Summer 2026 Undergraduate Courses

CIN220H1S - Animated Horror

Day and time: Tuesday and Thursday 10:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Nikole McGregor
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations

What is more terrifying: a body that dies, or a body that was never alive yet moves anyway?

Animation does not just show death; it makes death perform. Every time a drawn figure moves, it enacts animation's fundamental paradox: bringing life to the inherently lifeless, making the dead move. This is why animation might be horror's perfect medium: where live-action horror has to convince us the impossible is happening, animated horror lives, thrives, and expands in impossibility. In its realm, a stop-motion puppet's jerky movement is not a technical limitation but the entire point. Hand-drawn bodies do not just transform; they exist in a constant state of transformation. When experimental filmmakers use mixed-media techniques, they are not fragmenting reality so much as revealing that reality was fragmented all along. This course explores why horror works differently in animated form by looking at how animation's materials and techniques embody fear. Through international screenings—from Jiří Barta's Gothic The Pied Piper (Czechoslovakia, 1986) to Satoshi Kon's psychological thriller Perfect Blue (Japan, 1997), the political nightmare The Wolf House (Chile, 2018), and Mariusz Wilczyński's grief-soaked Kill It and Leave This Town (Poland, 2020)—you’ll see how animation gives form to things that resist realistic representation: psychological fracture, historical trauma, political repression, body horror, and the unsettling fact that some objects move when they absolutely shouldn’t.

CIN321H1S - Laughing Ourselves Mad

Day and time: Monday and Wednesday 10:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Tamar Hanstke
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations

Historically, it has been all too common for mainstream American comedy films and television shows to invite viewers to laugh at characters depicted as living with a mental illness. In contrast, the past two decades of American filmmaking have seen a promising shift in this trajectory, with more comedy films and TV shows instead figuring characters living with mental illness as protagonists for the audience to laugh with. In this course, we will watch a representative selection of such media texts, including select episodes from the TV shows Adventure Time (2010-2018), Bojack Horseman (2014-2020), and WandaVision (2021); films such as The Skeleton Twins (2014), Swiss Army Man (2016), Ingrid Goes West (2017), and A Real Pain (2024); and some examples of relevant stand-up comedy performed by comedians openly living with a mental illness and/or neurodivergence, such as Pete Davidson. The accompanying course readings will support us in analyzing such popular depictions of mental illness and neurodivergence through a critical and theoretical lens derived from Critical Disability Studies (CDS), as well as Mad Studies, a recent field derived from CDS principles that more radically centers “Mad” (or mentally ill and neurodivergent) perspectives.

Further, we will consider the culturally contested relationship between comedy and mental illness, and how comedy can raise many important questions about our understanding of mental health: When is it appropriate to joke about mental illness? What are the responsibilities of a comedian, self-identified as living with a mental illness, when they make jokes about their own experiences with mental health? How might comedy, sometimes theorized as a chaotic force that can reveal hidden contradictions in a society, be used as a radical tool for critiquing the social marginalization of mental illness? How might we identify the line between laughing with a fictional mentally ill character, and laughing at them, and how do we reconcile the possibility that this line does not exist in the exact same place for all spectators? The familiarity and fun of comedy as a genre will serve as a jumping-off point for a semester of learning how to discuss the convergence of mental illness and popular media with both sensitivity and open, honest sincerity. In essence: Get ready for six weeks of laughing ourselves Mad.

CIN240H1F - Global Film Musical

Day and time: Monday and Wednesday 10:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Jixin Jia
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 3. Society and its Institutions

What counts as a film musical—and what changes when we stop treating it as a Hollywood-only genre? Why do song-and-dance numbers feel like they can suspend ordinary time, reorganize space, and pull a crowd into the same mood? How do music, choreography, and camera movement steer attention and desire, and what happens to the “star voice” when performance depends on playback, dubbing, or multilingual address? Most film histories tell the musical through a familiar Hollywood arc: studio-era invention, mid-century refinement, then the much-discussed “boom and bust” of the 1960s. But that story looks different the moment we broaden the scope. In the very decade when the Hollywood musical is often said to decline, other traditions are thriving and mutating: think Jacques Demy’s candy-colored melancholy in France, and the continuing power of popular Hindi cinema. Taking the musical seriously as a global, traveling mode doesn’t just add more titles to the list; it changes what we think the musical is, what it can do, and where its history is happening.

