Previous Courses Offered & Course Outlines

2023 Spring/Summer

Intersession (May 15-June 23)

2159A - Disney
This course offers students a survey of Disney's animated features, non-theatrical films and propaganda film shorts. Students will study Disney film's relationship to art, society and politics and examine constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Disney's filmmaking. 0.5 course

Spring/Summer 2159A / 001
In-Person C. Ylagan Syllabus 

2022-23 FALL/WINTER

1000 Level Courses

1022 - Introduction to Film Studies POPULAR!
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter 1022 / 001 J. Wlodarz Syllabus 
Fall/Winter 1022 / 002 M. Raine Syllabus 

2000 Level Courses

2159B - Disney (Disney Dream Factory) POPULAR! Second section added
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20th and 21st century. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Tron, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, Steamboat Willy, Fantasia, The Lion King and Frozen. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 2159B / 001 J. Swim Syllabus 
Winter 2023 2159B / 002 C. Ylagan Syllabus 

2164A - Animation/Anime
This course explores the power of animation in film, with a particular emphasis on Japan. Students will study Japanese anime franchises as artistic expressions, as industrial products with relations to other cultural forms, and as objects through which consumers construct their social lives. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 2164A / 001 M. Raine Syllabus 

2197B - Special Topics in Film Studies: Spaghetti Westerns: Origins and Legacy from the Samurai Film to Sergio Leone, Bollywood, and Quentin Tarantino (cross-listed with Italian 2281B and Complit 2294G) - CANCELLED
Why was the Italian take on the genre so at odds with earlier Westerns? This course considers the departure from the conventions, visual style, and myths of the "classic" Western; origins of the Italian Western in the European Western; the influence of Kurosawa's Samurai pictures; the legacy of the genre on global cinema and pop culture (Peckinpah, Bollywood, pop music, Tarantino, Netflix). 0.5 course

Winter 2023 2197B / 001 Y. Sangalli Syllabus

2198A - Special Topics in Film Studies: Cinemas of Dystopia
Dystopia is, according to the OED, “[A]n imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible.” It is the opposite of Utopia. Dystopian literature and cinema take contemporary social and political concerns and displace them to fictional universes, sometimes imagined futures, to better illuminate and interrogate real-world perils facing viewers in their present. Beginning with Thomas More, this course will consider the concept of dystopia in select cinema and television through the vectors of philosophy, history, aesthetics, genre studies, and ideology, and with reference to nation, race, class, gender and sexuality. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 2198A / 001 C. Gittings Syllabus 

2212F - Adapting across Page, Stage, and Screen NEW! (cross-listed with English 2112F and Theatre Studies 2212F)
How does the shape an artwork takes contribute to its aesthetic and political power? When artworks flex across form and media how do their messages change? What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said “the medium is the message”? How do genre and form shape social and political discourse? In this course, students explore these questions and more as they investigate texts that assume multiple cultural forms and represent a diversity of perspectives. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 2212F / 001 A. Pero Syllabus 

2230F - Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 2230F / 001 T. Nagl Syllabus

2252G - World Cinema
A survey of the history of world cinema, with a focus on postwar film cultures in areas such as Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Students will study films as expressive audiovisual texts and examine larger social, economic, and cultural patterns of influence in the global cultural economy. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 2252G / 001 C. Burnetts Syllabus 

2254F - Classical Hollywood Cinema
This course traces a history of American film from the silent period to the end of the studio era. Topics include the establishment of the Hollywood style, major directors/genres, as well as key industrial, technological, and cultural factors in the development of Hollywood cinema. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 2254F / 001 J. Wlodarz Syllabus 

2258G - Canadian National Cinema
This course looks at Canadian cinema in relation to the category label, national cinema. What is the value of a national cinema? What is the popular imagination? How do the films speak to us about Canada, its history, its people and its politics? 0.5 course

Winter 2023 2258G / 001 K. Younes Syllabus 

3000 Level Courses

3309G - Film and Popular Culture
In this course students are encouraged to develop a critical understanding of the role film plays in shaping popular culture. Topics may include: children's film, dystopian film, and fantasy film. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 3309G / 001 A. Mioc Syllabus 

3311G - Special Topics in Film Studies: Hispanic Culture on Film (cross-listed with Spanish 3511G)
Description TBA. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 3311G / 001 C. Burucua Syllabus 

3335F - Contemporary German Cinema
This course introduces students to Contemporary German Cinema after unification. Topics include the "Berlin School" and transnational film production, Ostalgie, European identity, migration, and historical memory. The relationship to the auteurism of post-war New German Cinema will also be examined. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 3335F / 001 A. Mioc Syllabus 

3357G - Science Fiction Cinema
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 3357G / 001 Instructor: tba Syllabus

3361F - Stardom
This course examines stardom in its cultural, historical, industrial, and national contexts. The course may examine the development of the star system in a specific national context, focus on a particular star or stars, a historical period or movement, or a specific theoretical aspect of the star phenomenon. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 3361F / 001 C. Ylagan Syllabus

3362F - The Musical
Musical films are one of the most enduring forms of cinema, in Hollywood and around the world. This course explores the range of musical films, from all-singing, all-dancing extravaganzas to the eruption of "musical moments" in popular films, art cinema, and the avant-garde. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 3362F / 001 J. Faflak Syllabus

3363G - Screening Race
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. An outgrowth of the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, the civil rights and Black Power movements, the counterculture, feminism, and gay liberation, the blaxploitation films embody the cultural crises of ‘70s America. 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. The primary goal of this course will be to unpack the culturally loaded term “blaxploitation” in terms of its relationship to economics, audience, identity politics, art, music, stardom, and genre.

While the core of the course will focus on key films such as Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Shaft, Coffy, Superfly, Cleopatra Jones, and Black Caesar, the contexts surrounding (and informing) these films will be given equal critical attention. For example, we will examine key texts from the Black Power period and look at the rise and fall of the Black Panther party in relation to the films discussed. We will also explore the complex reception of blaxploitation cinema, the pimp figure in the genre, the relationship of feminism to the blaxploitation heroine, counter-blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s, and the genre’s representation of urban space. Throughout we will be concerned with analyzing the complicated intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they play out both on screen and in the culture of the era. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 3363G / 001 J. Wlodarz Syllabus 

3368F - Film Production
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through the analysis and production of films. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 3368F / 001 G. De Souza Syllabus 

3371F - Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed. 0.5 course

Fall 2022 3371F / 001 T. Nagl Syllabus

3373G - Reframing National Cinemas
This course will introduce students to theories of nationalism and national identity, to determine how they influence our understanding of national cinemas. Issues such as colonialism, postcolonialism, imperialism, multiculturalism, regionalism, and globalization will be explored through reading political and cultural essays. The course will examine one or two national cinemas. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 3373G / 001 V. Jara Syllabus 

3374F - Documentary Film
Historically, the dominant perception of documentary or non-fiction cinemas is that they teach us about the ‘real’ world by documenting truth transparently. However, this course will consider documentary as a form of representation and, as such, trouble its relationship to the ‘objective reality’ it seeks to represent. What is at stake in representing the ‘historical real’? What issues of selection and mediation intrude between the reality unfolding in front of the lens and the projection of that reality onto a screen? As theorists such as Michael Renov and Bill Nichols argue, although a documentary film references the historical world and actual people, it also constructs an audience’s understanding of this world and its inhabitants through point of view and the post-production process.

Early practitioners and theorists of documentary were well aware of this contradiction; John Grierson, the so-called ‘father’ of documentary film and one of its first theorists describes documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality,” but audiences were frequently unaware of this creative element, often reading documentary film as ‘true’. To begin to answer the questions posed below, the course will examine the theoretical and historical development of non-fiction filmmaking from the work of early pioneers like the Lumières in late nineteenth-century France and John Grierson in early twentieth-century United Kingdom and Canada to more contemporary and innovative filmmakers who complicate and innovate documentary’s basic conventions by questioning notions of objectivity, reality and verisimilitude. Collectively, we will pose the following questions:

  • What is documentary?
  • How did documentary filmmaking get started?
  • Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?
  • What makes documentaries engaging and persuasive?
  • How have documentaries addressed political and social issues?
  • What roles have documentaries played in colonization/decolonization?
  • How can we differentiate between documentary modes and models? 

