All 2023/24 Cinema Studies (CIN) undergraduate courses will take place in person unless public health guidance requires a shift to online learning. The only exception is CIN460H1S - Cinematic Cities: Berlin, Los Angeles, which will be online synchronous.
Group A: Foundations
Introduction to film analysis; concepts of film style and narrative. Topics include: documentary, avant-garde, genres, authorship, ideology, and representation.
Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC), one Tutorial (TUT) and one Practicum (PRA). When the 2023/24 Timetable is released, please see Timetable Builder for the schedule of Practicums and Tutorials.
Day and Time: Lecture: Wednesday 9-10am; Practicum: Thursday 9am-12pm or Thursday 12-3pm; Tutorial: various dates
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Mike Meneghetti
Exclusion: ENGB70H3, ENGB75H3, ENGB76H3, CIN101H5
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Emergence 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) and one Tutorial (TUT). When the 2023/24 Timetable is released, please see Timetable Builder for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and time: Lecture: Tuesday 3-4pm, Wednesday, 3-6pm; Tutorial: various dates
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Nadine Chan
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1 Students must complete CIN105Y1 before taking CIN201Y1.
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations, 2. Thought, Belief and Behaviour
Examines 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) and one Tutorial (TUT). When the 2023/24 Timetable is released, please see Timetable Builder for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and time: Lecture: Monday 3-4pm, Wednesday 12-3pm; Tutorial: various dates
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Bliss Lim
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1 Students must complete both CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1 before taking CIN301Y1.
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations, 2. Thought, Belief and Behaviour
Group B: Genre and Modes
Horror 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) and one Tutorial (TUT). When the 2023/24 Timetable is released, please see Timetable Builder for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and Time: Lecture: Tuesday 12-3pm; Tutorial: various dates
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Carrie Reese
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course is the study of science fiction films in their cultural and political contexts and the genre's narrative and conceptual components. The goal of the course is to familiarize students with science fiction films as popular genre texts, emphasizing the period between 1950 and the present.
Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC) and one Tutorial (TUT). When the 2023/24 Timetable is released, please see Timetable Builder for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and time: Lecture: Tuesday 12-3pm; Tutorial: various dates
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Roshaya Rodness
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Action movies cement the dominance of commercial cinema, and they largely define the contemporary era of the blockbuster and CGI effects. This course examines the narrative modes and the extremes that action scenes reach, and it explores the commercial and social function of the genre. The course also traces Action's historic reach and global diversity to include its significant precursors and transnational forms that Action cinema takes on.
Students must enrol in the Lecture (LEC) and one Tutorial (TUT). When the 2023/24 Timetable is released, please see Timetable Builder for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and time: Lecture: Monday 12-3pm; Tutorial: various dates
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Roshaya Rodness
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Critical and historical survey of documentary practice, including cinema verité, ethnographic experiments, and various hybrid forms, with emphasis on the rhetorical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of the "art of record." Topics include: the filmmaker/subject/audience nexus; historiography, hagiography, and performance; and how emerging technology and new media platforms, evinced in the rise of documentary-based webdocs, i-docs, and webgames, affect the actual production and style of linear documentary, as well as impact earlier models of documentary exhibition, distribution, and viewer engagement alike.
Day and time: Tuesday 5-8pm, Thursday 5-7pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Mike Meneghetti
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: ENGD94H3
Recommended Preparation: CIN201Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations, 3. Society and its Institutions
This course is a survey of an innovative, iterative, and largely undertheorized audiovisual object—the music video. In this class, we’ll ask what makes the music video a historically, technologically, and aesthetically distinct form. At the same time, we’ll address the ways this hybrid-media informs our understanding of other audiovisual objects like film, television, video games, fine art, and digital visual culture. As we seek to understand the complex relationship between sound and image—a pairing in need of “couples therapy” according to theorist Carol Vernallis—this class will elaborate upon familiar topics in film/media studies: industry practices (e.g. modes of global production and distribution); fandom; aesthetic value and the importance of ‘originality;’ and sensory experience among many others. Addressing the music video as both an object of study and as a method, a way of thinking about media, this course will encourage students to identify their key interests as media theorists and develop original research projects that contribute to a field of study that is (after almost a half-century) still emerging.
