To register for graduate courses, please contact the Graduate Assistant at gradcinema.studies@utoronto.ca.
For students from outside of Cinema Studies, please inquire about spaces in these courses in August.
For all room information, please consult ACORN in August each year after registration and course enrolment.
2025-26
Master of Arts Core Courses
CIN1101HF - Theories and Practices of the Cinema
FALL | Mondays 3-5, Wednesdays 11-1 | Kass Banning
Organized around a series of issues that have incited ongoing discussion and debate among scholars, cultural critics, and filmmakers, this course takes a topical approach to the study of film theory. In the process it both revisits some of the most canonical texts in the field and attends to more recent attempts to think through our contemporary moment, when digitality and transnationalism are radically changing the nature of film as well as the manner in which it is produced, distributed, exhibited, and viewed. Among those issues to be discussed are medium specificity, spectatorship, narrativity, affect, and the relationship between aesthetics, economics, and politics.
CIN1102HS - Key Developments in Film History
WINTER | Tuesdays 3-5, Wednesdays 3-5 | Nic Sammond
This course will examine a limited number of important developments in the history of cinematic media. It will extend the in-depth study of these developments in technique, technology, and text to include considerations of the sociocultural forces, economics, theories of the cinematic and aesthetics that have played a role in their development, or in the ways in which we have studied them. The course will cover a wide range of distinct time periods, geographical areas, and stylistic tendencies, and will engage with a range of scholarly approaches to key developments in cinematic media. The course aims to ensure that students' knowledge of the history of film and media is enhanced, and that they have the opportunity to engage more critically with the issues surrounding the historical study of cinema and related media that are of interest and importance to them.
CIN1006Y - Major Research Paper in Cinema Studies
SUMMER
This course provides each student with the opportunity to write a major research paper on a topic to be devised in consultation with an individual member of the Cinema Studies core faculty. Students will be encouraged to make use of the special collections housed with the Media Commons as the basis for their research projects.
CIN1007Y - Internship in Cinema Studies
SUMMER
A variety of placement settings connected to film culture. Each placement will entail some form of film-related research and/or examination of / participation in how organizations use and study film and disseminate it within a broader cultural field. Students will produce a report at the end of their internship outlining the learning experience and the implications for research and film scholarship.
Doctor of Philosophy Core Courses
CIN2101HF - Pressures on the Cinematic
FALL | Mondays 5-7, Wednesdays 3-5 | Angelica Fenner
This course examines a range of factors that shape and contest the field of cinema studies. It maintains a focus on pressures exerted on our conception of what constitutes “cinema” as they are inflected in current scholarly debates, including institutional pressures on steady and gainful employment in the field. Rapid changes in technology; shifts in modes of delivery; individual, embodied, and communal spectatorial practices, experiences and uses of cinema; globalization and industrial consolidation—all of these forces work to alter both the forms of cinematic media and their place in social, cultural, and political life. This course will study how cinema’s mutable nature remains a central issue in debates about medium specificity, the role and toll of digitalization, and the shapes and purposes of different viewing communities, among other topics.
CIN2999HF - Research Seminar
FALL | Thursdays 1-3 | Sara Saljoughi
This course is required of all second-year PhD students in the Cinema Studies Institute. Structured as a workshop, it aims to develop students' skills for surviving and thriving in the doctoral program, as researchers and teachers in the fields of cinema and media studies, and as professionals in the academy and beyond.
In 2025, we will ask what it means to produce scholarly labour at this historical conjuncture. What is the status of the university? Why are we writing, and for whom? We will contend with these questions alongside workshops dedicated to the craft of writing, with a particular emphasis on process and the structure of a writing life.
Elective Courses
CIN1005HF - Special Studies in Cinema
FALL | Wednesdays 5-9 | Scott Richmond
Seminar format. Drawing on the scholarly interests of faculty, courses may include intermediality, film genres, corporeality, and transnationality.