0.5 course

Fall 2022 3374F / 001 C. Gittings Syllabus 

3375G - Japanese New Wave
This course focuses on Japanese cinema as part of a global `new wave' of films in the 1960s that scandalized audiences with unsettling representations of sex, violence, and politics. Students will debate the ethics and aesthetics of new wave films, and discover the role of the films in creating film studies. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 3375G / 001 M. Raine Syllabus 

3397G - Berlin to Hollywod:  German Exile Cinema - CANCELLED
This course focuses on German directors and actors who emigrated to the U.S. before and after the Nazi seizure of power, including Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich and Ernst Lubitsch. Topics include: expressionism, film noir, diaspora/exile, historical trauma, the anti-Nazi film/anti-fascist aesthetics, the Hollywood studio system, importing/exporting entertainment. 0.5 course

Winter 2023 3397G / 001 T. Nagl Syllabus 

4000 Level Courses

4409E - Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter 4409E / 001 Various Consent Form / Evaluation Form 

4495FG - Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper. 0.5 course

Fall/Winter 4495FG / 001 Various Internship Guidelines 

2022 Spring/Summer

Intersession (May 16-June 24)

2159A - Disney
This course offers students a survey of Disney's animated features, non-theatrical films and propaganda film shorts. Students will study Disney film's relationship to art, society and politics and examine constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Disney's filmmaking. 0.5 course

Spring/Summer 2159A / 001 In-Person Z. Maric Syllabus

2021-22 FALL/WINTER COURSES

1000 Level Courses

1022 - Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.

Fall/Winter 1022 / 001 (Evening) J. Wlodarz Syllabus 
Fall/Winter 1022 / 002 (Evening) M. Raine Syllabus 

2000 Level Courses

2159B - Disney (Disney Dream Factory)
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20th and 21st century. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Tron, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, Steamboat Willy, Fantasia, The Lion King and Frozen.

Winter 2022 2159B / 001 J. Blankenship Syllabus 

2164A - Animation/Anime
This course explores the power of animation in film, with a particular emphasis on Japan. Students will study Japanese anime franchises as artistic expressions, as industrial products with relations to other cultural forms, and as objects through which consumers construct their social lives.

Fall 2021 2164A / 001 M. Raine Syllabus 

2191G - Special Topics in Film Studies: World Cultures, Global Screens (cross-listed with Spanish 2700G and CLC 2700G)
America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, this course aims to expose students to a wide range of questions and debates around culture and identity, while also relating these matters to circulating discourses about the Global. Depending on each case study, the consecutive units will focus on different critical approaches, alternatively addressing questions concerning the representation of racial, ethnic and cultural identities, matters of gender and female authorship, and issues of genre and stardom.

Winter 2022  2191G / 001 C. Burucua Syllabus 

2194B - Special Topics in Film Studies | World Literature and Film: Women and the Environment (cross-listed with CLC 2108B and GSWS 2246B)

Winter 2022  2194B / 001 V. Jara Syllabus

2195B - Special Topics in Film Studies: The Horror Film
Although marked by a consistently disreputable status, horror has long been one of the most popular and enduring global genres in the history of film. With deep roots in mythology, fairy tales, Gothic literature, and Freudian psychoanalysis, horror cinema continues to shock and delight audiences through tales of vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, serial killers, and other monstrous icons. And yet the basic function of the horror film—to elicit unsettling emotions of fear, shock, anxiety, and disgust—has also made the genre a frequent target of censorship and a convenient scapegoat for broader social crises and moral panics. Such controversies also speak to the crucial ways that horror cinema both explores and negotiates cultural tensions and anxieties about identity, technology, religion, difference/Otherness, and the environment. Providing an introduction to the history of horror cinema, this team-taught course will explore the key forms, styles, and thematic elements of both classic and contemporary horror films from around the world. It will also frame the analysis of major films such as Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1957), Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), and The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) in relation to their specific industrial and cultural contexts, paying close attention to both the perception and reception of horror audiences as well as the genre’s allegorical potential.

Key topics to be discussed include: fears and anxieties addressed by horror cinema; cultural traditions of horror; horror and repression/the unconscious; bodily horrors; supernatural vs. psychological horror; normality and monstrosity; gender and sexuality in horror cinema; horror and technology; fandom and the pleasures of horror.

Winter 2022 2195B / 001 Z. Bronson Syllabus

2230F - Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema.

Fall 2021 2230F / 001 T. Nagl Syllabus

2254F - Classical Hollywood Cinema
This course surveys the central industrial, technological, aesthetic, and ideological developments in the history of classical Hollywood cinema. Given the global prominence and influence of Hollywood cinema, much of the course will be focused on the establishment of the Hollywood studio system and its many transformations over the course of the 20th century. We will begin with an analysis of the origins of the medium and its place in American culture at the turn-of-the-century. We will then examine the development of narrative cinematic standards and the rise and consolidation of the Hollywood studio system, paying close attention to genre, stardom, marketing, and popular reception from the 1920s to the 1960s. In addition to key technological developments such as the coming of sound and the emergence of widescreen cinema, we will also explore social anxieties about cinema's effects, the institution of the Production Code, and the complex relationship of Hollywood film to key social crises (The Depression, WWII, McCarthyism, Civil Rights) of the period.

Potential screenings include: Stagecoach, Rebel Without a Cause, It Happened One Night, Little Caesar, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Best Years of Our Lives, Rope, Imitation of Life, Double Indemnity, The Reckless Moment, The Cheat, The Birth of a Nation, Baby Face, My Son John, and others.

Fall 2021 2254F / 001 (Evening) J. Wlodarz Syllabus 

2258F - Canadian National Cinema(s)
Beginning in the silent period and extending into the twenty-first century, this course seeks to answer historical, cultural, ideological and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema. We will explore how cinema has reflected the complex and unstable notion of Canada as a nation, focusing upon issues of representation as well as problems of production, distribution and exhibition as these are grounded in political economy. Additionally, we will consider the transnational flows between the Canadian film industry, Hollywood, and other global film industries through co-production and casting. Questions addressed include: What is the influence of the documentary tradition on Canadian cinema as a whole? Is there an innate division between Canadian “art” cinema and popular cinema? What are the relationships of First Nations, regional, diasporic and queer cinemas to a Canadian national cinema? Does Canadian cinema embody two linguistic, cultural and industrial “solitudes” or are there in fact a range of Canadian cinemas? How have history, immigration and economics shaped Canadian cinema? What roles can genre play in understanding Canadian cinema? How do gender, sexuality, race and class inflect the representation of Canadian nation on screen?

Fall 2021 2258F / 001 C. Gittings Syllabus 

3000 Level Courses

3340G - Japanese National Cinema
A survey of Japanese cinema from its prehistory to the work of contemporary transnational auteurs. Students will study films in their historical and aesthetic contexts, and in relation to specific topics in film studies. For example: traditional aesthetics; the war film and propaganda; postwar melodrama; J-Horror; and anime.

Winter 2022 3340G / 001 (Evening) M. Raine Syllabus

3342G - Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema (1960-Present)
This course examines the economic, aesthetic, and ideological transformations in American film from the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s to the contemporary era of conglomeration, globalization, and digital media. Topics include the fall of the Production Code, the Hollywood Renaissance, American independent cinema, and the global blockbuster.

Winter 2022 3342G / 001 (Evening) J. Wlodarz Syllabus 

3356F - Avant-Garde Cinema
An exploration of a variety of marginal film practices and modes of production through an historical consideration of the major trends and developments in European, American, and Canadian avant-garde. Films will be analyzed in relation to the theoretical issues they raise, specifically, feminist theory and practice, film formalism, and spectatorship.

Fall 2021 3356F / 001 T. Nagl Syllabus

3357G - Science Fiction Cinema
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”.

Winter 2022 3357G / 001 T. Nagl Syllabus 

3360G - Topics in Film Genre - Medical Drama: Cine-Biology
This course examines a specific film genre or cycle, focusing on its historical contexts and development and its aesthetic, cultural and political significance.

Winter 2022 3360G / 001 J. Blankenship Syllabus 

3368F - Film Production
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through the analysis and production of films.

Fall 2021 3368F / 001 (Evening) G. De Souza Syllabus 

3371G - Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed.

Winter 2022 3371G / 001 T. Nagl Syllabus

3373G - Reframing National Cinemas
This course will provide students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema informed by theories of identity, nation, and globalization developed by such figures as Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Roland Robertson and Edward Said. Students will trouble 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 and transnational cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of history, class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various colonial, postcolonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes the terrain of national cinema. To this end we will read essays by such leading national cinema scholars as Stephen Crofts, Andrew Higson, Susan Hayward, Marsha Kinder, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Philip Rosen, Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino.

