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During the first year of study, students will take Theories of National Cinema (0.5) in the fall term and Research Methods in Film Studies (0.5) and Film Theories, Criticisms and Histories (0.5) in the winter term. These three courses make up 1.5 of your course requirements.
Theories of National Cinema will provide students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema. Informed by theories of nation and globalization developed by Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, David Harvey, Roland Robertson and Fatimah Tobing Rony, the course begins by troubling notions of nation as an organic, homogeneous, unitary entity before shifting into a study of ideology and cinematic representations of nation, distribution and the political economies that facilitate the production of national cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various imperial, colonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes a national cinema. Research Methods in Film Studies (0.5) will introduce students to a variety of historical and contemporary approaches critical to doing advanced research in Film Studies. Film Theories, Criticisms and Histories introduces a number of key concepts and cultural theories in order to foster a variety of critical perspectives.Students in the MA program must complete the equivalent of three full courses, normally taking the required Theories of National Cinema and one course elective in the Fall term. In the Winter term of their first year students would normally take Research Methods in Film Studies and Film Theories, Criticisms and Histories. In the Fall term of year two, students would normally take two elective half courses and in the Winter term of this year they would complete their thesis (80-100 pages in length). The thesis must be completed in various stages. Early in March first-year M.A.students orally present their “work in progress” toward the thesis at a meeting of the Graduate Faculty. By mid-March first-year M.A. students in consultation with an advisor, will have proposed and submitted a thesis proposal (5 pages + Bibliography) to the Graduate Committee. At that stage the Graduate Committee provides comments and makes suggestions, and, if the proposal is approved, formally appoints a supervisor.
Over the first summer, students are expected to continue researching and writing and attend the mandatory Summer Research Colloquium.
Students will submit a draft of the first chapter (20-25 pages) to their thesis supervisor by September 1st of their second year. After reading the chapter, the thesis supervisor must make a written report on the student’s progress to the Graduate Chair. It is the joint responsibility of the individual students and supervisors to arrange mutually satisfactory deadlines for the submission of the remaining portions of the thesis. Thesis supervisors generally provide students with written assessments of the material submitted. A second reader from inside the department may read all of the drafts as they are submitted, or s/he, in consultation with the supervisor and student may opt to read only one chapter before the thesis goes to defense in order to prove that it is ready. When the thesis is completed it is examined by program examiners and one university examiner from outside the student’s graduate program, following the regulations of the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.
Students must maintain a B average in course work to proceed to the thesis.
Intellectual Development and Educational Experience
A) Being Made Aware of Expectations/Availability of Information
There are a number of features of our proposed M.A. which are specifically designed to help chart the student’s progress through the program. All incoming students are sent a copy of the Rules and Regulations when they are first accepted into the program.
At that time (usually early in March), students are also informed about the total amount of their financial support (i.e. the amount of the Special University Scholarship and any tuition fee waivers or reductions as well as the likely nature of their teaching assistantship or research assignment). Over the course of the summer, before entering the program, students are given a specific teaching assistantship assignment, sent a course syllabus and asked to contact the individual faculty member responsible for teaching the course. Contract letters outlining the specific duties of teaching assistants are signed by the Department Chair and student late in August.
At the beginning of September, several orientation meetings are held. The first is organized by the Graduate Chair and introduces all incoming MA candidates to faculty members and to continuing graduate students in the program. A representative of UWO’s Society of Graduate Students normally attends this meeting to review the organizations and resources available to all graduate students on campus, and to answer questions from incoming students.
There is also an orientation meeting for new Teaching Assistants. At this meeting the Graduate Chair explains the unionized contract and outlines general expectations and procedures for evaluation and appeal. Students are also given more specific advice relating to the particular course assignments. New TAs are encouraged to attend a one-day workshop sponsored by the Graduate Teaching Union (PSAC) and the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.
B) Professional Development
Eventually, a maximum of 8 MA students will be offered TA positions to support the first-year undergraduate course Film Studies 1020E—An Introduction to Film Studies. The coordinator of Film Studies 1020E will work with the Graduate Coordinator to design and run a seminar on teaching skills for Film Studies. Other TAships will be available on other 2100-level courses, on an as-needed basis.