Thinking Media and Reasoning Machines: The focus of this seminar is on the theoretical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of the blur between humans and machines. The goal of the seminar will be to articulate some of the analytical tools required to dwell in that blur. To situate and understand that blur, we will stage a series of historical encounters, from the 18th century through the end of the 20th, between of the critique of instrumental reason and the critique of the media machines that embody that reason. We will study the machines which seem to offer ways of turning the human into a machine: counting machines, androids, the cinema, and digital media. We will also study the history of the critique of machines that seem to think, or (and this is the same thing) the history of the idea that thinking can be made mechanical. Ultimately, we will aim understand the apparent convertability of the machine and the human, by investigating the ways philosophers, technologists, and artists have–in moods by turns delighted and terrified–theorized how the human is already machinic, and how machines might remake humanity in their own image.
• The main line of the course traces the philosophical and theoretical articulation of two twinned figures: the human made into machine, and the irreducible humanity of the human. Major figures from this intellectual history will include Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Sylvia Wynter, Donna Haraway, Paul Preciado, and Fred Moten. At the same time, as a history of technology and media, this course sets this intellectual history in relation to histories and analyses of particular machines and scenes of human/machine encounter: Charles Babbage’s counting machines and their ancestors; Soviet Futurist Cinema; Spacewar!, the first videogame; early “artificial intelligence” systems of the 1960s; and the history of Black androids.
• Students will pursue substantial semester-long research projects which develop case studies of their own devising. These projects will be scaffolded across the term.
CIN3006HF - Media and Philosophy
FALL | Tuesdays 5-9 | Brian Price
An in-depth examination of aspects of media and philosophy. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Character and Moral Philosophy: In this seminar, we will consider what it means to take character as a central concern in film viewing and analysis. By character I mean both the fictionalized beings enacted in film and television and the values we assess in our most basic and, I would argue, most important experience of cinematic fictions and everyday life: namely, what kind of person is this before me? How am I to value them? How, in other words, am I to assess their character and understand that character in relation to my own? What could it mean to have character? These are questions recently raised in a host of provocative ways about literature in Character: Three Inquiries into Literary Study by Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski and Toril Moi. It was also the subject of Murray Smith’s pioneering work on the subject in film studies, Engaging Characters. Among other questions, the authors of Character wonder why, for instance, we tend to regard character and characterization as if it were separable form style and form, and also why structure and ideology would be understood as antithetical to character. In bringing this question to back bear on film study, and in view of Murray Smith’s important work for film theory, my hypothesis is that the ontological concerns about fictional characters takes on an even greater significance for film especially as the skeptical strains of film theory tend to regard characters less often as persons than as subjects. In returning to the question of character, we will be read works in moral psychology, an important sub-field of moral philosophy; one that tends to complicate psychoanalytic discourses about subjects, drives and acts by tending to the psyche as something textured, complex, and not easily reducible to generalizations in and about being. We will consider the relation between value pluralism in our responses to characters. And to be clear, it will not be argued that style does not matter. Rather, it will be on us to understand—having considered, first, the question of character as a matter of value and then psychic complexity—how style may in fact be the ground of character, and so, being.
CIN3008HF - Topics in Film and Media History
FALL | Tuesdays 2-5, Thursdays 11-1 | Bliss Cua Lim
An in-depth examination of a specific topic in film and media history not covered by the core curriculum, such as Women’s Film Festivals, or Animals and Film. Content in any given year depends on the instructor.
Queer Asian Cinemas: This seminar begins by denaturalizing the seemingly self-evident phrase “Queer Asia,” foregrounding the noncongruence between multiple conceptual histories of Asia (a geopolitical imaginary structured by national, colonial, and decolonial forces) vis-a-vis contested notions of queerness (an identitarian term that sometimes shares the anti-identitarian impetus of transgender studies). As Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel point out, queer theory’s “studied avoidance of any engagement with area studies” leaves the US-centrism of its epistemologies unmarked. Alongside the recognition, then, that different contexts give rise to different Asianisms (e.g., a bulwark against Western hegemony in the late 19th century, versus a regional branding strategy in the 21st), the seminar also draws on inter-Asian cultural critique to dislodge Eurocentrism and what Kuan-Hsing Chen calls a “Northeast Asia-centric imagination” of Asia through an emphasis on local, transborder approaches.