Winter 2022 3373G / 001 C. Gittings Syllabus 

3374F - Documentary Film
This course will examine the development of film documentary, from Lumière in the 1890s to the modern docudrama.

Fall 2021 3374F / 001 C. Gittings Syllabus 

3377F - Haunted Screen: Early German Cinema
This course will focus on the sensational origins of cinema in Germany. We will examine cinema as part of a wider social and technological exhibition culture that includes phantasmagoria ghost projection, magic lanterns, and the “edutainement” of microscopes, X rays and stereoscopes. Our “media archaeology” of German cinema starts with hand-tinted shorts and Max and Emil Skladanowsky’s 1895 Wintergarten film program (projected to a paying audience several months before the Lumière Brothers in Paris) and ends with Weimar horror classics (Caligari, Genuine, Nosferatu). Rare glimpses into the Skladanowsky retrospective of the Third Reich and a screening of New German cinema representations of forgotten film pioneers also illuminate the act of creating a national film history and archive. Other topics include the transition from “attractions” to narrative; modernity and the city symphony; the early star system; gender and genre; early film theory and the auteur/art film.

Fall 2021 3377F / 001 J. Blankenship Syllabus 

4000 Level Courses

4409E - Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies.

Fall/Winter 4409E / 001 Various Consent Form / Evaluation Form 

4495FG - Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper.

Fall/Winter 4495FG / 001 Various Internship Guidelines 

2020-21 FALL/WINTER COURSES

The Registrar is using the phrase “Distance Studies/Online” on the Timetable to designate any course that is not fully in-person. Below is a fuller explanation of English and Writing Studies course delivery modes. Check individual course syllabi for delivery details.

In-Person: As long as the university considers face-to-face instruction with proper social distancing measures safe, these courses will be taught in-person in a classroom on campus with strict adherence to public health protocols.

Synchronous Online: These courses will offer an online component in which students will participate at the same time (synchronously). Some or all lectures, tutorials, film screenings, discussion groups or tests will require mandatory attendance during scheduled online meeting times. Other components of the course may be offered asynchronously, (i.e., with no requirement for attendance at a designated time). Consult individual course outlines for details.

First year courses have both on-line and in-person tutorials.
As long as the university considers face-to-face instruction with proper social distancing measures safe, the designated in-person component will be offered in a classroom on campus with strict adherence to public health protocols. Students may choose in-person or on-line delivery mode when they register.

Asynchronous Online: In this course type, all teaching activities will take place online with no timeslot assigned (asynchronously). You may access the course material any time you wish; there are no mandatory synchronous activities at a specified time during the week.

Blended: There are a small number of courses that were designed for both in-person and online delivery. Blended courses have both face-to-face and online instruction.

Students who are not available to attend classes on campus should not choose courses with a required in-person component. If students become unable to attend in-person classes they should consult with their course instructor and seek accommodations.

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Delivery Type Course Title & Description Instructor
1022 001
(Evening)
Distance Studies/Online  lectures with choice of in-person or online tutorials Introduction to Film Studies
Over its long and complex history, cinema has often been viewed as mere “entertainment.” Film viewing can be tense, exciting, and even terrifying, but ultimately, it’s supposed to be an enjoyable leisure activity. Thus, outside of certain circles (academia, cinephilia, fan communities), we seldom seek to analyze movies the way that we might examine a work of art or literature. And yet, along with a variety of other contemporary visual media, our film experiences often directly (or indirectly) shape our values, beliefs, and opinions about ourselves, about life, and about our society.

A year-long introduction to film studies, this course will explore the concepts of film form, film aesthetics, and film style, while remaining attentive to the various ways in which cinema always also involves an interaction with both specific audiences and larger social structures. Throughout the course, we will closely examine the construction of a variety of film forms and styles—including the classical Hollywood style, documentary cinema, experimental films, and contemporary independent and global cinemas. During the fall term, we will pay particular attention to the construction of film images, systems of film editing, film sound, and the varied modes of organizing these core elements. The second term of the course will introduce key theoretical perspectives in cinema studies as well as examine genre, authorship, non-narrative cinemas, transnational filmmaking, and alternative/independent cinemas. Overall, the goal of the course is to help you develop a set of skills that will enable you both to experience and analyze all forms of cinema in newly exciting (and critical) ways.

Potential screenings include: Gravity, The Wizard of Oz, Get Out, Wonder Woman, Vertigo, The Searchers, Citizen Kane, The Silence of the Lambs, Halloween, Jaws, The Florida Project, Memories of Underdevelopment, Happy Together, Germany Year Zero, The Conversation, Bonnie and Clyde, The Piano, Nosferatu, and others.

J. Wlodarz
1022 002 
(Evening)
Distance Studies/Online  lectures with choice of in-person or online tutorials Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
T. Nagl
2159B 001 Distance Studies/Online Disney (Disney Dream Factory)
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20th and 21stcentury. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Tron, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, Steamboat Willy, Fantasia, The Lion King and Frozen.
J. Blankenship
2191G 001 Distance Studies/Online Special Topics in Film Studies: World Cultures/Global Screens (cross-listed with Spanish 2700G and CLC 2700G)
America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, this course aims to expose students to a wide range of questions and debates around culture and identity, while also relating these matters to circulating discourses about the Global. Depending on each case study, the consecutive units will focus on different critical approaches, alternatively addressing questions concerning the representation of racial, ethnic and cultural identities, matters of gender and female authorship, and issues of genre and stardom.
C. Burucua
2195B 001 Distance Studies/Online Special Topics in Film Studies: The Horror Film
Although marked by a consistently disreputable status, horror has long been one of the most popular and enduring global genres in the history of film. With deep roots in mythology, fairy tales, Gothic literature, and Freudian psychoanalysis, horror cinema continues to shock and delight audiences through tales of vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, serial killers, and other monstrous icons. And yet the basic function of the horror film—to elicit unsettling emotions of fear, shock, anxiety, and disgust—has also made the genre a frequent target of censorship and a convenient scapegoat for broader social crises and moral panics. Such controversies also speak to the crucial ways that horror cinema both explores and negotiates cultural tensions and anxieties about identity, technology, religion, difference/Otherness, and the environment. Providing an introduction to the history of horror cinema, this team-taught course will explore the key forms, styles, and thematic elements of both classic and contemporary horror films from around the world. It will also frame the analysis of major films such as Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1957), Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), and The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) in relation to their specific industrial and cultural contexts, paying close attention to both the perception and reception of horror audiences as well as the genre’s allegorical potential.

Key topics to be discussed include: fears and anxieties addressed by horror cinema; cultural traditions of horror; horror and repression/the unconscious; bodily horrors; supernatural vs. psychological horror; normality and monstrosity; gender and sexuality in horror cinema; horror and technology; fandom and the pleasures of horror.

Z. Maric
2230F 001  Distance Studies/Online Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema.
T. Nagl
2254F 001 Distance Studies/Online Classical Hollywood Cinema
This course surveys the central industrial, technological, aesthetic, and ideological developments in the history of classical Hollywood cinema. Given the global prominence and influence of Hollywood cinema, much of the course will be focused on the establishment of the Hollywood studio system and its many transformations over the course of the 20th century. We will begin with an analysis of the origins of the medium and its place in American culture at the turn-of-the-century. We will then examine the development of narrative cinematic standards and the rise and consolidation of the Hollywood studio system, paying close attention to genre, stardom, marketing, and popular reception from the 1920s to the 1960s. In addition to key technological developments such as the coming of sound and the emergence of widescreen cinema, we will also explore social anxieties about cinema's effects, the institution of the Production Code, and the complex relationship of Hollywood film to key social crises (The Depression, WWII, McCarthyism, Civil Rights) of the period.

Potential screenings include: Stagecoach, Rebel Without a Cause, It Happened One Night, Little Caesar, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Best Years of Our Lives, Rope, Imitation of Life, Double Indemnity, The Reckless Moment, The Cheat, The Birth of a Nation, Baby Face, My Son John, and others.