Across four units, we track how musicals build collective feeling in very different settings. Unit 1 begins with classic Hollywood and asks how “integration” works—how numbers fit or misfit into narrative, romance, and comedy (Love Me Tonight [1932], Show Boat [1936], The Band Wagon [1953]). Unit 2 goes to the other side of the Iron Curtain and considers what can the musical do for mass address and propaganda, and how do actors’ bodies move differently when they stand for “the people” (Jolly Fellows [1934], The East Is Red [1965]). Unit 3 turns to (post)colonial modernities and Asian commercial cinemas, asking how the musical negotiates class aspiration, different musical traditions, and industry-specific star systems—from Hindi cinema to Hong Kong huangmei opera films (Awaara [1951], Pyaasa [1957], The Wild, Wild Rose [1960], The Love Eterne [1963]). Unit 4 explores gender play, camp, and feminist/auteur reworkings of the musical, asking how performance becomes a space for women’s desire and queer self-fashioning; and how genre conventions shift when filtered through art-cinema sensibilities (Victor/Victoria [1982], Golden Eighties [1986], The Hole [1998]).

CIN340H1S - Film Censorship

Day and Time: Tuesday and Thursday 19:00 - 21:00
Instructor: Dalia Hatalova
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations

Our implicit knowledge of film censorship norms enables us to make sense of seemingly puzzling moments in cinema. In the Hollywood classic Casablanca (1942), the two protagonists, Rick and Ilsa, embrace and share a kiss in a darkly lit room. The scene changes to a view of a tall tower outside of their window before returning us to the same room where Rick is now smoking and Ilsa is sitting on a sofa. What has transpired in this unrepresented segment of time, and how do we instinctively make meaning of this absence as viewers? How do we intuitively know that something occurred in a narrative without seeing it? The Classical Hollywood period gave rise to these forms of "coded" representation, enabling viewers to draw on their knowledge of social contexts as they read into and through the suggestions in scenes. Yet the censorship of moving images and resultant encrypted images is far from confined to American cinema.

In the global sphere, censorship demonstrates the entanglement of cinematic aesthetics with industrial economic interests, social movements, and state power. This course will begin with an overview of Hollywood’s regulatory history, followed by case studies of individual films and nationally specific censorship systems in the second half of the term. We will explore why we are so concerned about moving image representations that we subject them to continual regulation, examining films as distinct as Grigori Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga (Soviet Union, 1938), Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay’s Old Temple (India, 1984), and Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly (Iran, 2009). The historical and theoretical grounding of the course will foster students' ability to read moving images through the analytical lens of censorship studies. Students will also have the option to conduct independent research on regions/eras of regulation that interest them.

Lectures will be available only as online synchronous at their scheduled times. Assigned film and media will be available for students to view online asynchronously. Students will be expected to watch assigned films and media prior to class meetings. Students must have a computer with a microphone and camera in order to participate in online activities.

CIN260H1F - Brain Rot Cinema

Day and Time: Monday and Wednesday 19:00 - 21:00
Instructor: Ben Kiem
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations

Trailer for CIN260H1F - Brain Rot Cinema

In December of 2024, Oxford named “brain rot” as their Word of the Year. They define brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.” Notably, brain rot refers to both the material being consumed and a negative affect of consuming that material – the media itself and its audience reception.

