Undergraduate Courses
FILM 152 Information, Ethics, and Society
Information Science is a multidisciplinary field that examines information systems in a broad array of social contexts, encompassing historical, cultural, economic, legal, and political perspectives. This introductory seminar provides in-depth study of contemporary information technologies, emphasizing their relationship with power dynamics and ethical considerations. After establishing a foundation in these areas, the course delves into diverse aspects of information including privacy, coloniality, inequality, labor, and the expansion of artificial intelligence. The concluding module applies these discussions to real-world scenarios, exploring how to address ethical and societal issues through legal and human rights frameworks, governance and regulation, and grassroots initiatives. This course is ideal for both computer science and engineering students looking for a socio-humanistic viewpoint on information technology, and humanities and social sciences students intrigued by the societal implications of computing and information.
FILM 160 Introduction to Media
Introduction to the long history of media. Focus on taken-for-granted infrastructures as the deep background for the digital age. History will be our major resource for understanding the present. We move through strategically selected case studies including technologies for controlling space and time, writing in its many forms, visual and auditory media, and digital media. Media theory will be taught alongside case studies.
FILM 162 Introductory Documentary Filmmaking
The art and craft of documentary filmmaking. Basic technological and creative tools for capturing and editing moving images. The processes of research, planning, interviewing, writing, and gathering of visual elements to tell a compelling story with integrity and responsibility toward the subject. The creation of nonfiction narratives. Issues include creative discipline, ethical questions, space, the recreation of time, and how to represent “the truth.”
Film 210 Philosophy of Digital Media
Discussion of fundamental and theoretical questions regarding media, culture, and society; the consequences of a computerized age; what is new in new media; and digital media from both philosophical and historical perspective, with focus on the past five decades. Topics include animals, democracy, environment, gender, globalization, mental illness, obscenity, piracy, privacy, the public sphere, race, religion, social media, terrorism, and war.
FILM 232 Classical Hollywood Narrative 1920–1960
Survey of Classical Hollywood films. Topics include history of the studio system; origin and development of genres; the film classics of the Classical Hollywood period, and the producers, screenwriters, directors, and cinematographers who created them.
FILM 243 Family in Greek Literature and Film
The structure and multiple appropriations of the family unit, with a focus on the Greek tradition. The influence of aesthetic forms, including folk literature, short stories, novels, and film, and of political ideologies such as nationalism, Marxism, and totalitarianism. Issues related to gender, sibling rivalry, dowries and other economic factors, political allegories, feminism, and sexual and social violence both within and beyond the family.
FILM 250 Introduction to Critical Data Studies
“Big data” has become a buzzword these days—but what is data? This course introduces the study of data and data technologies and techniques through a critical, anti-colonial lens with profound attention to the power dynamics that constitute what is today called “data.” From the seemingly opaque play of algorithms to artificial intelligence and surveillance systems, to digital media and the culture industries, various systems rely on the storage, transaction, classification, and exploitation of datasets. Data is, in short, both a medium that relies on and reconfigures power. This class discusses methods for the study of data technologies and techniques from multiple interdisciplinary humanities and social science perspectives. Through academic scholarship as well as art and data visualizations, students interrogate: How is data constituted through its entanglements with power? What is the relationship between data and social and material inequality? What methods can we use to study the making of data? How can we envision decolonial data technologies and techniques?
FILM 268 Platforms and Cultural Production
Platforms—digital infrastructures that serve as intermediaries between end-users and complementors—have emerged in various cultural and economic settings, from social media (Instagram), and video streaming (YouTube), to digital labor (Uber), and e-commerce (Amazon). This seminar provides a multidisciplinary lens to study platforms as hybrids of firms and multi-sided markets with unique history, governance, and infrastructures. The thematic sessions of this course discuss how platforms have transformed cultural production and connectivity, labor, creativity, and democracy by focusing on comparative cases from the United States and abroad. The seminar provides a space for broader discussions on contemporary capitalism and cultural production around topics such as inequality, surveillance, decentralization, and ethics. Students are encouraged to bring examples and case studies from their personal experiences.
Students previously enrolled in AMST 268 may not enroll in this course.
FILM 298 Digital War
From drones and autonomous robots to algorithmic warfare, virtual war gaming, and data mining, digital war has become a key pressing issue of our times and an emerging field of study. This course provides a critical overview of digital war, understood as the relationship between war and digital technologies. Modern warfare has been shaped by digital technologies, but the latter have also been conditioned through modern conflict: DARPA (the research arm of the US Department of Defense), for instance, has innovated aspects of everything from GPS, to stealth technology, personal computing, and the Internet. Shifting beyond a sole focus on technology and its makers, this class situates the historical antecedents and present of digital war within colonialism and imperialism. We will investigate the entanglements between technology, empire, and war, and examine how digital war—also sometimes understood as virtual or remote war—has both shaped the lives of the targeted and been conditioned by imperial ventures. We will consider visual media, fiction, art, and other works alongside scholarly texts to develop a multidiscpinary perspective on the past, present, and future of digital war.