J. Wlodarz
2258F 001 Distance Studies/Online Canadian Cinema: Documents, Storytelling, Experiments
Beginning in the silent period and extending into the twenty-first century, this course seeks to answer historical, cultural, ideological and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema. We will explore how cinema has reflected the complex and unstable notion of Canada as a nation, focusing upon issues of representation as well as problems of production, distribution and exhibition as these are grounded in political economy. Additionally, we will consider the transnational flows between the Canadian film industry, Hollywood, and other global film industries through co-production and casting. Questions addressed include: What is the influence of the documentary tradition on Canadian cinema as a whole? Is there an innate division between Canadian “art” cinema and popular cinema? What are the relationships of First Nations, regional, diasporic and queer cinemas to a Canadian national cinema? Does Canadian cinema embody two linguistic, cultural and industrial “solitudes” or are there in fact a range of Canadian cinemas? How have history, immigration and economics shaped Canadian cinema? What roles can genre play in understanding Canadian cinema? How do gender, sexuality, race and class inflect the representation of Canadian nation on screen?
C. Gittings
3309F 001 Distance Studies/Online Film and Popular Culture
In this course, we will contemplate the dream of cinemaas it intersects with other forms of popular culture, likegraphic novels, comic books, video games, and television. We will engage with a wide cinematic corpus (from silent cinema and the avant-garde to Hollywood cult classics, Canadian cyberpunk and contemporary techno-horror), and investigate how filmic texts engage with popular culture, using both film theory concepts and discussion of historical and technological contexts as our main research methods. Topics include media anxiety, horrors of mechanical reproducibility, cinema as virtual reality and imaginary travel, cinema's shifting role in a larger digital age and nostalgic views of nitrate and early pioneers. Films include Scorsese's Hugo, The Truman Show, Johnny Mnemonic, the J-Horror film Ring, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
J. Blankenship
3312G 001  Distance Studies/Online Special Topics in Film Studies:Art and Mass Media (cross-listed with AH 2662G)
Description n/a.
C. Sprengler
3330F 001 Distance Studies/Online National and Transnational Cinemas
This course offers an in-depth examination of a specific national film culture or related group of cultures. The course may address the entire cinematic history of a specific nation-state, be narrowed by a historical period, mode or region within a national cinema, or extended across national borders.
C. Gittings
3335F 001  Distance Studies/Online Contemporary German Cinema (cross-listed with German 3362F)
This course introduces students to Contemporary German Cinema after unification. Topics include the "Berlin School" and transnational film production, Ostalgie, European identity, migration, and historical memory. The relationship to the auteurism of post-war New German Cinema will also be examined.
J. Blankenship
3352G 001 Distance Studies/Online 3352G - Queer Cinema: Before Stonewall—Queer Cinema and American Culture from WWII to Gay Liberation (cross-listed with Women's Studies 3357G)
Although the Stonewall rebellion has long served as a foundational moment in the history of gay liberation and queer visibility, its iconicity tends to overshadow the crucial transformations of queer identity, community, culture, and politics that took place in the U.S. and abroad from WWII to that fateful summer night in 1969. For not only did the postwar era witness the development of queer urban spaces and homophile political groups, but it also marked a significant expansion of queer visibility in literature, theater, and cinema. Examining the conventions andthe gradual undoing of what Vito Russo famously called “the celluloid closet,” this course will explore key shifts in queer representation in American cinema of the postwar era. We will analyze the queer typology (sad young men, dangerous dykes, queer killers, etc.) of a variety of Hollywood genres (horror, noir, melodrama) as well as the often subversive work of figures like Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Alfred Hitchcock in the context of Cold War homophobia and gender normativity. We will then frame the eventual breakdown of Production Code restrictions on “sexual perversion” in relation to the development of queer alternatives via avant-garde, underground, and documentary cinema. The final section of the course will concentrate on a group of films from the Stonewall era that will allow us to grapple with the aesthetic, cultural, and political consequences of the shift from silence and oppression to an era of presumed liberation. What’s gained—and perhaps lost—for queer subjects in the transition from invisibility to visibility, from subculture to mainstream, and how has this key historical moment shaped our contemporary notions of queer culture and identity?

Potential screenings include: Queen Christina, Rope, Tea and Sympathy, Caged, Johnny Guitar, Glen or Glenda?, The Children’s Hour, Fireworks, Un Chant d’Amour, My Hustler, Chained Girls, Olivia, Flaming Creatures, A Florida Enchantment, Portrait of Jason, The QueenCBS Reports: The Homosexuals, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Killing of Sister George, and others.

J. Wlodarz
3361G 001 Distance Studies/Online Stardom
This course examines stardom in its cultural, historical, industrial, and national contexts. The course may examine the development of the star system in a specific national context, focus on a particular star or stars, a historical period or movement, or a specific theoretical aspect of the star phenomenon.
J. Blankenship
3362F 001 Distance Studies/Online The Musical
Musical films are one of the most enduring forms of cinema, in Hollywood and around the world. This course explores the range of musical films, from all-singing, all-dancing extravaganzas to the eruption of "musical moments" in popular films, art cinema, and the avant-garde.
J. Faflak
3366F 001 Distance Studies/Online Film Noir and the Crime Genre
While “noir” is one of the most widely applied descriptions of film style, it is also one of the most notoriously contentious categories: is it a genre, a period, an aesthetic, a mood, a psychology, a philosophy, an associated set of themes, icons, character types, and/or narrative conventions? This course challenges students to consider film noir and its historical and cultural contexts, considering the way it both emerges from and shapes aesthetic and social vision. In it, we will explore film noir through a variety of critical lenses, considering both classical exemplars and revisionary approaches to noir. Film noir emerged as an identifiable phenomenon in the United States in the 1940s and continues to influence contemporary culture, from film and television, to advertising, to computer games. We will consider its distinctive representations of ideas about crime, the law, race, class, and gender.
M. Jones
3368G 001 In Person Film Production
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through the analysis and production of films.
G. De Souza
3371G 001 Distance Studies/Online Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed.
T. Nagl
3373G 001  Distance Studies/Online Reframing National Cinemas
This course will provide students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema informed by theories of identity, nation, and globalization developed by such figures as Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Roland Robertson and Edward Said. Students will trouble 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 and transnational cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of history, class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various colonial, postcolonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes the terrain of national cinema. To this end we will read essays by such leading national cinema scholars as Stephen Crofts, Andrew Higson, Susan Hayward, Marsha Kinder, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Philip Rosen, Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino.
Z. Maric
4409E 001 Other Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies.
Consent Form / Evaluation Form
4495FG 001 Distance Studies/Online Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper.
Internship Guidelines

2019-20 FALL/WINTER COURSES

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Course Title & Description Instructor
1022 001 
(Evening)
Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
J. Wlodarz
1022 002 
(Evening)
Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
T. Nagl/S. Bissonnette
2159B 001 Disney (Disney Dream Factory)
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20th and 21st century. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Tron, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, Steamboat Willy, Fantasia, The Lion King and Frozen.
Z. Maric
2191G 001  Special Topics in Film Studies: World Cultures/Global Screens (cross-listed with Spanish 2700G and CLC 2700G)
America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, this course aims to expose students to a wide range of questions and debates around culture and identity, while also relating these matters to circulating discourses about the Global. Depending on each case study, the consecutive units will focus on different critical approaches, alternatively addressing questions concerning the representation of racial, ethnic and cultural identities, matters of gender and female authorship, and issues of genre and stardom.
C. Burucua
2195B 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: The Horror Film
Although marked by a consistently disreputable status, horror has long been one of the most popular and enduring global genres in the history of film. With deep roots in mythology, fairy tales, Gothic literature, and Freudian psychoanalysis, horror cinema continues to shock and delight audiences through tales of vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, serial killers, and other monstrous icons. And yet the basic function of the horror film—to elicit unsettling emotions of fear, shock, anxiety, and disgust—has also made the genre a frequent target of censorship and a convenient scapegoat for broader social crises and moral panics. Such controversies also speak to the crucial ways that horror cinema both explores and negotiates cultural tensions and anxieties about identity, technology, religion, difference/Otherness, and the environment. Providing an introduction to the history of horror cinema, this team-taught course will explore the key forms, styles, and thematic elements of both classic and contemporary horror films from around the world. It will also frame the analysis of major films such as Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1957), Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), and The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) in relation to their specific industrial and cultural contexts, paying close attention to both the perception and reception of horror audiences as well as the genre’s allegorical potential.

Key topics to be discussed include: fears and anxieties addressed by horror cinema; cultural traditions of horror; horror and repression/the unconscious; bodily horrors; supernatural vs. psychological horror; normality and monstrosity; gender and sexuality in horror cinema; horror and technology; fandom and the pleasures of horror.