We will focus on films that portray “media anxieties” – experiences of new media as uncertain, unknown, threatening, alluring. This class will be structured chronologically, and we will trace the ways in which cinema has grappled with emerging screen technologies in order to historically contextualize how anxieties like “brain rot” have been present from the beginning of the medium. Films from the silent era, such as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), and Modern Times (1936) will help us to think about cinema as a new and anxious medium. Later films such as Peeping Tom (1960), The Conversation (1974), Network (1976) and Videodrome (1983) will allow us to examine anxieties about increased surveillance technologies and television, where a screen anxiety enters the home. Finally, we will consider the internet and smartphones, a screen anxiety on our desks and our pockets, looking at films like Perfect Blue (1997), Pulse (2001), Ingrid Goes West (2017), We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), and Red Rooms (2023), considering how notions of media anxieties continue to shape our experience today. We will consider questions such as: Is “brain rot” a unique phenomenon born from a world shaped by the internet and screens? How is our experience of the world mediated by images, by representations, by the virtual, by technologies, by machines? How are these experiences of screen anxieties shaped by gender, race, colonialism, and capitalism? How does cinema itself reflect back to us a mediated experience of the world, a world shaped by cinema? How do cinema and other technologies affect our nervous systems? What is the history of media anxieties, moral panics, real or imagined, that appear alongside new technologies?

Lectures will be available only as online synchronous at their scheduled times. Assigned film and media will be available for students to view online asynchronously. Students will be expected to watch assigned films and media prior to class meetings. Students must have a computer with a microphone and camera in order to participate in online activities.

CIN360H1F - Sound in Cinema

Day and time: Tuesday and Thursday 10:00 - 14:00
Instructor: Lawrence Garcia
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 2. Thought, Belief and Behaviour

It is often said that film is a visual medium. This course begins from the hypothesis that this claim is false—or at least partially so—and contends that cinema is in fact irreducibly audio-visual. Guided by Michel Chion’s counterintuitive formulation that “There is no soundtrack,” we will start from the assumption that we cannot study a film’s sound independently of the image—and that, conversely, we cannot study a film’s image on its own. Throughout the course, we will see how this seemingly simple formulation has manifold consequences for all aspects of film study: its history, aesthetics, politics, and poetics.

The course will be structured roughly chronologically, in order to provide a historical picture of how various technologies and filmmaking innovations have shaped the use of sound across cinema history—such as the advent of sound-on-film in the 1920s, and Dolby in the 1970s. But rather than confine ourselves to a specific period, genre, or national cinema, this course will take stock of the inventive ways that sound has been used across cinema history, looking at how diverse filmmakers have explored various dimensions of film sound. We will look at off-screen sound in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) and the use of voiceover in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). We will consider how sound works in comedies (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, 1953) and horror-thrillers (The Birds, 1963), documentaries (The Thin Blue Line, 1988) and experimental films (Free Radicals, 1958). We will even examine how filmmakers use sound to explore the intricacies of colonial and post-colonial relations in specific local contexts, in such films as Emitaï (Ousmane Sembène, 1971), India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975), and Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012). By the end of the course, students will be able to identify key points of transformation in the history of film sound, as well as gain an aesthetic and formal appreciation of all that film sound can do.

CIN378Y0 - Aspects of a National Cinema: Black Britain

This course is offered through the Summer Abroad program. Please refer to their website for details. 

This course explores Black British cinemas while examining categories of race and nation specific to post-Imperial Britain and its Black diasporic subjects’ world-making. Institutional practices and networks that have shaped the development and aesthetics of Black British film culture from the 1960s to the present, will be highlighted, when, in the words of Stuart Hall, filmmakers sought to “find a new language” to challenge post-war norms and culture that led to seismic shifts towards imagining postcolonial Britain. Studying Black British media on UK soil offers the opportunity to be immersed in the cultural ethos of Black Britain. We will experience locales and re-visit histories that, in part, inform deeper understanding of the unique film and moving-image practices under study. Topics will include London as a postimperial migrant city, “political Blackness,” Black Power and black music’s transnational remit, Black film collectives, among other topics. Media objects will range from documentary, Art cinema, television, to moving image installations.

Day and time: TBA
Instructor: Kass Banning
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations