The study of film and media has involved disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches for about half a century. This intermediate topical course of varying emphases studies the key critical terms, issues, and debates in popular media cultural study, including genre study, in relation to specific topics. Readings of film and media examples illustrate how different theories or perspectives can be applied to contemporary pop culture.
Audiences and Spectators
Media is not only enjoyed by solitary viewers, but also by communities of people who come together to celebrate their love of culture. Across the 20th and 21st centuries, media fans have formed clubs, written amateur publications, altered their appearances, and made parodies of their favorite movies and TV shows as ways to express their fandom. This course will explore how audiences have taken pleasure in film, television, and contemporary digital media. Students will examine moving images in a variety of technological formats and exhibition contexts to study how communities of viewers have developed vibrant fan cultures around popular media. Students will also learn how media spectatorship has been structured by racial segregation, class-based accessibility, and other vectors of social inequity. Course screenings will include: The Last Picture Show; Goodbye, Dragon Inn; The Watermelon Woman; and Dawson City: Frozen Time; in addition to user-generated content on platforms such as YouTube, Vine, and TikTok.
Media and Your Body
Media forms require us to be spectators, audiences, and increasingly, users and participants, in ways that distinctly implicate and impact our bodies and identities. The course examines the nature of bodies, spaces, and materiality in media, specifically examining prominent theories and analyses that illuminate the nature of media as it exists off of the screen. The course will survey how we interact with media in different spaces and how our bodies form a part of the media experience. Specific topics include mobile games, humor and riffing with movies, participatory media, materialism, haptics, television spaces in the home and beyond, disability media studies, performing sexuality, and mental illness and video games. Assignments will engage students in practicing the theories they learn in class.
Genre in Contemporary Film, TV, and Digital Media
Genre films were part of Classic Hollywood, but genres started changing in interesting ways as media industries evolved after World War II, with the introduction of television, new technologies that enabled shooting on location or new opportunities with color film, the rise of drive-in movie theaters, and indie or exploitation filmmaking. We will study the shift from classic genre films and theory to hybrid genres and genre revisionism in film/media movements spearheaded by people of color, feminists, and LGBT communities, as well as studios. The focus in the class is on genre theory studied through historical and technological shifts in media production. Screenings will introduce a range of genres, from classic films like the Western and noir to more recent genres like road films, television melodramas, and war video games.
Imagining War: Genre on Screen and Battlefield
The war film has arguably been one of the most consistent and popular elements of cinema's history. It was a component of film from its beginnings and is now a regular mainstay amongst Hollywood blockbusters. It has also undergone several political revisions and technological shifts in media production, distribution and exhibition, making it ideally suited to study the theory and history of genre. Importantly, this course will not only look at how war figures in film, but how film also profoundly effects and configures war. Entertainment and war are the United States' primary exports. Militarism and the Hollywood studio system have had a long and deadly interdependence. By conceiving of the viewing screen as an extension of the battlefield (and vice versa), this course will look at the profound social and political implications of the classic genre system. We will do this by examining such films as Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Battle of Algiers, Black Hawk Down, Kandahar, Night and Fog, The Hurt Locker. Das Boot, Saving Private Ryan, All Quiet on the Western Front, Dr. Strangelove, Inglourious Basterds, Birth of a Nation, Rambo, MASH, as well as a host of television shows, websites, and video games
The Western: From Colonialism to Gaming
This course will primarily explore the classic Hollywood genre system through a detailed look at "The Western." However, before looking at how genre operates within cinema, we take a broad historical and theoretical examination of genre within literary studies, critical theory, Wild West shows, philosophy, travel literature, ethnographic photography, and cultural studies. The aim is to critically examine a wide array of generic conventions within "The Western" film, while simultaneously situating these conventions within the broader historical and ideological context of European colonization of North America. Particular attention will be placed on the role of racial and gender performances within "The Western" genre as both a founding American myth and a component of the Hollywood film system. We will analyze both the classic Western as well as revisionist films. Additionally, we will investigate how the genre transforms as it moves into other media, including fine art, television, gaming, and other digital contexts.