Plans are in place for a Professional Development Workshop that would tutor MA candidates on applying for a Ph D, and non-academic options for their degree.
Students will also have the opportunity to attend the Visual Culture Research Group which Film Studies introduced in 2006-07 with the cooperation of other units on campus. Second-year students will have the opportunity to present work from their research projects at this forum.
Course Work
Non-Course MilestonesThesis
Students must a write research thesis (80-100 pages in length) which must be approved by their examining committee and accepted by the U.W.O. School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. The thesis is completed in various stages.
Residency Requirements:
There is no residency requirement at Western. However, the degree will normally take two calendar years or 6 terms to complete and funding will be in place for six terms.
Part time studies
The program will not be offered on a part-time basis.
Students must complete 3.0 graduate-level course credits within the M.A. in Film Studies program.
These include:
•Film 9373 – Theories of National Cinema (weight 0.5)
•Film 9200 – Film Theories, Criticisms and Histories (weight 0.5)
•Film 9100 – Research Methods in Film Studies (weight 0.5)
•1.5 course credit electives
With the permission of the Graduate Committee, it may be possible to substitute a directed reading course for one of the four electives. This is dependent on Faculty workload and availability.
Total Graduate Courses Listed and Level
Besides the required Theories of National Cinema, Film Theories, Criticisms and Histories and Research Methods in Film Studies, one additional half year course is offered as an elective in the Fall term of the first year. Two more half-year electives are offered in the Fall term of the second year.
The availability of courses means that all M.A. students can complete all of their course requirements within two regular academic years in the fall and winter terms.
Film Studies graduate courses will be presented as a combination of lecture and seminars. Students will be required to conduct seminars on readings of visual materials selected by the professor, and sometimes supplemented by their own chosen texts. Assessment will be based on oral participation, marking of short written assignments, and marking of a longer term paper (generally about 20 pages).
Required courses
Film 9373 Theories of National Cinema (0.5)
Provides students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema. Informed by theories of nation and globalization developed by such figures as Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, David Harvey, Andrew Higson, Roland Robertson and Fatimah Tobing Rony, the course begins by troubling notions of nation as an organic, homogeneous, unitary entity before shifting into a study of ideology and cinematic representations of nation, distribution and the political economies that structure the production of national cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various imperial, colonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes a national cinema.
Type of Course: required course
Prerequisites: none
Film 9200 Film Theories, Criticisms, and Histories (0.5)
Moving chronologically from the early twentieth century to the present, this course will examine key approaches to the study of film. The course will concentrate on classical and contemporary film theories and criticisms, then explore the development of film historical and interdisciplinary scholarship in film studies today.
Type of course: required course
Prerequisite: none
Film 9100 Research Methods in Film Studies (0.5)
This course will highlight some of the major research methods in film studies. Students will develop a necessary range of skills for conducting advanced research in film studies. Course material will be shaped in part by student research interests, with the goal of developing a thesis topic.
Type of course: required course
Prerequisite: Film Theories, Criticisms, Histories
Elective Courses
The following courses have been taught as electives in the programme so far:
Blaxploitation (0.5)
In the history of black cinema, seldom has a body of filmmaking been as controversial and as rife with contradiction as the so-called blaxploitation films of the early 1970s. Although the short-lived era remains tainted in the eyes of many due to valid charges of opportunism and exploitation, the cultural significance of blaxploitation cinema cannot be overestimated given its influence on both hip-hop culture and contemporary filmmaking (from Tarantino to John Singleton to the Hughes Brothers). The primary goal of this course will be to unpack the culturally loaded term "blaxploitation" in terms of its relationship to economics, social politics, art, music, stardom, genre, and identity.
While the core of the course will focus on key films such as Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Shaft, Coffy, Superfly, and Black Caesar, the "contexts" surrounding (and informing) these films will be given equal critical attention. We will, for example, read key texts from the Black Power era and look at the rise and fall of the Black Panther party in order to examine the complex intersection of black nationalism and black popular culture during this period. We will also tend to blaxploitation’s folkloric and generic precursors, its fraught cultural reception, and the cinematic alternatives (and homages) that it inspires. Other key topics will include: visibility and stereotype, feminism and the black action heroine, the politics of style, screening urban space, blaxploitation in a global context, and the cultural memory of the Black Power era.
