2026/27 Cinema Studies (CIN) undergraduate courses will take place in person except for one online synchronous course: CIN411H1S - Chinese Action Film.
Group A: Foundations
CIN105Y1Y - Introduction to Film StudyIntroduction to film analysis; concepts of film style and narrative. Topics include: documentary, avant-garde, genres, authorship, ideology, and representation. CIN105Y1 course trailer Students must enrol in one Lecture (LEC), one Tutorial (TUT) and one Practicum (PRA). Day and Time:
Instructor: James Cahill |
CIN201Y1Y - Film Cultures IEmergence of cinema from its start until the dismantling of the studio system and an emergent internationalism in the early 1960s. Examines the practices and theories underlying the development of cinema as a mass medium in the 20th century. Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC), the Practicum (PRA), and one Tutorial (TUT). Day and time:
Instructor: Grant Wiedenfeld |
CIN301Y1Y - Film Cultures IIExamines film theory and practice from the 1950s onward, and the impact of media change on earlier film cultures and aesthetics. Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC), the Practicum (PRA) and one Tutorial (TUT). Day and time:
Instructor: Scott Richmond |
Group B: Genre and Modes
CIN210H1F - Horror FilmHorror film as a genre, focusing on three types of international horror: the un-dead, body horror, and the supernatural. The genre's popular appeal, affective power, unique means of producing pleasure, and current global resurgence will be emphasized. Topics include: the aesthetics of gore and violence, technologies of fear, J-Horror, new French extremity, cult fandom and paracinema, and media convergence. Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC), the Practicum (PRA) and one Tutorial (TUT). Day and Time:
Instructor: Justin J. Morris |
CIN213H1S - Sex on FilmCIN213H1S course trailer When the film philosopher Stanley Cavell remarked that the cinematic medium is “inherently pornographic,” he echoed a history of thinkers who had observed an intrinsic connection between cinema and sex. Cinema’s original claim to “show it all” through the power of photographic likeness appeared most dangerously fulfilled in the display of sex and sexuality on screen. American film in the twentieth century is often organized around the adoption and dissolution of censorship code and law, and so it is no exaggeration to say that the development of the cinema was profoundly directed by the stakes of putting sex on film. This course will be an introduction to major movements and fields of sexual representation in Western cinema. We will explore films that shape our understanding of what sex is or could be, and the historical, normative, and ethical currents that determine how sex is both shown and hidden in film. Representations of sex in the cinema take us to the limits of our own values and taste, and they hold up a mirror that at once reveals and estranges our sense of how we move through the world and experience it with others. How does sex preside over our understanding of human life, and how does the cinema speak publicly to experiences so often rendered private? We will draw back the covers and find out. Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC), the Practicum (PRA) and one Tutorial (TUT). Day and time:
Instructor: Roshaya Rodness |
CIN216H1S - Crime Film TraditionsOriginating in the mid-19th century from journalistic accounts and detective stories, crime fiction has emerged as one of the dominant popular genres in the 20th century across a variety of media and platforms, from true crime dime novels to radio dramas, from hard-boiled literature to prestige television series. Rejuvenated in the 21st century by the consolidation of gaming culture and the rise of podcasting, crime narratives have expanded to transmediality, stretching the boundaries between fiction and documentary practices. In this context, the culturally porous and generically elastic crime film had remained one of the most enduring cinematic expressions of sociopolitical anxieties related to class, gender, race, and ethnicity. This course examines a selection of crime film traditions across various geographical areas and historical periods, investigating the resilience of this form from the silent period to the present day. Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC), the Practicum (PRA), and one Tutorial (TUT). Day and time:
Instructor: Brett Story |
CIN220H1F - Asian AnimationMore information to come. Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC), the Practicum (PRA), and one Tutorial (TUT). Day and time:
Instructor: Bliss Lim |
CIN312Y1Y - Documentary FilmThis course introduces students to the history and theory of documentary film. It studies the origins and development of several distinctive types of nonfiction filmmaking such as cinéma vérité, direct cinema, the essay film, the portrait film, rockumentary, and mockumentary (among others), while at the same time situating such production in its political-economic, institutional, and international contexts. The course also investigates documentary film, video, and television production in terms of its variable epistemological claims; its frequently contentious relation to realism; its paradoxical involvement with reenactment and fabrication; its particular modes of address to a variety of publics; and the ethics and politics of its work as propagandist and/or activist. Throughout this course, we attempt to understand historical changes in the global production and reception of nonfiction media, and we conclude with a survey of present-day digital technologies (new devices for image and sound recording, emergent platforms for sharing audiovisual artifacts, etc.) and ongoing disruptions to established conceptions of documentary production, distribution, and reception. Day and time: Tuesday 17:00 - 20:00, Thursday 18:00 - 20:00 |