Day and time: Monday 5-7pm, Tuesday 5-7pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Lauren Cramer
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course aims to unsettle the privileging of the visual and of live action cinema in film and media studies. The founding impetus of the class is to counter the marginalization of two intertwined issues – animation and sound – in our field. This course takes seriously the suggestion of various scholars that animation is central rather than peripheral to film history and the rise of digital media. Reversing the usual dominance of live action over animation, Tom Gunning suggests that “all cinema can be approached as animation.” As Rebecca Coyle emphasizes, both sound and animation are difficult to analyze because neither can be captured by a freeze-frame: sound events depend on duration and movement, just as animation depends on “what occurs between frames.”
The course aims to give students a working knowledge of key concepts at the intersection of animation, sound, and music, while also surveying a range of historical, national, and transnational contexts. The class considers feature-length titles from Hollywood and Japan as major nodes in the global circulation of cartoon and anime; at the same time, it de-centers these major players by also exploring short, experimental, and independent animation work. This eclecticism is paralleled by a variety of approaches to sound and animation covered in the class, from more theoretical, philosophical, or formalist discourses to perspectives that foreground history and ideology, to considerations grounded in the materiality of media, production contexts, or industrial circulation. Throughout, the class is attuned to the cultural and political work that animated sound films do in negotiating dynamics of race, gender and sexuality: moving from a critique of the legacy of blackface minstrelsy to an exploration of feminist animated filmmaking in a transcultural vein.
Day and time: Monday 11am-2pm, Wednesday 4-6pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Bliss Lim
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course examines "cult" and "exploitation" cinema. It examines the growing popularity of cult/exploitation films as an emerging cinematic subculture that valorizes disreputable or "trash" cinema. A number of sub-genres within exploitation film, including teen films, educational/instructional films, sexploitation, and Blaxploitation, will be explored. The social politics of appropriating texts through ironic reading strategies will also be considered.
Day and time: Wednesday 3-7pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Kate J. Russell
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement Status: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Since its emergence in the 1940s, film noir has exerted considerable influence in film study, both as a cultural phenomenon of some endurance and as a corpus of films possessing distinct formal and ideological traits. This seminar will examine film noir during its heyday of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as neo-noir offshoots that have proliferated during the past half-century. As a means of defining noir, we will consider both its status as a body of films relatable to particular historical contexts and as a term applicable to various cultural products.
The organisation of the course focusses attention on four distinct approaches to noir: in the first, we will examine noir’s central formal attributes and debates regarding its proper definition (as genre, style, or mode) and production contexts; in the second, we will look at the cinematic and literary antecedents of noir, emphasising its links to European pre-war culture; in the third, we will consider certain recurring concerns of noir narratives as they relate to a prevailing ethos of post-war America; finally, we will conclude by studying how noir has been revisited and recast in more recent times, both by filmmakers and scholars.
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Tuesday 5-9pm, Wednesday 7-9pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Charlie Keil
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This 400-level seminar provides a critical context for the rise of gallery-based moving image installations, outlining their distinctive features and their particular relevance in terms of aesthetics and practice. 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. We will examine video installation’s capacity to provoke sensory encounters within the architectural space of the gallery through various optics: cinematic, philosophical, and art historical. To this end, we will study video installation’s precedents – from early forms of expanded cinema to the essay film, and their migration into the gallery. Lastly, through select case studies of individual artists’ installation works we will explore how the proliferation of moving images within gallery space coalesces with contemporary art’s “documentary turn.”