Z. Maric
2197A 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Spaghetti Westerns (Origins, Legacy and Popular Cinema, From Sergio Leone to Quentin Tarantino) (cross-listed with CLC 2105A and Italian 2280A) Y. Sangalli
2198A 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Cinemas of Dystopia
Dystopia is, according to the OED, “[A]n imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible.” It is the opposite of Utopia. Dystopian literature and cinema take contemporary social and political concerns and displace them to fictional universes, sometimes imagined futures, to better illuminate and interrogate real-world perils facing viewers in their present. Beginning with Thomas More, this course will consider the concept of dystopia in select cinema and television through the vectors of philosophy, history, aesthetics, genre studies, and ideology, and with reference to nation, race, class, gender and sexuality.
C. Gittings
2230G 001  Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema.
T. Nagl
2254F 001  Classical Hollywood Cinema
This course traces a history of American film from the silent period to the end of the studio era. Topics include the establishment of the Hollywood style, major directors/genres, as well as key industrial, technological, and cultural factors in the development of Hollywood cinema.
J. Wlodarz
2258F 001 Canadian Cinema: Documents, Storytelling, Experiments
Beginning in the silent period and extending into the twenty-first century, this course seeks to answer historical, cultural, ideological and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema. We will explore how cinema has reflected the complex and unstable notion of Canada as a nation, focusing upon issues of representation as well as problems of production, distribution and exhibition as these are grounded in political economy. Additionally, we will consider the transnational flows between the Canadian film industry, Hollywood, and other global film industries through co-production and casting. Questions addressed include: What is the influence of the documentary tradition on Canadian cinema as a whole? Is there an innate division between Canadian “art” cinema and popular cinema? What are the relationships of First Nations, regional, diasporic and queer cinemas to a Canadian national cinema? Does Canadian cinema embody two linguistic, cultural and industrial “solitudes” or are there in fact a range of Canadian cinemas? How have history, immigration and economics shaped Canadian cinema? What roles can genre play in understanding Canadian cinema?  How do gender, sexuality, race and class inflect the representation of Canadian nation on screen?
C. Gittings
3309F 001 Film and Popular Culture (Dreaming Cinema)
In this course, we will contemplate the dream of cinema as it intersects with powerful forms of popular culture, like the graphic novel, comic book, video games, and television. We will engage with a wide cinematic corpus (from silent cinema and the avant-garde to Hollywood cult classics, Canadian cyberpunk and contemporary techno-horror). Topics include media anxiety, horrors of mechanical reproducibility, cinema as virtual reality and imaginary travel, cinema’s shifting role in a larger digital age and nostalgic views of nitrate and early pioneers. Films include Scorsee’s Hugo, Truman Show, Cronenberg’s Johnny Mnemonic, the J-Horror film Ring, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
M. Enns
3311G 001  Special Topics in Film Studies: Women Filmmakers (cross-listed with Spanish 3350G, CLC 3350G and Women's Studies 3357G)
This course will explore the notion of film authorship in relation to its utterances and implications when associated to the praxis of contemporary women film directors, from the early 1960s to the present. While troubling the notion of women’s cinema, its definition, limits and limitations, a wide range of case studies – films emerging from dissimilar contexts of production and reception – will be mostly read and discussed in the light of feminist approaches to questions about gender and representation. In this sense, the course will also offer a historical and critical overview of feminist scholarship within film studies and of the ongoing debates in this area of study.
C. Burucua
3342G 001 Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema (1960-Present)
This course examines the economic, aesthetic, and ideological transformations in American film from the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s to the contemporary era of conglomeration, globalization, and digital media. Topics include the fall of the Production Code, the Hollywood Renaissance, American independent cinema, and the global blockbuster.
J. Wlodarz
3357F 001  Science Fiction Cinema
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”.
T. Nagl
3368F 001 Film Production
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through the analysis and production of films.
G. De Souza
3371G 001 Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed.
T. Nagl
3373G 001  Reframing National Cinemas
This course will provide students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema informed by theories of identity, nation, and globalization developed by such figures as Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Roland Robertson and Edward Said. Students will trouble 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 and transnational cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of history, class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various colonial, postcolonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes the terrain of national cinema. To this end we will read essays by such leading national cinema scholars as Stephen Crofts, Andrew Higson, Susan Hayward, Marsha Kinder, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Philip Rosen, Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino.
Z. Maric
3374G 001 Documentary Film
This course will introduce students to the history and theory of documentary cinema from the earliest actualities of the 1890s to the present. We will consider how the documentary film developed as an aesthetic form and a mode of cultural expression and also study technological changes that impacted the development of form. Topics include the Lumière Brothers and early actualities, Robert Flaherty and the ethnographic gaze, montage and the city symphony, the British documentary of the 1930s, the poetic documentary and essay film, Direct Cinema,cinéma vérité, Michael Moore, the postmodern “mockumentary,” the digital image and documentary ethics.
Z. Maric
3377F 001 Haunted Screen: Early German Cinema
This course will focus on the sensational origins of cinema in Germany. We will examine cinema as part of a wider social and technological exhibition culture that includes phantasmagoria ghost projection, magic lanterns, and the “edutainement” of microscopes, X rays and stereoscopes. Our “media archaeology” of German cinema starts with the body madness of the “Boxing Kangaroo” and Max and Emil Skladanowsky’s 1895 Wintergarten film program (projected to a paying audience several months before the Lumière Brothers in Paris) and ends with Weimar horror classics (Caligari, Genuine, Nosferatu). Rare glimpses into the Skladanowsky retrospective of the Third Reich and a screening of New German cinema representations of forgotten film pioneers also illuminate the act of creating a national film history and archive. Other topics include the transition from “attractions” to narrative, the history of film exhibition, the early star system, gender and genre, early film theory, the auteur/art film, and modernity.
A. Mioc
4409E 001 Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies.
Consent Form / Evaluation Form
4495FG 001 Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper.
Internship Guidelines

2019 Spring/Summer

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Course Title & Description Instructor
2162A 650 Cinemas of Disaster - CANCELLED
Offering an overview of cinemas of disaster from Hollywood and beyond, this course analyzes representative films from a number of different perspectives in relation to such issues as gender, sexuality, race, the family, and the environment and considers the cinematic technologies that have defined and influenced the genre's development.
B. Bruce

 

2018-19 FALL/WINTER COURSES

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Course Title & Description Instructor
1022 001 
(Evening)
Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
M. Raine
1022 002 
(Evening)
Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
B. Bruce
2153B 001  American Television and Culture
This course examines the history, technology, and forms of television in the U.S. The course analyzes distinctive elements of televisual form (flow, liveness, seriality, advertising); TV's key genres (soap, sitcom, drama, news, reality); modes of reception (fandom, distraction, surfing); as well as television's construction of social difference in America.
J. Wlodarz
2159B 001 Disney (Disney Dream Factory)
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20th and 21st century. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Tron, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, Steamboat Willy, Fantasia, The Lion King and Frozen.
C. Ylagan
2164A 001  Animation/Anime
This course explores the power of animation as a form of audiovisual representation, with a particular emphasis on Japan. We will trace the intertwined history of film, television, video, and computer animation from short films in the 1930s to the present day media mix that incorporates comic books, light novels, video games, and toys. Japanese anime franchises will be examined from the side of production, as industrial products and artistic expressions, and from the side of reception, as semiotic texts and as objects through which consumers construct their social lives. We will also explore the further dissemination of those franchises in various kinds of fan fiction and academic discourse, and as an aspect of Japanese "soft power" in North American popular culture. All readings on the course are in English; no Japanese is required.
M. Raine
2191F 001  Special Topics in Film Studies: World Cultures/Global Screens (cross-listed with Spanish 2700F and CLC 2700F)
By looking at a body of films from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, this course aims to expose students to a wide range of questions and debates around culture and identity, while also relating these matters to circulating discourses about the Global. Depending on each case study, the consecutive units will focus on different critical approaches, alternatively addressing questions concerning the representation of racial, ethnic and cultural identities, matters of gender and female authorship, and issues of genre and stardom.
C. Burucua
2192F 001  Special Topics in Film Studies: Italian Popular Films (cross-listed with Italian 2241F and CLC 2133A)
Join us on a journey through Italian genre filmmaking! Italian Popular Films will introduce you to the most successful and exported genres of Italian Cinema. Come and learn about the Spaghetti Western, Comedy "Italian Style", the Poliziesco, the Giallo Thriller, and the Italian Horror film!
Y. Sangalli
2195B 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: The Horror Film
Although marked by a consistently disreputable status, horror has long been one of the most popular and enduring global genres in the history of film. With deep roots in mythology, fairy tales, Gothic literature, and Freudian psychoanalysis, horror cinema continues to shock and delight audiences through tales of vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, serial killers, and other monstrous icons. And yet the basic function of the horror film—to elicit unsettling emotions of fear, shock, anxiety, and disgust—has also made the genre a frequent target of censorship and a convenient scapegoat for broader social crises and moral panics. Such controversies also speak to the crucial ways that horror cinema both explores and negotiates cultural tensions and anxieties about identity, technology, religion, difference/Otherness, and the environment. Providing an introduction to the history of horror cinema, this team-taught course will explore the key forms, styles, and thematic elements of both classic and contemporary horror films from around the world. It will also frame the analysis of major films such as Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1957), Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), and The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) in relation to their specific industrial and cultural contexts, paying close attention to both the perception and reception of horror audiences as well as the genre’s allegorical potential.