Type of course: elective
Prerequisite: none
Brecht in World Cinema (0.5)
This course investigates the historical and theoretical links between the Marxist aesthetics of playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), the development of “political modernism” as a once influential paradigm in Film Studies and different modes of radical filmmaking in World cinema. In this course, we will study key writings by Brecht on theater and the cinema (“epic” theater, the “v”-effect, realism/formalism, etc.) in the context of 1920s and 1930s Marxist debates on the “revolutionary” potential of film and “new” media (Benjamin, Lukacs, Bloch, Eisenstein) and trace Brecht’s involvement in and influence on the cinema in his own era. At the same time, we will look at the manifold usages non-Western, feminist and left-wing European filmmakers made of Brecht’s aesthetic strategies during the worldwide social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s in their attempts to politicize film form and spectatorship and develop popular modes of film practice that challenge both the historical avant-gardes and commercial cinema. Finally, we will critically analyze the rise and shortcomings of theoretical “Brechtianism” in Film Studies (as an eclectic amalgam of Althusser’s theories of ideology, Lacan’s re-reading of psychoanalysis, and Barthes’ semiotics) and explore alternatives to theorize the political potential of the moving image after the “end” of cinema. This course is not for the faint-hearted: some of the films screened in this class can be quite challenging.
Type of course: elective
Prerequisite: none
Magic Lantern (0.5)
In this course we will use magic lantern culture to theorize an alternate history of moving picture “screen practice.” We will study the history of magic lantern projection within the larger context of philosophical toys and optical attractions of the nineteenth-century, such as the Phenakistiscope, the Zoetrope, and Thaumatrope and scrutinize the impact the magic lantern as mass medium had on international early cinema. We will examine the contested role magic lantern practice and exhibition played in shaping “national” attractions and the screen practice of German, British, French, Swedish and Japanese film pioneers, auteurs, educators, and scientists. From the perspective of comparative media history, we will also consider how the magic lantern can be used to challenge the pro-Western bias and technological determinism of media history. Further topics include the phantasmagoria in France in the 18th century, the role of the lecturer and the monstrateur in international early cinema and Japanese mobile rear-projection lantern culture or Utushi-e, the “world theater” of magic lantern projection in Germany, magic lantern narration and the nation, alternating apparatuses and dissolving views, the magic lantern as edutainment, and the relationship between magic lantern showmanship and the nascent cinema of attractions. We will also investigate how the magic lantern was used an auxiliary or supplementary tool for translating intertitles during the silent period. Theoretical texts on screen practice, media history, visual perception, attraction vs. narration, magic lantern showmanship and the challenge that the magic lantern poses to a teleological “grand narrative” of film history by Anne Friedberg, Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, Deac Rossel, Erkki Huhtamo, and others will also be supplemented by a wide range of optical manuals, catalogues, memoirs and treatises on projection by scientists and opticians Terade Torahiko, Wilhelm Pfeffer, L.J. Marcy, T.C. Hepworth, Edward Wilson, and William K. and Antonia Dickson (Edison engineers). Case studies include filmmakers G.W. Smith, M. Skladanowsky, S.C. Curtis, Cecil Hepworth, Georges Méliès and E.S. Porter. In a final unit we will also heed the magic lantern’s “warning” signals in German silent and sound cinema (of the 1920s and 30s) and consider the haunted return of magic lantern “screen memories” in Bill Douglas’ epic Comrade, the art cinema of Ingmar Bergman, and American avant-garde cinema.