1 credit for Yale College students
FILM 304 Japanese Cinema and Its Others
Critical inquiry into the myth of a homogeneous Japan through analysis of how Japanese film and media historically represents “others” of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and sexualities, including women, black residents, ethnic Koreans, Okinawans, Ainu, undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ minorities, the disabled, youth, and monstrous others like ghosts.
FILM 320 Close Analysis of Film
Close study of a range of major films from a variety of periods and places. Apart from developing tools for the close analysis of film, we consider such topics as genre and mode; the role of sound; cinema as a structure of gazes; remakes and adaptations; approaches to realism; narration and resistance to narration; film in relation to other moving image media; and the relationship of close analysis to historical contextualization and interpretation more generally.
Prerequisite: FILM 150.
FILM 345 Politics of East Asian Digital Media Culture
East Asian digital media culture, ranging from cinema, television, musical video, to online games, has (re)shaped the global and national/regional imaginings of East Asia. The Post-Cold War intensification of intra-Asian interactions has precipitated the rise of a Pan-Asian regional identity wherein the nation-state is not yet obsolete. What role does screen culture play in the border-crossing interplay among languages, ideologies, aesthetics, and affect? How do we understand the storytelling and politics of East Asian screen cultures in relation to its historical and social context? How does screen culture capture local/global desires in a digital time? Within the contemporary media ecologies, how does screen culture create an audiovisual relation that traverses screen and actuality? How do screen culture continue to push forward the history of transformation of sign system from the written words to visual moving images in the contemporary sensory over-loaded world of screens. This course deals with issues of (trans)nationalism, (un)translatability, locality and globality, (post)modernity, virtuality and actuality, and politics of gender. Students learn how to think and write about screen cultures of East Asia in particular and of contemporary screen culture in general.
FILM 350 Screenwriting
A beginning course in screenplay writing. Foundations of the craft introduced through the reading of professional scripts and the analysis of classic films. A series of classroom exercises culminates in intensive scene work.
Prerequisite: FILM 150. Not open to freshmen.
FILM 355 Intermediate Film Writing and Directing
In the first half of the term, students write three-scene short films and learn the tools and techniques of staging, lighting, and capturing and editing the dramatic scene. In the second half of the term, students work collaboratively to produce their films. Focus on using the tools of cinema to tell meaningful dramatic stories.
Priority to majors in Art and in Film & Media Studies. Prerequisites: ART 241.
FILM 356 Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking
Students explore the storytelling potential of the film medium by making documentaries an art form. The class concentrates on finding and capturing intriguing, complex scenarios in the world and then adapting them to the film form. Questions of truth, objectivity, style, and the filmmaker’s ethics are considered by using examples of students’ work. Exercises in storytelling principles and screenings of a vast array of films mostly made by independent filmmakers from now to the beginning of the last century.
Limited enrollment. Priority to majors in Art and in Film & Media Studies. Prerequisites: ART 141 or 142.
FILM 395 Intermediate Screenwriting
A workshop in writing short screenplays. Frequent revisions of each student’s script focus on uniting narrative, well-delineated characters, dramatic action, tone, and dialogue into a polished final screenplay.
Prerequisite: FILM 350. Priority to majors in Film & Media Studies.
FILM 397 Writing about the Performing Arts
Introduction to journalistic reporting on performances as current events, with attention to writing in newspapers, magazines, and the blogosphere. The idea of the audience explored in relation to both a live act or screening and a piece of writing about such an event. Students attend screenings and live professional performances of plays, music concerts, and dance events. Formerly ENGL 244.
Film 401 Writing Screenplay Adaptations
A workshop on the art of screenplay adaptation. Students read short stories, novels, and non-fiction; the screenplays based on that source material; and view and analyze the final product, the films themselves. Instruction focuses on the form, economy, and structure specific to screenwriting. Weekly writing exercises supplement the creation of a final project: a short screenplay based on source material of the student’s choosing.
Previous experience in writing for film or stage would be advantageous but is not required. Restricted to juniors and seniors, or by permission of the instructor.
FILM 403 Scared to Death: Fear, Threats, and Media
Fear is a dominant political, cultural, social, and economic force today. However, its importance is often overlooked, especially in film and media studies. While recent work has looked at our positive affective relationships with media, including fandom and cinephilia, the fear of media has been largely ignored. Yet, media are deeply accomplice of social anxieties. On the one hand, as they try to respond to and to resist these anxieties, they register and disseminate them. Media are often amplifiers of social distress. On the other hand, their action raises fears, either because they display aggressive behavior, or because they produce addiction – not to say the cases in which media break moral norms, make us to lose our sense of reality, or are instrumental of forms of bullying. Media can be improper weapons. This lecture course considers how media and fear intersect, asking both how technology mediates fear and how fear shapes our engagement with media. To this end, the course is broken into two main units. In the first, “Fearing Media,” we look at media as objects of fear, due to their nature as technological, modern, ephemeral, unfamiliar, attractive, and pervasive objects. In the second, “Fears in the Age of Medias,” we analyze how fear has historically circulated and how media have conveyed and transformed this emotion. In order to better explore fear as a concept and as an object of experience, every week we present both a theoretical framework and a case study. At the same time, we discuss forms of protection–including those provided by the so-called protective media–against the threats that media intercept and amplify. Readings include not only academic papers but also op-eds and articles in both print and digital publications.