Key topics to be discussed include: fears and anxieties addressed by horror cinema; cultural traditions of horror; horror and repression/the unconscious; bodily horrors; supernatural vs. psychological horror; normality and monstrosity; gender and sexuality in horror cinema; horror and technology; fandom and the pleasures of horror.

Z. Bronson
2230F 001  Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema.
B. Bruce
2254F 001  Classical Hollywood Cinema
This course traces a history of American film from the silent period to the end of the studio era. Topics include the establishment of the Hollywood style, major directors/genres, as well as key industrial, technological, and cultural factors in the development of Hollywood cinema.
J. Wlodarz
2258G 001 Canadian Cinema: Documents, Storytelling, Experiments
Beginning in the silent period and extending into the twenty-first century, this course seeks to answer historical, cultural, ideological and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema. We will explore how cinema has reflected the complex and unstable notion of Canada as a nation, focusing upon issues of representation as well as problems of production, distribution and exhibition as these are grounded in political economy. Additionally, we will consider the transnational flows between the Canadian film industry, Hollywood, and other global film industries through co-production and casting. Questions addressed include: What is the influence of the documentary tradition on Canadian cinema as a whole? Is there an innate division between Canadian “art” cinema and popular cinema? What are the relationships of First Nations, regional, diasporic and queer cinemas to a Canadian national cinema? Does Canadian cinema embody two linguistic, cultural and industrial “solitudes” or are there in fact a range of Canadian cinemas? How have history, immigration and economics shaped Canadian cinema? What roles can genre play in understanding Canadian cinema?  How do gender, sexuality, race and class inflect the representation of Canadian nation on screen?
T. Wong
3311G 001  Special Topics in Film Studies: Women Filmmakers (cross-listed with Spanish 3901G and Women's Studies 3357G)
This course will explore the notion of film authorship in relation to its utterances and implications when associated to the praxis of contemporary women film directors, from the early 1960s to the present. While troubling the notion of women’s cinema, its definition, limits and limitations, a wide range of case studies – films emerging from dissimilar contexts of production and reception – will be mostly read and discussed in the light of feminist approaches to questions about gender and representation. In this sense, the course will also offer a historical and critical overview of feminist scholarship within film studies and of the ongoing debates in this area of study.
C. Burucua
3340G 001 Japanese National Cinema
This course focuses on both Japan and the cinema: each week will present a specific historical context and a film that speaks to a particular aspect of film studies. For example, we will consider the relation between traditional aesthetics and Japanese cinema; the mass culture of 1930s Japan and theories of "vernacular modernism"; the war film and propaganda; genre theory and postwar melodrama; J-Horror; trendy dramas; and Japanese animation. We will of course pay attention to geniuses of Japanese cinema such as Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Kurosawa but we will also study popular films, and the connections between cinema and parallel institutions such as radio, television, and the record industry, as well as intermedia connections between cinema and theatre, literature, manga, and anime. All readings on the course are in English; no Japanese is required.
M. Raine
3352F 001 
(Evening) 
Queer Cinema (cross-listed with Women's Studies 3345F)
This course will explore the history, politics, and aesthetics of queer film, particularly the representation of queer culture and identity as well as the policing of non-normative sexualities. Course topics may include: Hollywood and the Celluloid Closet, queer independent cinema, and transgender film.
J. Wlodarz
3356F 001  Avante-Garde Cinema
An exploration of a variety of marginal film practices and modes of production through an historical consideration of the major trends and developments in European, American, and Canadian avant-garde. Films will be analyzed in relation to the theoretical issues they raise, specifically, feminist theory and practice, film formalism, and spectatorship.
T. Nagl
3357F 001  Science Fiction Cinema
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”.
T. Nagl
3368F 001 Film Production
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through the analysis and production of films.
G. De Souza
3371G 001 Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed.
T. Nagl
3373F 001  Reframing National Cinemas
This course will provide students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema informed by theories of identity, nation, and globalization developed by such figures as Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Roland Robertson and Edward Said. Students will trouble 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 and transnational cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of history, class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various colonial, postcolonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes the terrain of national cinema. To this end we will read essays by such leading national cinema scholars as Stephen Crofts, Andrew Higson, Susan Hayward, Marsha Kinder, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Philip Rosen, Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino.
C. Gittings
3374F 001 Documentary Film - CANCELLED
This course will examine the development of film documentary, from Lumière in the 1890s to the modern docudrama.
J. Blankenship
3397G 001 Berlin to Hollywood: German Exile Cinema (cross-listed with German 3397G and CLC 3391G)
This course focuses on German directors and actors who emigrated to the U.S. before and after the Nazi seizure of power, including Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich and Ernst Lubitsch. Topics include: expressionism, film noir, diaspora/exile, historical trauma, the anti-Nazi film/anti-fascist aesthetics, the Hollywood studio system, importing/exporting entertainment.
T. Nagl
4409E 001 Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies.
Consent Form 
4495FG 001 Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper.
Internship Guidelines

2018 Spring/Summer

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Course Title & Description Instructor
2166A 650 Zombie Film
This course considers how this horror subgenre has developed over the past century and why it continues to resonate with filmmakers and filmgoers. Using various approaches, we'll examine the cultural anxieties the films raise in relation to such issues as gender, sexuality, race, capitalism, technology, religion, and the environment.
B. Bruce

 