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Tuesday 1-4pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Kass Banning
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Group C: Social and Cultural Practices
Gender politics of feminist film culture since the 1970s. Topics include: apparatus theory and its legacy, models of spectatorship, feminist historiography, the cinematic (re)production of identity, the relationship between social movements and cinema, "postfeminism."
Day and Time: Tuesday 10am-12pm, Thursday 11am-1pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Corinn Columpar
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations, 2. Thought, Belief and Behaviour
This course explores the cultural, aesthetic, technological, and political category of “Black cinema.” Across the diaspora, Black cinema is an artistic praxis that utilizes techniques like improvisation and collaboration in order to make and remake the cinematic archive. The films and filmmakers in this category intervene in cinematic histories by responding to exclusionary narratives, technologies, and critical discourse by imagining alternative stories, spaces, and temporalities. Thus, these films help articulate both the pervasiveness of anti-blackness in our visual culture and help us understand the difference (film) aesthetics can make (Chun, 2019).
Our goal is to 1) develop a critical language to discuss Black cinema (its techniques, its aims, and its political contexts) and 2) articulate research questions, methods, and arguments that consider what is happening inside and outside the frame in these films.
Day and Time: Tuesday 1-3pm, Thursday 1-3pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Lauren Cramer
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Students will have the opportunity to explore the world of film festivals and their contribution to our understanding of film, the film industry and the broader cultural and societal conversation.
Day and time: Monday 11am-3pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Diana Sanchez
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
From 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 cinemas, 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, and labor. Course content augmented by guest lectures from the adult industry.
Day and time: Friday 11am-3pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Patrick Keilty
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
In this course, we will examine the body that labours in front of the camera — the figure known variously as a star, an actor, or a performer. In keeping with these labels, the course will be divided into three sections, each dedicated to a particular scholarly approach to that body and its contribution to the production of meaning and affect, both in film and beyond. In the first section we will examine the discourse of stardom and the related topics of celebrity, charisma, and commodity, using foundational work in star studies as a jumping off point for select case studies. In the second section we will turn our attention to the discourse of acting, with its emphasis on craft, in order to examine how different acting styles incorporate elements of naturalism and stylization, expression and pose, gesture and movement. Finally, the third section of the course will focus on the discourse of performance, exploring how the concerns of the relatively new field of performance studies, including corporeality and affect, have inflected the work of certain cinema studies scholars.
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Wednesday 11am-1pm, Friday 11am-1pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Corinn Columpar
Exclusion: CIN260H1S – Stardom: Performances and Personas from Summer 2021
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
More information to come.
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Tuesday 9-11am, Wednesday 9-11am
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Angelica Fenner
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Calls to defund the police may have led to the cancellation of the notorious reality program COPS, but crime scenes, cell blocks, courtrooms, victims and vigilantes continue to dominate our screens and our imaginations. This course explores the relationship between the carceral apparatus - that matrix of institutions, laws, and logics that make up the prison industrial complex and the criminal-legal system - and the cinematic representations that have historically valorized carceral narratives for popular consumption. This class will consider paradigms of crime, policing, prisons, rebellion, reform and abolition in relation to questions of innocence and guilt, racialized criminalization, social control, property, and social transformation as they are reproduced and/or challenged on screen. The class will combine class discussion of relevant readings, film screenings, and examinations of various media through the lens of abolition, deconstructing carceral scenarios and affects in order to unearth and imagine transformative approaches to moving image art.
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Tuesday 9am-1pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Brett Story
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Group D: Theory and Criticism
This course will consider the Coens and PTA not only in terms of their respective authorial programs—the former pair’s pathological commitment to themes of recidivism and recurrence; the latter’s fixation on literal and figurative monuments dwarfing the men who make them; the starring roles of sex, violence, and rock and roll (or at least folk music) in both ouevres —and their relationships to the film and cultural histories they knowingly evoke (and rewrite in their images) but also with a nod to what was and remains at stake in proposing such filmmakers as not only auteurs but as ruling and influential figureheads in the American cinema. The fascination (and, heaven forfend, entertainment value) watching gifted formalists wringing intricate variations on their pet themes should be acknowledged, but also juxtaposed against the relative sociological narrowness of these filmmakers’ visions and the problems of representation (or non-representation) swirling around their cinema; a case could be made that when it comes to the Coens and Anderson, the real “issues of authorship” are less a matter of surface virtues than inherent vices.
Day and time: Thursday 9am-1pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Adam Nayman
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: ENGD52H3, CIN206H5
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course uses research creation, critical making, digital humanities, videographic criticism, or other practice-based methods to the humanistic study of cinema and moving-image media. Students will pursue substantial research projects grounded in these approaches. Topics and methods vary by semester and instructor.
Day and time: Monday 9-11am, Wednesday 9-11am
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Brett Story
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
The practice of film criticism: studies of examples of journalistic and scholarly critical writing, practical sessions of process writing, and collaborative editing. Course includes regular film screenings. This course is offered biannually.
Interested students must apply to enrol in the course. The application deadline has passed.
Day and time: Thursday 9-11am, Friday 9-11am
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Adam Nayman
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1 and 1.0 additional CIN credit.
Exclusion: ENGB71H3
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
In the Western imagination, cultural difference (race, class, gender, etc.) is rendered through the organization of space. Geographies, real or imagined, provide the grounds for exploration, segregation, and domination. In this course, we will explore the politics of space and the built environment in a wide range of images across film, television, and digital media. Using a collection of interdisciplinary texts, we will address cultural spaces like “the sunken place,” (Get Out), the banlieue, and “the East.” The course will be divided into three units: first, we will explore the formal and historical resonance between cinema and architecture; second, we will look at specific architectural techniques that appear in both the built environment and in cinema that shape the way we understand space, bodies, information, time, and culture; finally, we will explore spatial interventions in visual culture, formal manipulations of space, that use images to reimagine the world and our place in it.
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Monday 5-7pm, Wednesday 6-8pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Lauren Cramer
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Queer 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.
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Monday 11am-2pm, Wednesday 5-7pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Bliss Lim
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
“'I didn’t think it would turn out this way’ is the secret epitaph of intimacy.” – Lauren Berlant
What’s so good about intimacy? And what’s so intimate about film? This course examines the modern idea of intimacy as a solution to the anxiety of alienation and atomization, and it investigates the potentials of a politics of intimacy. Since its invention, cinema has spurred pronouncements on the intensely emotional, affective, and even spiritual effects engendered by the filmic image, as well as in-depth theoretical examinations of the specific devices (the close-up, the photographic trace, the kiss, etc.) through which films impact our most intimate experiential registers. Within the framework of classical film theory, such devices were frequently invested with redemptive – if not revolutionary – potential for their capacity to counter modern alienation and repression. More recently, however, cultural theorists have issued strong rejoinders to such claims, analyzing how cinematic conventions work to structure intimate relations in accordance with normative ideologies, and suggesting that the aspiration for intimacy may itself be a crucial component of modern power. Examining classical and contemporary film theory alongside diverse contributions to the emerging field of intimacy studies, we will ask: How have the different forms of intimacy we encounter in cinema been mobilized, exploited, critiqued, and transformed throughout film history? How do processes of modernization, mass-mediation, urbanization, and global migration challenge our capacity to cultivate meaningful cultural attachments, while simultaneously producing unexpected intimacies? And how do recent inquiries into the politics of intimacy force us to rethink the problems and possibilities of cinema?
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Thursday 11am-3pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Jason Fox
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
The mode of delivery for this seminar is online synchronous.
Cinematic Cities delves into three topics: 1. Initially, the tension between the planned “panoptic” urban grid set in place by planners and the improvisations of urbanites as walkers and drivers in the spaces of the city. 2. The course treats the “modernity thesis” which was a production of Berlin intellectuals. They argued that urban experience and cinema are interactive but also mutually symptomatic. The 19th century figure of the flaneur (revived in Berlin by the writer Franz Hessel) will centre a good deal of our discussion, and with it the concept of the “mobile gaze,” versus the fixated gaze posited by contemporary film theory, exemplified by Hitchcock’s Vertigo. 3. Consideration of silent cinema related to Weimar-era Berlin. The writings of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin will be emphasized. Attention will fall on focused on some early films, D. W. Griffith’s Musketeers of Pig Alley, the Bauhaus artist Moholy-Nagy’s film Berlin Stilleben, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Joe May’s Asphalt, and two adaptations of Alfred Doblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Piel Jutzi (1931) and Ranier Werner Fassbinder (1980; in except), and Fritz Lang’s M. 4. This section will deal with later Berlin, including postwar “rubble films,” Hollywood films (The Spy who Came in from the Cold) that project Cold War tensions onto the city; Wenders’ Wings of Desire and unification films, The Lives of Others. 5. Comparable studies “mapping” Los Angeles with films including Los Angeles Plays Itself, film noir (Act of Violence and Kiss Me Deadly) and neo-noir (Chinatown). Course work includes student presentations and short essays.
Pre-enrolment balloting for 400-Level seminars will start in late May to early June, opening roughly five weeks before the July enrolment period begins. More information on balloting procedures, the balloting form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Tuesday 7-9pm, Wednesday 7-9pm
Location: Online
Instructor: Bart Testa
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Group E: History and Nation
The examination of popular American cinema through its social, political, and commercial practices, and through the study of selected popular films from the 1970s to the present.
Day and time: Lecture: Monday 4-6pm, Tuesday 4-6pm; Tutorial: various dates
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Nicholas Sammond
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations, 3. Society and its Institutions
The topic of this course proposes expanded documentary inquiry in two directions. First, our focus will exceed normative categorization of Canadian documentary, one that serves a governmental apparatus. Following brief familiarization with key representative films of this ilk, we will study works that engender a more capacious poetic and formal register – emphasizing the aesthetic dimensions of our digital present – to include works that remobilize the colonial archive, artists’ media, interactive documentary, and beyond.
The second implication of expanded lies within our objects of study. Our formative question is: What defines expanded documentary within and after critiques of Canadian settler colonialism? Indigenous, “minor” and queer media will be foregrounded while attentive to the critical role of sovereignty. Critical frameworks that situate expanded documentary as an alternative screen practice will be highlighted, with intersectional approaches to critical race and Indigenous/Black/Brown theory – to include critiques of multiculturalism and explorations into Indigenous ways of knowing– guiding our study.
Filmmakers/artists include Alanis Obomsawin, Kent Monkman, Brett Story, Thirza Cuthand, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, Lisa Jackson, Abdi Osman, Peter Mettler, Dionne Brand, ISUMA and ARNAIT Video Productions, Stan Douglas, Ali Kazimi, John Greyson, William Grieves, Sarah Polley, Lynne Fernie, Colin Campbell, Loretta Todd, among others.
Day and time: Thursday 10am-2pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Stephen Broomer
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: FCS391H1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
CANCELLED
This course examines Chinese films in their main three production centres: Hong Kong, The People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. Chinese cinemas share common historical ground, the mainland industry of the 1930s, chiefly in Shanghai. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war with Japan in 1937, the Chinese industry fragmented. Following the Maoist triumph in establishing the People’s Republic, in 1949, the mainland industry assumed a socialist form under state control. The Hong Kong industry took a dynamically commercial form and successfully served the Chinese diaspora as well as the local audience. The Taiwanese industry, while likewise commercial, was also under state control. Three separate cinemas resulted and grew distinct from one another. The process of division only began to reverse in the new century when co-productions and transnational financing grew in importance.