Accordingly, the seminar covers canonical works (Farewell, My Concubine, Happy Together, and The Handmaiden) alongside lesser-known narrative films, documentaries, shorts, and experimental videos from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. In doing so, the course attends to the minor in queer Asian cinema, where ‘minor’ refers to an inflection within or at the margins of dominant norms, whether cinematic, sexual, gendered, geographical, political, ethnic, or linguistic. We consider how queer politics, religious agendas, and state regulation intersect across Hindu, Islamic, Catholic, and Communist contexts of film reception.
Throughout, we grapple with dynamics of naming, translation and untranslatability when considering a range of genders and sexualities. Diverse local practices, identities, and communities in Asia may recall LGBTQ+ categories familiar to North Americans; ultimately, however, they have cultural, historical, and sociopolitical specificities that are irreducible to these. This seminar is premised on the understanding that the global dominance of Anglophone queer and trans vocabularies make disparate social, sexual, and gender worlds provisionally intelligible without, however, presupposing their equivalence.
CIN3107HS - Topics in Politics and the Moving Image
WINTER | Tuesdays 5-9 | Meghan Sutherland
This course will introduce students to a wide variety of approaches to the study of film style and questions about the aesthetic experience of film: how film impacts the senses, how we understand film style in relation to other art forms, how notions of beauty in film raise related questions about race, gender, power, capital, and also autonomy.
Melodrama As Politics/Politics As Melodrama: The category of aesthetic form known as melodrama holds a strange distinction: it is defined above all by its excessive relation to most traditional categories of form. To call a film, a play, or even a person melodramatic is to evoke a sense of gendered overindulgence that is emotional, moral, and aesthetic all at once—one that reflects not only on the quality of the work or the person in question, but on the sensibility and judgment of the implicitly reactive, feminized audience that enjoys it. In other words, the term melodrama has often served a pejorative function in western culture, indicating an “over-the-top” display of female artifice, affect, and stylization that exploits only base and irrational people and feelings. This rather unusual aspect of the form has made it notoriously difficult for scholars to define, but it has also positioned the unstable category of entertainment known as melodrama at the center of debates about the politics of popular aesthetic form. While an important body of literary theory ties the politics of melodramatic form to the emergence of modern democracy writ large, and regards it as a medium through which the oppressed have found new modes of expression when silenced, many other traditions of critical thought point to the role the form has played in the historical construction of those very same oppressions, and regard the form as an exploitation of mass sentiment with grave implications for the disenfranchised people whose suffering it so often thematizes. The pivotal role the form plays in the feminist and queer film theory of the 1980’s and 1990’s, and the debates around the politics of aesthetic form this moment launched for the field more broadly, only further underscore the intractable nature of this debate. What has never been seriously in question is the political significance of melodrama itself—that it carries some volatile yet fundamental bond with that which exceeds, expands, forms, or contains the very limits of the social and its sufferings.