2017-18 FALL/WINTER

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Course Title & Description Instructor
1022 001 Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
Z. Maric
1022 002 Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
B. Bruce
2159B 001 Disney (Disney Dream Factory)
Benjamin Barber in The New York Times argued “whether Disney knows it or not, it is buying much more than our leisure time. It has a purchase on our values, on how we feel and think, and what we think about.” This course offers a closer look at Disney as one of America's most long-standing “dream factories,” examining the cultural narratives, industrial strategies, fantasies and ideologies that fuel Disney’s global impact in the 20th and 21st century. In addition to analyzing key Disney animated features, we will also look at the studio’s early cartoons, educational and advertising films, nature documentaries, live action films and propaganda shorts. We will study Disney’s relationship to art, politics and ecology and also examine the “invention” of childhood, notions of “family” entertainment and constructions of race, class and gender in Disney filmmaking. Films might include BambiSleeping BeautyTron, Snow White and the Seven DwarfsSong of the SouthSteamboat WillyFantasiaThe Lion King and Frozen
J. Blankenship
2164A 001 Animation/Anime
This course explores the power of animation as a form of audiovisual representation, with a particular emphasis on Japan. We will trace the intertwined history of film, television, video, and computer animation from short films in the 1930s to the present day media mix that incorporates comic books, light novels, video games, and toys. Japanese anime franchises will be examined from the side of production, as industrial products and artistic expressions, and from the side of reception, as semiotic texts and as objects through which consumers construct their social lives. We will also explore the further dissemination of those franchises in various kinds of fan fiction and academic discourse, and as an aspect of Japanese "soft power" in North American popular culture. All readings on the course are in English; no Japanese is required.
M. Raine
2194B 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: It’s Only Rock’n’Roll: Film and Popular Music
The course examines the synergetic relationship between film and popular music, particularly focusing on the global appeal of rock’n’roll’s primal spectacle to youth culture and its significance as a barometer and sometimes vanguard of cultural change. Exploring the seemingly inherent power of rock’n’roll to unsettle the existing social structures and values via rhythm, riff, lyrical imagery, and stage iconography, the course focuses on intersections of film and rock’n’roll to discuss topics like “alternative” spirituality, counterculture, class, race, post-colonialism, globalization, technology, fashion, fandom, stardom, sex, drugs, and others. Various genres of popular music (heavy metal, punk rock, rap, hip-hop, blues, reggae, country, soul, R&B) and film (action, musical, horror, science fiction, romantic comedy, documentary) are discussed.
Z. Maric
2195A 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: World Cultures/Global Screens (cross-listed with Spanish 2901A and CLC 2107A)
By looking at a body of films from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, this course aims to expose students to a wide range of questions and debates around culture and identity, while also relating these matters to circulating discourses about the Global. Depending on each case study, the consecutive units will focus on different critical approaches, alternatively addressing questions concerning the representation of racial, ethnic and cultural identities, matters of gender and female authorship, and issues of genre and stardom.
C. Burucua
2195B 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: The Horror Film
Although marked by a consistently disreputable status, horror has long been one of the most popular and enduring global genres in the history of film. With deep roots in mythology, fairy tales, Gothic literature, and Freudian psychoanalysis, horror cinema continues to shock and delight audiences through tales of vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, serial killers, and other monstrous icons. And yet the basic function of the horror film—to elicit unsettling emotions of fear, shock, anxiety, and disgust—has also made the genre a frequent target of censorship and a convenient scapegoat for broader social crises and moral panics. Such controversies also speak to the crucial ways that horror cinema both explores and negotiates cultural tensions and anxieties about identity, technology, religion, difference/Otherness, and the environment. Providing an introduction to the history of horror cinema, this non-essay course will explore the key forms, styles, and thematic elements of both classic and contemporary horror films from around the world.Potential films to be screened include: Get Out (Peele, 2017), The Witch (Eggers, 2015), It Follows (Mitchell, 2014), The Babadook (Kent, 2014), The Descent (Marshall, 2005), Ringu (Nakata, 1998), The Blair Witch Project (Sanchez/Myrick, 1999), A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984), Wolfen (Wadleigh, 1981), Halloween (Carpenter, 1978), Suspiria (Argento, 1977), The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1957), I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943), Cat People (Tourneur, 1942), The Mask of Fu Manchu (Brabin, 1932), Frankenstein (Whale, 1931), Dracula (Browning, 1931), Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) and others.
J. Wlodarz
2198A 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Ancient Greece on Film (cross-listed with Classical Studies 2810A)
This course introduces students to epic films set in ancient Greece. Besides detailed discussion of individual films, topics covered will include how and why events are selected and portrayed in film, the differences between history and Hollywood mythology, history and fiction, and conventions of the Greek epic. Antirequisite(s): The former CS 2903B (if taken in 2011-12) and Film Studies 2198B (if taken in 2011-12).
K. Olson
2230F 001 Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema.
B. Bruce
2242F 001 National Cinemas: Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema (1960-present)
A companion to Film 2254—American Cinema, this course will focus on the emergence of “post-classical” Hollywood and the parallel growth of American independent cinema. We will explore the economic, aesthetic, and ideological transformations in American film from the social upheavals of the '60s and '70s to the contemporary era of conglomeration, globalization, and digital media. Key topics will include: the politics of genre revision; the shifting parameters of the “New Hollywood”; the fall of the Production Code and the representation of sex and violence; independent cinemas and social identity; the emergence of the international blockbuster; and crises of security in post-9/11 cinema. Potential screenings include: PsychoBonnie & ClydeChinatownThe GodfatherA Woman Under the InfluenceScorpio RisingAliensApocalypse NowBlue Velvet, Menace II Society, Wall-E, The Hurt Locker, Her, The Social NetworkTangerine, and others.
J. Wlodarz
2252G 001 World Cinema
This course surveys the significant movements and expressions of world cinema outside of North America. It traces the development of the medium in Europe and its spread around the world, paying particular attention to Asia. The course encompasses all forms of cinema, from avant-garde and experimental films to politically-charged critiques of Hollywood as well as entertainment films. The goal is not to cover everything but to raise awareness of the aesthetic and political powers of the medium, in its various contexts.
M. Raine
2257G 001 Science Fiction Cinema
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”.
T. Nagl
2258F 001 Canadian Cinema: Documents, Storytelling, Experiments
Beginning in the silent period and extending into the twenty-first century, this course seeks to answer historical, cultural, ideological and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema. We will explore how cinema has reflected the complex and unstable notion of Canada as a nation, focusing upon issues of representation as well as problems of production, distribution and exhibition as these are grounded in political economy. Additionally, we will consider the transnational flows between the Canadian film industry, Hollywood, and other global film industries through co-production and casting. Questions addressed include: What is the influence of the documentary tradition on Canadian cinema as a whole? Is there an innate division between Canadian “art” cinema and popular cinema? What are the relationships of First Nations, regional, diasporic and queer cinemas to a Canadian national cinema? Does Canadian cinema embody two linguistic, cultural and industrial “solitudes” or are there in fact a range of Canadian cinemas? How have history, immigration and economics shaped Canadian cinema? What roles can genre play in understanding Canadian cinema?  How do gender, sexuality, race and class inflect the representation of Canadian nation on screen?
C. Gittings
2270F 001 Film Aesthetics
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through analysis of films.
G. De Souza
2275G 001 Documentary Film
Historically, the dominant perception of documentary or non-fiction cinemas is that they teach us about the ‘real’ world by documenting truth transparently. However, this course will consider documentary as a form of representation and as such, trouble its relationship to the ‘objective reality’ it seeks to represent. What is at stake in representing the ‘historical real’? What issues of selection and mediation intrude between the reality unfolding in front of the lens and the projection of that reality on a screen? As theorists such as Michael Renov and Bill Nichols argue, although a documentary film references the historical world and actual people, it also constructs an audience’s understanding of this world and its inhabitants through point of view and the post-production process. Early practitioners and theorists of documentary were well aware of this contradiction; John Grierson, the so-called ‘father’ of documentary film and one of its first theorists describes documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality,” but audiences were frequently unaware of this creative element, often reading documentary film as ‘true’. To begin to answer the questions posed above, the course will examine the theoretical and historical development of non-fiction filmmaking from the work of early pioneers like the Lumières in late 19th-century France and John Grierson in early 20th-century United Kingdom and Canada to more contemporary and innovative filmmakers who complicate and innovate documentary’s basic conventions by questioning notions of objectivity, reality and verisimilitude. Collectively we will pose the following questions:
• What is documentary?
• How did documentary filmmaking get started?
• Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?
• What makes documentaries engaging and persuasive?
• How have documentaries addressed political and social issues?
• How can we differentiate between documentary modes and models?
C. Gittings
2295G 001 Film Directors/Auteurs: Todd Haynes
This course will explore key debates in the history of the auteur theory through a close analysis of the work of Todd Haynes, a major figure in the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s and American independent cinema more generally. Although Haynes’s status as a gay filmmaker with a discernable thematic and aesthetic approach has fostered auteurist readings of his work, his films also interrogate classical notions of authorship, typically through postmodern strategies of pastiche, parody, and allegory. Throughout the course we will examine Haynes’s films in relation to auteurist influences (Sirk, Genet, Akerman, etc.), generic modes (melodrama, musicals, film noir), and queer history and politics. We will also analyze the formal and aesthetic rigor of his films, paying particular attention to their deft ability to blend experimental and popular modes of cinema. Finally, while emphasizing formal analysis, cultural studies, and industry-based analysis, the course will also examine the influence of key theoretical trends in film studies (structuralism, feminist film theory, queer theory, etc.) on conceptions of film authorship. Screenings will include: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter StoryPoisonSafeVelvet GoldmineI’m Not There, and Carol, among others.
J. Wlodarz
2297G 001 Berlin to Hollywood: German Exile Cinema (cross-listed with German 2260G and CLC 2291G)
This course focuses on German directors and actors who emigrated to the U.S. before and after the Nazi seizure of power, including Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich and Ernst Lubitsch. Topics include: expressionism, film noir, diaspora/exile, historical trauma, the anti-Nazi film/anti-fascist aesthetics, the Hollywood studio system, importing/exporting entertainment.
T. Nagl
3311G 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Women Filmmakers (cross-listed with Spanish 3901G and Women's Studies 3357G)
This course will explore the notion of film authorship in relation to its utterances and implications when associated to the praxis of contemporary women film directors, from the early 1960s to the present. While troubling the notion of women’s cinema, its definition, limits and limitations, a wide range of case studies – films emerging from dissimilar contexts of production and reception – will be mostly read and discussed in the light of feminist approaches to questions about gender and representation. In this sense, the course will also offer a historical and critical overview of feminist scholarship within film studies and of the ongoing debates in this area of study.
C. Burucua
3359F 001 Family Viewing: Melodrama
Thomas Elsaesser describes the family melodrama as a genre where plots revolve around the powerless, and their victimization by a corrupt social order as this is represented through family relationships (Elsaesser 1974, 514-15). A genre that tailors "ideological conflicts into emotionally charged family situations" (Elsaesser 1974, 516), the popular family melodrama "facilitates conflict and negotiation between cultural identities" (Gledhill 1987, 37). Family melodramas negotiate the space between the home and the community, and the family's classed, raced and gendered positions within these two spheres. Drawing on the work of Cook, Gledhill and Kleinhans, Hayward has suggested, in melodrama the family becomes the site of patriarchy and capitalism and therefore reproduces them (Hayward 1996, 200). With an emphasis on questions of genre, the course will pay close attention to cinematic and televisual constructions of the home, site of the family, as a symbolic structure of identity, its heimlich (canny, homely, familiar) and its unheimlich (uncanny, alien, unknown) properties. Relationships between the family, domestic space and the space of the nation will be a central focus of the course. As the course develops, students will begin to understand the shape-shifting nature of genre in general and melodrama in particular through time and culture and the aesthetic and ideological practices of genre bending.  Tracing a trajectory of family representations ranging across such divergent formations of melodrama as  Birth of a Nation (USA, DW Griffith, 1915), Mildred Pierce (USA, Michael Curtiz, 1945),  All That Heaven Allows (USA, Douglas Sirk, 1955),  Leave it to Beaver(USA, 1957-63),  Mad Men (USA, 2007-2015), Pleasantville (USA,Gary Ross 1998), Far From Heaven (USA, Todd Haynes, 2002),  Muriel’s Wedding  (Australia, P.J. Hogan, 1994), All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) and There Will be Blood (USA, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007), students will investigate, through discussion, collaborative presentation and essay writing, the interrelationships of race, gender, class, sexuality and the nation as these concepts are performed through the family.
C. Gittings
3362G 001 The Musical (The International Musical Film)
The course will survey the history of the musical film in Hollywood and around the world. It will also explore the history and relation of popular song and narrative in film. We will study films made in Hollywood, the financial, technological, and stylistic center of the musical film from its inception in the late 1920s to the present day, as well as films made in France, the UK, India, China, and Japan. This class involves advanced close analysis of audiovisual texts and careful reading of the arguments about musical films that are central to the development of Film Studies over the past several decades. Topics include theories of narration, ideology critique, psychoanalysis, and aspects of popular culture such as the media convergence of popular music and film, and the political economy of cultural industries.
M. Raine
3371G 001 Film Theory
This course will investigate major writings in two areas of classical film theory: the realism-formalism debate and the auteur theory. Additional topics in film poetics and semiotics will also be discussed.
T. Nagl
3373G 001 Theories of National Cinemas
This course will provide students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema informed by theories of identity, nation, and globalization developed by such figures as Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Roland Robertson and Edward Said. Students will trouble 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 and transnational cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of history, class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various colonial, postcolonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes the terrain of national cinema. To this end we will read essays by such leading national cinema scholars as Stephen Crofts, Andrew Higson, Susan Hayward, Marsha Kinder, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Philip Rosen, Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino.
C. Gittings
3375F 001 Japanese New Wave
Sex. Activism. Rock 'n' roll. "New Wave" cinemas emerged around the world between 1955 and 1973. A new generation of iconoclastic filmmakers rebelled against the studio system and explored new media, such as the graphic novel and television. As with music, art, and literature, the cinema of this period shook off old ways and topics to explore new political and modernist forms of storytelling and new ideas about sex, gender, and society. Like those arts it also aimed to shock: the films we study are rhetorical interventions that often scandalized audiences with their unsettling juxtaposition of sex, violence, and politics. By studying critical writing as well as the films themselves we will seek to understand the intellectual and material conditions that brought about new wave cinema. We will discuss what the films tell us about Japan, and what they tell us about the global simultaneity and cultural permeability of cinema around the world that is sometimes ignored in single-country film histories. All readings on the course are in English; no Japanese is required.
M. Raine
3377G 001 Haunted Screen Early German Cinema (cross-listed with German 3361G and CLC 3302G)
This course focuses on the sensational origins of cinema and the first three decades of film history in Germany. We will examine cinema as part of a wider social and technological exhibition culture that includes 19th-century phantasmagoria ghost projection, the magic lantern, and the “edutainment” of microscopes, X-rays and stereoscopes. Our “media archaeology” begins with the film pioneers and showmen Max and Emil Skladanowsky (who in 1895 projected moving pictures to a paying audience several months before the Lumière brothers in Paris) and ends with early Weimar horror classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922). Topics might include: the transition from “attractions” to narrative; the history of film exhibition; the early star system and the European film economy; gender and genre (comedy, the detective film); cinema reformers, early film theory and the “auteur/art film”; modernity and the fantastic; propaganda and World War I; film style and problems in writing a national film history.
J. Blankenship
4409E 001 Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies.
Various
4495FG 001 Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper.
Various

