory (Lisa Parks)
Examines important theoretical works in Television Studies. Considers television in relation to theories of mass culture, and explores how television mediates the public and private spheres, participates in the formation of national cultures, and addresses citizens/consumers/viewers.

247 Feminism and Media Theory
An intellectual history of feminist film and television theory from the 1970s to the present. Course readings are discussed in relation to gender representations in various screenings. Areas covered include psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, queer theory, and cultural studies.

248 Digital Media Theory and Practices
Studies the emerging theoretical paradigms and creative practices of new media technologies including the Internet, computer games, CD-ROM, DVD, and wireless communication devices. Also examines how technologies mediate, perpetuate, and challenge social, cultural, political, and economic institutions and humanistic values.

249 Postcolonial Media Theory (Bhaskar Sarkar)
Studies colonial ideologies and representations, and postcolonial challenges and negotiations, with emphasis on concepts such as imperialism, Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Third Cinema, hybridity, voice and identity. Interrogates the institutions, frameworks and processes involved in the production of knowledge.

CULTURAL STUDIES

250 Cultural Theory (required course) (Greg Siegel)
Explores key ideas, issues, and developments in cultural studies and critical theory through close readings of primary texts. Possible approaches include the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, Freudianism/Lacanianism, semiotics/structuralism, and postmodernism/post-structuralism.

251 Theory and Practice of Popular Culture (Constance Penley)
Surveys contemporary approaches to the study of popular culture. Readings include theorists who have critically engaged the Frankfurt School, who have written before and beyond the Birmingham School, or who have taken a comparative international perspective. May be offered concurrently with Film Studies 190PC.

252AA-ZZ Special Topics in Cultural Studies
Close examination of a topic in cultural studies.

253 Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies
Even though Freud was an early modern theorist of popular culture and everyday life, the emergent field of cultural studies has paid little attention to the insights of psychoanalysis. What could cultural studies learn from psychoanalysis and vice versa?

254 The Inhuman and Posthuman in Digital Culture
Examines the rhetorics and aesthetics of digital media technologies, especially as they construct new epistemologies and ontologies of representing/mediating the human condition, paying particular attention to claims that new digital technologies have transformed the liberal Enlightenment subject into the posthuman.

255 Gaming Culture (Anna Everett)
The computer games industry rivals film and television for audience discretionary income. This course focuses on computer game theories, genres, aesthetics, industrial histories and practices, and representational discourses.

256 Latin American Popular Culture and Media (Cristina Venegas)
Explores Latin American cultural studies in relation to production of specific Latin American and Latino/a media within a transnational context. Incorporates various media products, including telenovelas, U.S. Spanish language television, popular and art films, popular music, web art, and websites.

GLOBALIZATION AND MEDIA

260 Film and Ethnography
Brings the techniques of film analysis to bear on the films, videos, and writings of leading visual anthropologists, such as Tim Asch, Jean Rouch, Jorge Preloran, and Dennis O’Rourke.

262AA-ZZ Special Topics in Film and/or Media Globalization
Close examination of a topic in the globalization of film and/or media.

263 Cultural Translation
Defines and examines the problematic of "translation" as the circulation of cultural texts beyond borders and boundaries (temporal, linguistic, institutional, communal, national, regional, and disciplinary).

264 Media Geographies (Peter Bloom)
Examines connections between shifting definitions of time/space and media technologies such as television, satellites, and computers. Draws from anthropology, geography, art history, and global studies to explore media technology’s impact upon the formation of world systems and knowledge structures.

265 Race and Gender in Cyberculture
Interrogates theories and representations of disembodiment in cyberculture. Especially interested in utopic and dystopic visions of gender-bending and colorblindness via the consensual hallucination of cyberspace. Does becoming posthuman mean that we have also become post-racist and post-sexist?

266 Political Economy of Global Media
Examines media institutions and networks of exchange, focusing on their transformation, shifting power relations, and emerging geopolitical imaginations.

267 Media Regulation and Policy
Explores institutions and practices related to governmental regulation of media and addresses historical shifts in American policymaking.  Topics include intellectual property, first amendment and censorship issues, media ownership, new technologies, global trade and convergence.

268 Paradigms of Globalization
Examines various theories of globalization: underdevelopment, world system, postcolonialism, cultural imperialism, etc. and interrogates how our daily lives are mediated by transnational flows of capital, information, technology, people, image, and cultural practices beyond national confines.

SPECIAL GRADUATE COURSES AND OPPORTUNITIES

295I Media Internship
An opportunity for training, career sampling, and contacts in the media industry.

501 Teaching Assistant Practicum
Designed to accommodate graduate students who serve as teaching assistants. Includes analyses of texts and materials, discussion section teaching techniques, formulation of topics and questions for papers and examinations, and grading papers and examinations under instructor supervision. (May be repeated for credit.)

594 Special Topics
A seminar on research subjects of current interest.

595 Group Studies
Provides guidance, training, a forum, and a common center for various research endeavors.

596AA-ZZ Directed Reading and Research (1-6 units)
Individual tutorial.

597 MA Oral Preparation

599 Dissertation Preparation
Only for the research and writing of dissertation. Instructor should be chair of the student's doctoral committee.