CIN320H1F - Sports MoviesSports movies concern life off the field more than the game itself. This course is a critical study of sport and how cinema inflects its sociopolitical meaning. In particular, we will examine the role that affirmative genre cinema can play in democratic culture, informed by Hannah Arendt's concept of action that relates body to community. Within film studies, sports movies challenge the semantic/syntactic view of genre because they span from romantic, comedy, realist drama, and biopic to documentary. Screenings will survey the genre's history and highlight contemporary features; titles may include Challengers (2024), Creed (2015), Rudo y Cursi (2008), Offside (2006), Lagaan (2001), Ali (2001), Slap Shot (1977), and This Sporting Life (1963). Day and time: Tuesday 9:00 - 11:00, Wednesday 9:00 - 11:00 |
CIN321H1F - Experimental FilmMore information to come. Day and time: Friday 13:00 - 17:00 |
CIN411H1S - Chinese Action FilmMore information to come. This seminar is online synchronous. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Tuesday 18:00 - 20:00, Wednesday 18:00 - 20:00 |
CIN412H1S - Post-War Hollywood CinemaMore information to come. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Tuesday 11:00 - 13:00, Thursday 13:00 - 15:00 |
CIN420H1F - Expanded Cinema: Moving Images in the GalleryThis 400-level seminar provides a critical context to explore the rise of gallery-based moving image installations, and to consider distinctive features and particular relevance of these practices in terms of aesthetics, politics and looking relations. Conceptualizing cinema’s migration into the gallery – to include its multi-screen potential beyond single-screen projection– will entail study of how screen-based installation’s temporal and affective affordances engender unique forms of visuality and spectatorship. Through various optics we will examine video installation’s capacity to provoke sensory encounters in gallery space: cinematic, philosophical, architectural, and art historical. To this end, we will study moving image installation’s precedents – from early forms of expanded cinema to the essay film, as well as returning to generative heuristics such as montage, assemblage, the interval, the fold, immersion, the archive, tableau and stillness, hauntology, and relationality, often in tandem with Black practice. Lastly, through select case studies of individual artists’ works, we will examine the claim that installation’s unique charge of the real affords a means to not only rethink moving images’ aesthetic and political potential, but to think through the commonplace that the moving image comprises thought. Studying screen-based installation’s aesthetic, political, and cultural dimensions will help us account for its proliferation within museum, art gallery and global art Biennale contexts, with its increasingly transnational audience and diversified exhibition design. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Friday 13:00 - 16:00 |
Group C: Social and Cultural Practices
CIN230H1S - The Business of FilmNOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING,” said the Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman about the film industry. In light of the past year’s events, Goldman’s oft-quoted maxim rings truer than ever. How do we teach, develop an attended course about the business of film—always considered an inexact science in the context of academia— when that business is currently in an intense and paradoxical state of mutation and paralysis? The history of cinema has always been one of industrial, technological and economic upheavals, but Covid-19 has written its own chapter in that history; a case could be made, in fact, that the entire course could be changed to reflect everything that’s happened since March of 2020, when a group of Business of Film students were confronted with a series of radical changes to teaching, assignments, and the field of study in real time. Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC), and the Practicum (PRA) Day and time:
Instructor: Adam Nayman |
CIN339H1S - Adult Film HistoriesFrom the birth of cinema and the legal emergence of “hardcore” to the rise of the internet, adult film covers a broad span of periods, genres, geographies, venues, and technical formats: stag and grindhouse films, peepshows, sexploitation films, avant‐garde cinema, “Golden Age” pornography, video, animation, adult theatres, and digital contexts. This course offers a critical and historical survey of adult films in social, legal, technical, and political contexts of production, consumption, and circulation. The course balances global and U.S. perspectives with attention to entanglements of race, class, gender, sexuality, feminism,1 and labor. Course content augmented by guest lectures from the adult industry. Day and Time: Friday 13:00 - 17:00 |