2017 Spring/Summer

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Course Title & Description Instructor
2194A 650 Special Topics in Film Studies B. Bruce

2016-17 FALL/WINTER

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Course Title & Description Instructor
1022 001 Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
Z. Maric
1022 002 Introduction to Film Studies
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
B. Bruce
2153B 001  American Television and Culture J. Wlodarz
2194B 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Horror Cinema C. Gittings
2195B 650 Special Topics in Film Studies: Zombie Film B. Bruce
2196A 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Disney Dream Factory J. Blankenship
2197B 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Spaghetti Western's Origins Y. Sangalli
2198A 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Animation/Anime M. Raine
2224F 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Berlin to Hollywood
2228F 001 Special Topics in Film Studies C. Sprengler
2230F 001 Critical Reading and Writing in Film Studies
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema.
B. Bruce
2242G 001 National Cinemas - Special Topics: Contemporary German Cinema T. Nagl
2243G 001 National Cinemas - Special Topics: Japanese National Cinema M. Raine
2252G 001 World Cinema
This course surveys the significant movements and expressions of world cinema outside of North America. It traces the development of the medium in Europe and its spread around the world, paying particular attention to Asia. The course encompasses all forms of cinema, from avant-garde and experimental films to politically-charged critiques of Hollywood as well as entertainment films. The goal is not to cover everything but to raise awareness of the aesthetic and political powers of the medium, in its various contexts.
M. Raine
2254G 001 American Cinema J. Wlodarz
2256G 001 Avant-Garde Cinema
2258F 001 Canadian Cinema: Documents, Storytelling, Experiments
Beginning in the silent period and extending into the twenty-first century, this course seeks to answer historical, cultural, ideological and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema. We will explore how cinema has reflected the complex and unstable notion of Canada as a nation, focusing upon issues of representation as well as problems of production, distribution and exhibition as these are grounded in political economy. Additionally, we will consider the transnational flows between the Canadian film industry, Hollywood, and other global film industries through co-production and casting. Questions addressed include: What is the influence of the documentary tradition on Canadian cinema as a whole? Is there an innate division between Canadian “art” cinema and popular cinema? What are the relationships of First Nations, regional, diasporic and queer cinemas to a Canadian national cinema? Does Canadian cinema embody two linguistic, cultural and industrial “solitudes” or are there in fact a range of Canadian cinemas? How have history, immigration and economics shaped Canadian cinema? What roles can genre play in understanding Canadian cinema?  How do gender, sexuality, race and class inflect the representation of Canadian nation on screen?
C. Gittings
2260G 001 Film Genres - Science Fiction T. Nagl
2270F 001 Film Aesthetics
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour, through analysis of films.
G. De Souza
2275F 001 Documentary Film J. Blankenship
2295G 001 Film Directors/Auteurs: Special Topics C. Gittings
3312F 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Service Learning Experiences
3316F 001 Special Topics in Film Studies: Hollywood Film & Contemporary Art C. Srengler
3360F 001 Film Genres B. Bruce/M. Raine
3370G 001 Advanced Film Aesthetics C. Guertin
3371F 001 Film Theory T. Nagl
3373F 001 Theories of National Cinemas C. Gittings
4409E 001 Undergraduate Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honors Specialization in Film Studies.
Various
4490G 001 Seminar in Film Studies
4495F 001 Film Academic Internship
Third or fourth year students enrolled in a honors, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper.
Various

2016 Spring/Summer

*Click on the section number found in the second column to view/download the course outline.

Course # Course Outline Course Title & Description Instructor
2194A 650 Special Topics in Film Studies: Cinemas of Disaster B. Bruce
4495F 001 (Intersession) Film Academic Internship Various