FILM 414 Jazz and African-American Historical Representations in American Films
This course deals with the presence of jazz music in American cinema, mainly in Hollywood films. Beyond considering the role of major jazzmen and jazzwomen in films such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monks, Lena Horne, etc., we also analyze how jazz and African Americans are represented in Hollywood films featuring this music as a focal point or as musical accompaniment. Jazz music has served historically as a medium for early African-American presence in Hollywood films, via musical numbers and performances (Duke Ellington orchestra, the Nicholas Brothers, etc.), all while conforming to the demands of major film companies. During WWII, wartime films saw in jazz the opportunity to convey consent and support for the war (Birth of the Blues, Blues in the Night, Syncopation). By exploring films from the 1930s to the 1970s, and cross-examining essays by Paul Gilroy, Krin Gabbard, and others, this course calls into question these attempts and investigates the early silencing, instrumentalization, and reappropriation processes commonly characteristics of Hollywood. We contextualize this filmography by comparing it with films made by African-American film directors and analyzing their use of jazz music. The course illustrates how jazz music embodies a formal and political counter-power, evident through its themes and compositions, and demonstrates how films such as The Cry of Jazz, or The Connection capture this spirit.
FILM 423 Documentary and the Environment
Survey of documentaries about environmental issues, with a focus on Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Food, Inc. (2009), GasLand (2010), and related films. Brief historical overview, from early films such as The River (1937) to the proliferation of environmental film festivals.
FILM 434 Archive Aesthetics and Community Storytelling
This production course explores strategies of archive aesthetics and community storytelling in film and media. It allows students to create projects that draw from archives—including news sources, personal narratives, and found archives—to produce collaborative community storytelling. Conducted as a production workshop, the course explores the use of archives in constructing real and fictive narratives across a variety of disciplines, such as—participants create and develop autobiographies, biographies, or fiction-based projects, tailored to their own work in film/new media around Natalie Goldberg’s concept that “our lives are at once ordinary and mythical.”
FILM 456 Documentary Film Workshop
A yearlong workshop designed primarily for majors in Film and Media Studies or American Studies who are making documentaries as senior projects.
Seniors in other majors admitted as space permits.
FILM 457 Italian Film from Postwar to Postmodern
A study of important Italian films from World War II to the present. Consideration of works that typify major directors and trends. Topics include neorealism, self-reflexivity and metacinema, fascism and war, and postmodernism. Films by Fellini, Antonioni, Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Wertmuller, Tornatore, and Moretti. Films in Italian with English subtitles. This course counts as a LxC course.
FILM 471 Independent Directed Study
For students who wish to explore an aspect of film and media studies not covered by existing courses. The course may be used for research or directed readings and should include one lengthy essay or several short ones as well as regular meetings with the adviser. To apply, students should present a prospectus, a bibliography for the work proposed, and a letter of support from the adviser to the director of undergraduate studies. Term credit for independent research or reading may be granted and applied to any of the requisite areas upon application and approval by the director of undergraduate studies.
FILM 484 Advanced Film Writing and Directing
A yearlong workshop designed primarily for majors in Art and in Film & Media Studies making senior projects. Each student writes and directs a short fiction film. The first term focuses on the screenplay, production schedule, storyboards, casting, budget, and locations. In the second term students rehearse, shoot, edit, and screen the film.
Priority to majors in Art and in Film & Media Studies. Prerequisite: ART 341.
FILM 488 Advanced Screenwriting
Students write a feature-length screenplay. Emphasis on multiple drafts and revision. Admission in the fall term based on acceptance of a complete step-sheet outline for the story to be written during the coming year.
Primarily for Film & Media Studies majors working on senior projects. Prerequisite: FILM 395 or permission of instructor.
FILM 492 The Senior Essay
An independent writing and research project. A prospectus signed by the student’s adviser must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of the term in which the essay project is to commence. A rough draft must be submitted to the adviser and the director of undergraduate studies approximately one month before the final draft is due. Essays are normally thirty-five pages long (one term) or fifty pages (two terms).
FILM 494 The Senior Project
For students making a film or video, either fiction or nonfiction, as their senior project. Senior projects require the approval of the Film and Media Studies Committee and are based on proposals submitted at the end of the junior year. An interim project review takes place at the end of the fall term, and permission to complete the senior project can be withdrawn if satisfactory progress has not been made. For guidelines, consult the director of undergraduate studies.
Does not count toward the fourteen courses required for the major when taken in conjunction with FILM 455, 456 or FILM 483, 484.