• This course will undertake an intensive exploration of the nature of this bond and its implications for contemporary understandings of the relation between politics, aesthetics, and affect—especially as they delimit the terrain of modern liberal democracy and its values. On the one hand, we will seek to form a more rigorous grasp of the theoretical and philosophical arguments that underpin this relation as it is conceptualized today, taking melodrama as a particularly formative medium for the discourse of aesthetic politics more broadly—one that pushes the very concept of aesthetic form to its limit, allowing it to morph into different configurations over time. On the other hand, however, we will consider what this genealogical examination of the relation between politics and melodrama stands to teach us about a phenomenon of contemporary political culture and media that simultaneously reproduces and transforms the basic coordinates of this relation on the terrain of digital media technology: namely, the rise of what is pejoratively referred to as “cancel culture,” “call-out culture,” “clap-back culture,” and so on, and the equally extreme displays of emotional and moral outrage it elicits in conservative “shock” media. Although a wide range of emergent frameworks for the study of new media technologies insist on the obsolescence of formalistic and subject-oriented approaches, we will take the twisting, ever-transforming limit case of aesthetic form instantiated by melodrama, and the excessive dynamics of affect, form, and morality that define it as such, as an opportunity to explore more fully what it means to talk about the politics of popular form today. Screenings will range from works of classical Hollywood cinema and global art film to YouTube rants and television news broadcasts, but with an emphasis on cinematic texts; readings will likewise move between an array of disciplinary formations, including film studies, critical race theory, continental philosophy, and political theory, but with a steady emphasis on the meeting point of affect and form. Throughout all of it, we will try to make sense of the liminal relation between politics, affect, and form that melodrama coordinates across these shifting configurations of popular discourse—and just as importantly, what to do about it now, both as scholars and political actors.
CIN6153HS - Race And Cinema
WINTER | Mondays 5-9 | Lauren Cramer
This course will consider the role race has played in defining film genres and film language. We will look primarily at American films, from the silent era to contemporary cinema and we will consider how the representation of race informs (or deforms) film narratives. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality intersect in film and film theory.
Black Studies in Cinema: Black Studies is an undisciplined project that centers black life as a way to, first, understand the relationship between blackness and the humanist subject and, second, coalesce around alternatives ways of living in and knowing the world. This seminar aims to identify the generative possibilities of utilizing this collection of theoretical and analytic tools in Cinema Studies. We will explore key concepts in Black Studies including black feminist thought, debates “between" Afro-pessimism and black optimism, black geographies, and the Black Radical Tradition with the aim of understanding the political potential of film aesthetics and filmmaking as an aesthetic practice. As we develop a sense of Black Studies as a field with overlapping and diverging methods, objects of study, and aims, this course will consider the implications of Black Studies' critique of disciplinarity for the field of Cinema Studies.
JFF1102HF - Animages-Animots-Animotions
FALL | Tuesdays 9-11, Thursdays 9-11 | James Cahill
(joint course with French; counts as a Cinema Studies course)
Animages, Animots, Animotions (Animals in Theory) tracks key debates in thinking about media through animals and animals through media, as well as the broader “animal turn” in French theory and cultural studies. Special attention is given to modernist, deconstructionist, materialist, feminist, queer, and posthumanist approaches to animals in theory and theoretical animals. Our enquiries will be organized around three key themes—animages (or animal images and questions of their epistemic and magical properties from Lascaux to modernist practice), animots (Derrida’s term for animal-words and the enframing of animal life within anthropocentric representational systems, as well as broader inquiries into the animations of language, metaphor, and figuration), and animotions (or the forms of movement, emotion, and affect expressed by or invested in animals and media). Through these themes we will track a triptych of questions: What can media teach us about animals (why and how we read with and look at animals on the page or on screen; how we represent, understand, and think with animals; what lessons or pleasures we gain or hope to gain from watching them)? What can animal media reveal or teach us about any given medium and forms of mediation, particularly the “electric animal” (to use Akira Mizuta Lippit’s term) known as cinema? What are the aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and political stakes of encounters between animals and media and how might they sensitize and sharpen our manners of thinking and approaching scholarly inquiry? Students can expect to encounter significant and emergent arguments in the field, work on their analytic and interpretive skills with textual and audiovisual materials, and rehearse high-level thought and the development of original interventions through two papers and a research presentation. Readings will include works by Daniel Arasse, Jean-Christophe Bailly, André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Vinciane Despret, Georges Didi-Huberman, Baptiste Morizot, Emanuel Levinas, Thangam Ravindranathan, Paul Valéry, and Simone Weil, among others. Screenings will likely include work by Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Jacques Perrin, Nagisa Oshima, Momoko Seto, Pierre Thévenard, and others. Readings will be in French and English translation. Work can be completed in French or English. Seminar in English.