Day and time:
Location:
Instructor: TBA
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: CIN376Y0
Recommended Preparation: CIN201Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations, 3. Society and its Institutions
This course will contextualize the history of Black British cinema, to include Art cinema, television, and gallery-located visual practice, and their interconnectedness. The practices and networks of collaboration that have shaped the development and aesthetics of Black British film culture from the 1980s to the present will be explored. In the words of Stuart Hall, artists collectively “finding a new language” to challenge normative post-war British culture, necessitated seismic shifts in politics, aesthetics, and theory. Topics include Black Power’s transnational remit, London as post-imperial migrant city, “political Blackness,” Black film collectives, among other topics. We will read canonical works by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Homi K. Bhabha, as well as film and literary scholars, to help frame this conjunctural moment of Black British culture. Media works by John Akomfrah, Horace Ové, Steve McQueen, Menelik Shabbaz, Stephen Frears, Gurinder Chadha, Ngozi Onwurah, Lionel Ngakane, Martine Attille, Isaac Julien, among others, will be screened.
Day and time: Monday 10am-2pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Kass Banning
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Examines historical trends, influential filmmakers, and social and cultural factors influencing the development of Hungarian cinema, assessing its impact within the context of Eastern Europe and internationally.
Day and time: Monday 5-9pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Tamas Nagypal
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
In Europe, as across the planet, more and more people are encountering precarity, whether stemming from endemic poverty, social exclusion, political instability in conflict zones, or climate change leading to loss of home and livelihood. This course explores these topical concerns in 21st-century German cinema alongside other European productions. Attending to their social discourses, poetics and reception, we’ll explore how innovations in film form enable us to rethink precarity in its existential and material dimensions? Can insights gleaned from the German context inspire more sustainable social relations, economic justice, and a rethinking of our place in and relationship with broader ecologies? Rubrics include: ‘Berlin School’ films, Austrian experimental film, digital videos by Syrian refugees assembled from footage shot in transit, documentaries by German environmental activists, another about a German call center in Turkey, Italian documentaries about Mediterranean border crossing, the Greek Weird Wave, Romanian New Wave, the Belgian Dardenne brothers, the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki and British Andrea Arnold. Class time is devoted to lecture, discussion, and group work drawing from course texts accompanying weekly screenings. Course given in English, with subtitled films.
Day and time: Thursday 9am-1pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Angelica Fenner
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course surveys the history of Italian cinema and the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding the film industry, from its early days to the present, while also introducing the students to methods of analysis and research appropriate to the field. Emphasis will be placed on films from the silent era to the 1960s, and from the 1960s to the present. This course includes a component designed to introduce students to methods of scholarly research appropriate to the field. The course is given in English and all films shown have English subtitles.
Day and time: Monday 2-6pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: TBA
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
The focus of this course is the films of Italian Neorealism, one of the most influential, artistic, and intellectual movements in the history of world cinema. While emphasis will be placed primarily on the work of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti, the course will also offer a detailed discussion of the historical context and of the sociopolitical issues of postwar Italy. This course includes a component designed to enhance students' research experience. (Given in English)
Day and time: Tuesday 12-4pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Alberto Zambenedetti
Recommended Preparation: ITA240Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Group F: Independent Studies
Independent 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 2023 courses by May 1, 2023, Winter 2024 courses by November 1, 2023, Summer 2024 courses by April 1, 2024. 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.
Distribution Requirement Status: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Independent 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 2023 courses by May 1, 2023, Winter 2024 courses by November 1, 2023, Summer 2024 courses by April 1, 2024. See Undergraduate Forms for application form. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1, CIN301Y1.
Distribution Requirement Status: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Independent 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 2023 courses by May 1, 2023, Winter 2024 courses by November 1, 2023, Summer 2024 courses by April 1, 2024. See Undergraduate Forms for application form. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1, CIN301Y1.
Distribution Requirement Status: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Group G: Cross-Listed
Please check with the home department for more details.