CIN340H1F - Bad KidsCIN340H1F course trailer Sigmund Freud made his famously provocative comment that “the sexual instinct of children proves in fact to be polymorphously perverse” only ten years after the birth of cinema. If at the turn of the century both cinema and children were birthed into an era bent on discovering the strange recesses of human life, it is hardly surprising to find a range of films that explore and produce unsanctioned childhoods. Freud did not mean that children possessed adult sexuality; rather, his observation explains a range of behaviours, desires, aggressions, needs, and fixations that don’t conform to a sentimentalized view of childhood development. After all, kids are weird. The postwar invention of the teenager, the expansion of the child welfare system, the emergence of the age-based MPAA ratings system, and the creation of the teen market for cinema are each products of the re/dis-appearance of childhood in modernity. Childhood innocence is deployed as a regulatory norm, and yet children aren’t always who we want them to be. This course treats films that follow the variously dark, complicated, unexpected, or troubling figures of the child and the adolescent. Through genres like the horror, the social-problem film, the coming-of-age drama, and the thriller, it identifies films that trouble the child’s own figuration of development, social stability, futurity, and nature. It asks what the adult’s interest might be in calling a child bad and why some filmmakers look to childhood to visualize nonnormative lives. Students can expect to discuss films that feature the queer child, the problem child, the monstrous child, the rebel, the abused child, the child at war, and youth subculture, and read a range of theoretical texts. This course looks to the postwar cinema as a source of uncompromising interest in the unruly worlds of kids. Day and Time: Wednesday and Thursday 13:00 - 15:00 |
CIN341H1S - Trans Cinema and MediaWho are the subjects of trans studies? What are interests of trans cinema? To what extent is trans not only an identity, and what might it mean to think of trans cinema as offering a methodology, or pedagogy of becoming? This course introduces and explores the representation of trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming identities, experiences, and narratives in cinema and media. Through an interdisciplinary lens, we will critically consider films, television, documentaries, digital media, and social media content, while exploring the historical, social, and cultural contexts of transgender representation. We will examine both mainstream media and works from independent filmmakers, alongside the contributions of trans artists, to assess how trans people are depicted, who gets to tell their stories, and how these portrayals affect the larger sociopolitical discourses around transgender identity. The course will provide tools for critical media literacy and engage students in thoughtful discussions about the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class as they are reflected in and shaped by media. Students will also have the opportunity to engage in creative projects, discussions, and research that contribute to the ongoing conversation surrounding transgender representation in media. Trans Cinema and Media will familiarize students with the history of the field of trans studies, its convergence with the study of cinema, genealogies of trans terms, and differing disciplinary approaches within trans studies to questions of power, gender, race, and sexuality. Day and time: Monday 13:00 - 15:00, Thursday 11:00 - 13:00 |
CIN349H1Y - ScreenwritingStudents will develop screenwriting skills under the guidance of a renowned Canadian screenwriter through a combination of writing workshops and individual consultations. Like the course, the appointment of the Universal Screenwriter-in-Residence occurs biannually. Prospective students must submit an application form that will be found at Cinema Studies Institute Undergraduate Forms and provide a creative writing sample to the Cinema Studies Undergraduate Office by email to cinema.studies@utoronto.ca by May 1. A screenplay (or excerpt) is preferred, but a submission that the students feel best expresses their talent is also acceptable. The course instructor and/or Undergraduate Coordinator will assess student potential based on the writing samples to determine student eligibility to enrol in the course. Enrolment priority will be given to upper year Cinema Studies program students. Day and time: Friday 10:00 - 13:00 in Fall 2026 term |