Type of Course: elective
Prequisite: none
Migratory Experiences and Diasporic Identities in European Cinema (0.5)
Movement and constant changes of place of residence have become a modus operandi or a style of life for many Europeans. These spatial transitions result from important social and political changes in Europe in the past twenty years. The events principally referred to as causes of new migration are The Fall of the Communism, the impact of glasnost in the Eastern bloc, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern European Bloc, the unification of Germany and the formal creation of the European Union. All these phenomena have led to a shift in ideologies, they destabilized obvious divisions into the East and the West, the South and the North and allowed for the porosity of geographical borders and for the formation of new hybridized national and ideological identities. Other parallel and contributory factors which have been widely identified are the advent of post-Fordism, with the decline of the manufacturing industry, the shift to a service economy, the growth of neo-liberal economy, and of globalization. The creation of the European Union has led to the disappearance of some customs and borders, the diffusion of a common currency and the formation of a single market. Among many social outcomes resulting from these changes are legal and illegal immigration, trans culturalism and hybridization of identities and cultures. The most interesting moment in these processes is the very instant of transition from the old phenomenon/entity/identity to the new one. A migrant is someone who usually partially or completely sheds his old identity and slowly absorbs new cultures and habits. Many films have been produced in Europe which illustrate these political and social phenomena.
Type of course: elective
Prerequisite: none
New Hollywood Cinema (0.5)
This course will explore key transformations in American cinema of the 1960s and 1970s following the perceived “collapse” of the classical Hollywood studio system. We will situate New Hollywood cinema in relation to the radical political and social upheavals of the era and examine the many aesthetic, narrative, and technological innovations of the films typically associated with this movement. In addition, close attention to key industrial changes and the emergence of blockbuster cinema will help enhance (and complicate) our conceptualization of postclassical American cinema. While emphasizing cultural studies and economic/industry-based analysis, the course will also attend to key theoretical trends in film studies (feminist film theory, spectatorship theory, etc.) from the period.
Type of course: elective
Prerequisite: none
Pregnance Film (0.5)
This course investigates representations of pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth in film. We wil take an interdisciplinary approach to the controversial issues of reproductive rights and visual representation, drawing on anthropological and historical study of women's health and the politics of the body as well as feminist film criticism. Topics we will discuss include: birth control, abortion, and eugenics in film before WWII; pregnancy as a perspective on seduction narratives and melodramas; the impacts of imaging technologies like ultrasound onthe politics of abortion; the art and politics of pregnancy horrors or science fictions; recent pregnancy-themed fiction films (Juno, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, and more). While we will take a variety of cinematic traditions - such as France, Hong Kong, and Romania -- into consideration, three weeks will be spent on Japanese film and culture so that we can develop a comparative perspective on the North American contexts.
Type of course: elective
Prerequisite: none
Silent Cinema (0.5)
This course explores the history, aesthetics and social significance of silent cinema as mass entertainment, art, and transnational business, covering the period from the emergence of cinema in the context of 19th century modernity to the transition to synchronized sound in the late 1920s. Course screenings include early shorts from the Edison laboratory and the Lumière brothers, some of the first features that emerged in the 1910s, as well as the work of directors such as D.W. Griffith, Georges Méliès, Oscar Micheaux, and Buster Keaton. Taking our clues from new historical approaches that emerged in film studies in the past three decades, we will discuss topics such as the “cinema of attractions“ and narrative, stardom and its relationship to gender and sexuality, moral reform movements and the sociology of early cinema, the serial, women and African American film pioneers, urban perception and modernity.
Type of course: elective
Prerequisite: none
The Face, the mask and the Thing (0.5)
This course will examine the continuum between one element of film-texts recognised as key to them and reasonably widely-discussed, the face, and two others that are less frequently-discussed: the mask and what Slavoj Žižek terms ‘the Thing’. It will pay particular attention to the points of interference, ambiguity and ambivalence between these categories, and to the deepening indeterminacy evident as one moves from the face to ‘the Thing’. The primary aim will be to examine relations between the viewer and the seen within the unsettled and often ‘dehumanized’ environments often deemed characteristic of modernity, the nature of whose positive and negative forms of transcendence and preoccupation with a ‘beyond’ (including that of stardom) it will also consider. It will deploy relevant theories, including those of – to restrict oneself to the first three letters of the alphabet – Agamben (Remnants of Auschwitz), Balázs (‘The Close-up’ and ‘The Face of Man’ from Theory of Film) and Canetti (Crowds and Power), attempting to account for the varieties of mechanisms of projection, splitting, disavowal, doubling, fetishism and adoration at work in a selection of relevant films.
Type of course: elective
Prerequisite: none