This course investigates how film aesthetics relate to the most profound socio-historical problems of Japanese modernity. It also considers the ways various filmmakers employ cinematic form to engage the social problems of their moment. Part I focuses on the 1890s - 1950s.
Day and time: Thursday 3-6pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Eric Cazdyn
Exclusions: EAS237Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
The focus ranges from the examination of cross-cultural theoretical problems (such as Orientalism) to a director-based focus, from the examination of genre (such as documentary or the category of genre itself) to the way film intersects with other cultural forms and technologies (such as video and new media).
Day and time: Thursday 3-5pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Eric Cazdyn
Prerequisites: EAS209H1 and EAS242H1/EAS243H1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Examines French colonial Indochina through several different lenses. Themes include the cross-cultural contact zones between colonial and colonized societies, imperial culture, expressions of colonial power, and forms of opposition. Colonial novels, translated resistance literature, documentaries, and films are utilized as primary sources to be examined critically.
Day and time: Thursday 1-3pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Eric Jennings
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 3. Society and its Institutions
This course focuses on Canadian literary and artistic productions that challenge prevailing notions of nationality and sexuality, exploring not only how artists struggle with that ongoing Canadian thematic of being and belonging, but also celebrate pleasure and desire as a way of imagining and articulating an alternative national politics.
Day and time: Tuesday 3-6pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: TBA
Prerequisites: SDS255H1/SDS256H1/CDN267H1/CDN268H1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
An introduction to recent Brazilian films, and their political, cultural, and social contexts. We will discuss how Black film collectives, Indigenous filmmakers, and a strong presence of women filmmakers have transformed the landscape of Brazilian cinema over the last two decades.
Day and time: Lectures: Wednesday 9am-12pm. Tutorials: Thursday 10-11am (Portuguese) or Thursday 11am-12pm (English)
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Carolina Sá Carvalho
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
The Polish School in cinema, its predecessors and successors, their artistic accomplishments, major theoretical and thematic concerns, and their place on the map of European cinema. Films of Ford, Wajda, Polanski, Konwicki, Borowczyk, Has, Kawalerowicz, Zanussi, Kieslowski, and of the new generation of Polish film makers. Films and discussions in English. (Offered every three years)
Day and time: Thursday 1-3pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: TBA
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This online course examines the social, political, and cultural contexts of recent Latin American Hispanic cinema. Topics include race and indigeneity; poverty, precarity, and inequality; gender and sexuality; and memory and trauma. The representation of these themes in Latin American cinema of the 21st century has contributed to an increase in its transnational and cosmopolitan reception. Lectures are in English. Students choose tutorials in Spanish or English.
Day and time: Lecture: Online Asynchronous; In Person Tutorial: Monday 1-2pm or Monday 2-3pm or Monday 3-4pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: TBA
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
First Year Foundations
This first-year foundation course is a survey of sound film (with a brief selection of silent shorts) on the topic of how popular cinemas have represented going to school. Looking at one film and one scholarly text a week, the course will offer an introduction to the close reading of film texts, reading and writing film criticism, and the fundamentals of film history. By engaging with only one film/reading per week, the course emphasizes depth over breadth. Texts for the course may include excerpts from Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing About Film, Sturken and Cartwright’s Practices of Looking, Staiger’s Interpreting Films, and Prince’s Movies and Meaning, along with selected criticism on the movies screened. Those films may include Zero for Conduct, Aparajito, Tom Brown’s School Days, Tea and Sympathy, If, Rock and Roll High School, Mean Girls, School Daze, Blackboard Jungle, or Lady Bird. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Day and time: Tuesday 1-3pm, Wednesday 1-3pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Nicholas Sammond
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Cinema as a commercial enterprise. Production, distribution, and exhibition in the political economy of North American film culture.
Day and time: Friday 1-4pm
Location: Please refer to ACORN.
Instructor: Adam Nayman
Distribution Requirement: Humanities or Social Science
Breadth Requirement: 3. Society and its Institutions