CIN431H1F - Cinema That Doesn't WorkCinema has a fraught relationship to work. Is watching—or making—moving image media more of a labor or a leisure? And how do the locations and contexts in which we make and encounter moving images influence our consideration of this question? Do cinema studies majors just sit around watching movies, or do they do real scholastic work? For the Ancient Greeks, leisure was the opposite of work, but it was not the same as play. To be at leisure was to live a life of contemplative study. In this course, we will explore how cinema and cinema studies has historically absorbed and reflected these questions, and we will consider the ways that questions about the boundaries between work and play also reflect anxieties about constructing and maintaining boundaries of race, class, and gender. We will track cinema’s rise to the status of a medium worthy of analysis inside and outside the classroom and museum; examine cinematic depictions of downtime, idleness and leisure; explore various independent film movements’ relationship to the art of making cinema as acts of labor or devotion; consider recent non-productive formal and ethical approaches to cinema such as the slow cinema movement and queer/crip critiques of ableist cinema. We will also consider whether, in the age of communicative capitalism, we are ever really off-the-clock. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Monday 10:00 - 14:00 |
CIN432H1F - Graphic!This is a course about vernacular media—the kind of media that get no respect, that most people don’t think of as art. The course explores the longstanding and constantly changing relationship between print and other forms of media, including film, radio, television and, more recently, online platforms. It also poses a question that is both simple and complex: what if we look at cinema as originating, not with the photograph, but with the drawing. Concepts like “convergence culture” and “transmedia storytelling,” as useful as they are for describing our current intermediated lives, aren’t new. Looking back before the storyboard and the adaptation, the course explores a long history of intermediality in which popular cultural forms—comics, cartoons, films, radio programs, etc.—are forums for exploring important social, cultural, and political ideas considered too “lowbrow” for more refined forms of cultural practice and production. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Wednesday and Thursday 13:00 - 15:00 |
CIN440H1S - Advanced Studies in CinemaMore information to come. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Monday 13:00 - 15:00, Thursday 11:00 - 13:00 |
Group D: Theory and Criticism
CIN260H1S - Film Stardom and Celebrity CultureMore information to come. Day and time: Wednesday 9:00 - 13:00 |
|
CIN352H1S - Issues in Film Authorship I: Todd Haynes and Jane CampionIn his essay on “auteur desire,” film scholar Dana Polan defines the concept as both the desire of the auteur, which gains expression in and through that auteur’s work, and the desire for the auteur – that is, “a fascination for the director [on the part of viewers] that just doesn’t seem to go away,” no matter how often the discourse of auteurism is subjected to critique. In this course we will explore both variants of auteur desire as we study the work of Todd Haynes and Jane Campion, two contemporary filmmakers who have been the focus of considerable attention for well over three decades. First, we will examine Haynes and Campion, both on their own terms and in conversation with each other, in order to think through the way their work functions formally, narratively, thematically, socially, and industrially. In the process certain issues will emerge as central, including the role of identity politics in film culture, the formal and ideological possibilities of generic transformation, and the modes of production, exhibition, and reception associated with independent and art cinemas. Second, we will use our consideration of Haynes and Campion to think through questions related to the ongoing fascination that Polan identifies: What investments do cinephiles, critics, and scholars have in the notion of the film auteur? What does an auteurist approach to the study of film and media enable, and what does it foreclose? Finally, how does auteurism figure into the ways we write the history of film – and, for that matter, envision its future? Day and time: Tuesday 10:00 - 13:00, Thursday 14:00 - 15:00 |
|
CIN360H1F - SatireMore information to come. Day and time: Monday 9:00 - 13:00 |
|
CIN361H1S - Special Topics in Theory and Criticism IIMore information to come. Day and time: Monday and Friday 9:00 - 11:00 |
|
CIN362H1F - Animals and CinemaThis course explores cinema's century-long fascination with animals. Its investigations are organized around three central questions. First, what does cinema teach us about animals (why and how we look at animals on film, how we represent and understand animals through film, and what lessons we hope to gain from animals on film)? Second, what do animal films reveal or teach us about the cinema? Third, what are the aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical stakes of such encounters between animals and cinema? Day and time: Monday 13:00 - 15:00, Wednesday 15:00 - 17:00 |
|
CIN365H1 - Nonfiction Video PracticeThis course is designed to introduce students to the basics of creative video production, with an emphasis on documentary and nonfiction film and video. Students will be introduced to the theory and practice of documentary filmmaking, including the creative, ethical, conceptual, and practical dimensions of artistic moving-image production. This is a hands-on course that will include off-site practical workshops and in-course group critique. Students are expected to have some prior technical knowledge of video recording and video editing, as technical skill-building will fall outside the purview of this course. We will explore the diverse approaches adopted by nonfiction filmmakers and video artists in order to consider what constitutes a cinematic practice. Students will work on creative assignments individually and in groups, coming up with conceptual ideas, creative treatments, and artistic methods for translating their ideas and questions into non-fiction moving image media. Nonfiction Video Practice will be offered twice in 2026/27. Once in the Fall 2026 term and once in the Winter 2027 term. Day and time:
Instructor: Brett Story |
|
CIN451H1S - Queer Asian CinemaQueer Asian subjectivities and sexualities acquired a sudden visibility in the early 1990s, when films like The Wedding Banquet circulated among queer and mainstream audiences globally through queer and art-house film festivals. Considering key narrative and documentary films from that period of emergence to more contemporary movies, the course has three main goals: First, to explore experiences of minoritization along the axes of sexuality, gender, class, caste, race, ethnicity, and generation as depicted in various Asian national cinemas. Second, to understand how queer politics, religious agendas, and state regulation intersect across Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist contexts of film reception. Lastly, to grapple with dynamics of translation and untranslatability in queer Asian cinemas. 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 categories. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Wednesday 10:30 - 13:00, Friday 11:00 - 12:30 |
|
CIN460H1S - Time, Cinema, ArchivesMore information to come. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Wednesday 14:00 - 16:30, Friday 13:30 - 15:00 |
|
CIN461H1F - Advanced Study in Cinema and Media PracticeMore information to come. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Tuesday and Wednesday 9:00 - 11:00 |
Group E: History and Nation
CIN381H1F - Direct Cinema in AmericaMore infomration to come. Day and time: Wednesday and Thursday 11:00 - 13:00 |
CIN471H1F - Local Film CulturesMore information to come. Only 4th Year Cinema Studies Specialists and Majors will be able to enrol in 400-Level CIN courses via ACORN during the Priority Enrolment Period ending on Wednesday, July 22. Course enrolment in the 400-Level CIN courses will open to remaining A&S and Daniels students on Friday, July 24. Day and time: Thursday 10:00 - 13:00 |
Group F: Independent Studies
CIN490Y1Y - Independent Studies in CinemaIndependent research projects devised by students and supervised by Cinema Studies faculty. Open to advanced Specialist and Major students in the Cinema Studies Program. Submit applications to the Undergraduate Program Office: Fall 2026 courses by May 1, 2026, Summer 2027 courses by April 1, 2027. See Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms for the application form. Not eligible for CR/NCR option. Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1, CIN301Y1. |
CIN491H1F - Independent Studies in CinemaIndependent research projects devised by students and supervised by Cinema Studies faculty. Open to advanced Specialist and Major students in the Cinema Studies Program. Submit applications to the Undergraduate Program Office: Fall 2026 courses by May 1, 2025, Summer 2027 courses by April 1, 2027. See Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms for the application form. Not eligible for CR/NCR option. Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1, CIN301Y1. |
CIN492H1S - Independent Studies in CinemaIndependent research projects devised by students and supervised by Cinema Studies faculty. Open to advanced Specialist and Major students in the Cinema Studies Program. Submit applications to the Undergraduate Program Office: Winter 2027 courses by November 1, 2026, Summer 2027 courses by April 1, 2027. See Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms for the application form. Not eligible for CR/NCR option. Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1, CIN301Y1. |
Group G: Cross-Listed
More information to come.
First Year Foundations
CIN196H1F - Story Worlds and the CinemaFilms create story worlds, imaginary environments in which characters live and act, and where events, large and small, transpire. Some story worlds are elaborate, fanciful constructs (think of Disney’s animated films). Others stay close to reality (think of “docudramas”). But across the spectrum, all of them are framed by and provided with rules of time and space, of believable or impossible. This course offers an examination of selected story worlds from several periods of film history. Emphasis falls on the expansive story worlds of contemporary corporately-run media-franchise “universes,” like the cross-media “DC Universe.” Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option. Day and Time: Wednesday and Thursday 13:00 - 15:00 |
CIN198H1S - Thinking With CinemaGiven that thinking is an act of inquiry and that film is both a subject and object of such reflection, this course focuses on both how one does the fundamental work of Cinema Studies as a discipline, but also engages in the broader questions that films at their most capacious pose for us: questions of listening, seeing, responding to, thinking with, and being shaped by cinema as an audiovisual medium. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option. Day and time: Monday 13:00 - 15:00, Tuesday 11:00 - 13:00 |