All 2022/23 Cinema Studies (CIN) undergraduate courses will take place in person unless public health guidance requires a shift to online learning.
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 sign up for a Practicum and a Tutorial. When the 2022/23 Timetable is released, please see Faculty of Arts & Science Timetable for the schedule of Practicums and Tutorials.
Day and Time: Lecture on Wednesday 9:00-10:00. Practicum on Thursdays 10:00-13:00 or Thursday 13:00-16:00. Tutorials at various times.
Location: Isabel Bader Theatre, BT 101, 93 Charles Street West
Instructor: Mike Meneghetti
Exclusion: INI115Y1, 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 sign up for a Tutorial. When the 2022/23 Timetable is released, please see Faculty of Arts & Science Timetable for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and time: Tuesday 13:00-14:00, Wednesday 15:00-18:00
Location: Innis Town Hall, IN-112, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Nadine Chan
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: INI212Y1, INI215Y1
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 sign up for a Tutorial. When the 2022/23 Timetable is released, please see Faculty of Arts & Science Timetable for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and time: Tuesday 12:00-13:00, Wednesday 12:00-15:00
Location: Innis Town Hall, IN-112, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Scott Richmond
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1
Exclusion: INI214Y1, INI314Y1, INI315Y1
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 sign up for a Tutorial. When the 2022/23 Timetable is released, please see Faculty of Arts & Science Timetable for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and Time: Tuesday 15:00-18:00
Location: Innis Town Hall, IN-112, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Lauren Cramer
Exclusion: INI226H1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Erotic images and sounds have long featured in filmic pleasure and, for just as long, excited controversy. This course examines how sex is articulated on screen and how its regulation suggests broader themes and ideas. Topics include: obscenity laws and the history of film censorship, the eroticized aspects of conventional movies, art cinema, and "adult" erotic films.
Students must sign up for a Tutorial. When the 2022/23 Timetable is released, please see Faculty of Arts & Science Timetable for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and time: Tuesday 15:00-18:00
Location: Innis Town Hall, IN-112, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Daniel Laurin
Exclusion: INI223H1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
CIN320H1S critically surveys the representation of work in documentary films and videos. The course is divided into three units. The first section looks briefly at foundational examples from the history of documentary filmmaking: the New Deal’s filmic envisioning of a new working public; Barbara Kopple’s observational documentaries about striking workers; and Michael Moore’s historical surveys of postindustrial America. In the subsequent two sections of the course, we examine the substantial legacy of American direct cinema in present-day documentary filmmaking, but we resituate its customary emphasis on “self-realizing” figures as investigations of work. Unit Two therefore turns to the so-called “process genre,” “the sequentially ordered representation of someone making or doing something” (Aguilera Skvirsky), but its primary focus is contemporary observational filmmaking and the latter's description of today’s degraded forms of work. In the course’s final unit, we analyze rockumentaries, portrait/profile films, and images of widespread precarity to determine how they figure labour in its assorted present-day forms. As we’ll see, the earliest exemplars of American direct cinema created a durable site for the figuration of “flexible” work, and we’ll try to understand how the familiar observational approach is deployed in contemporary nonfiction films for this same purpose.
Day and time: Monday 12:00-16:00
Location: Deluxe Screening Room, IN-222E, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Mike Meneghetti
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: Monday 9:00-13:00
Location: Deluxe Screening Room, IN-222E, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Jillian Vasko
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: INI396H1F (2011), CIN320H1F (20145), CIN320H1S (2016)
Distribution Requirement Status: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course has two tendencies: the first is the study of how films end – by achieving classical closure or avoiding it and becoming some version of an open text. The other tendency is more literal: it concerns how apocalyptic – and post-apocalyptic – themes and images have assumed the frequency and intensity in contemporary films.
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 11:00-13:00, Friday 11:00-13:00
Location: IN-313E, 2 Sussex Avenue
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
This course introduces students to the video essays and videographic criticism as an emergent form through a no-budget, DIY approach to making critical work about moving image media through moving image media.
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 10:00-14:00
Location: IN-312E, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Stephen Broomer
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
Despite it’s ubiquity, the thriller remains a troubling aesthetic category. As such, it remains sidelined in scholarship and teaching. However, it is for exactly this reason – that it is everywhere and yet remains under-described – that it needs to be investigated. This course examines the proliferation of the cinematic thriller from it’s emergence in silent cinema to its development in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock to its more recent iterations. In inquiring into the thriller we will place a particular emphasis on understanding dramatic story telling which seeks to provoke anticipatory and anxiety-laden responses from spectators who witness the gradual exposure of a secret – what we will learn to call the thriller's "known unknown" – and we will do so by attempting to understand this aesthetic device (and the genre more broadly) as a response to or symptom of the capitalist mode of production. We will also focus on what separates its particular instances – the thriller seems capable of assuming almost any form by cannibalizing all other genres. Doing so will allow us to consider how the thriller as a form can naturalize dominant ideologies just as much as it can compel us to interrogate those ideologies, raising a range of philosophical questions along the way. Films might include: North by Northwest, Rear Window, Single White Female, The Parallax View, State of Siege, Strange Days, The Handmaiden, Trouble Every Day, Cure, and Thief. Topics covered may include: knowledge, the secret, envy, feminism, violence, the state, capitalism, democracy, utopia, colonialism, eroticism, love, labour and debt.
Students must sign up for a Tutorial. When the 2022/23 Timetable is released, please see Faculty of Arts & Science Timetable for the schedule of Tutorials.
Day and Time: Monday 15:00-18:00
Location: Innis Town Hall, IN-112, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Patrick Marshall
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 3. Society and its Institutions
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: Tuesday 10:00-12:00, Wednesday 10:00-12:00
Location: Deluxe Screening Room, IN-222, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Diana Sanchez
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Students will develop screenwriting skills under the guidance of a renowned screenwriter-in-residence through a combination of writing workshops and individual consultations. Like the course, the appointment of the Universal Screenwriter-in-Residence occurs biannually.
The application deadline for CIN349H1Y - Screenwriting is June 1, 2022. More information on the application process, the application form and the submission deadline can be found in Cinema Studies Undergraduate Forms.
Day and time: Friday 13:00-16:00
Location: IN-223E, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Kazik Radwanski
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1, and two additional Cinema Studies full course equivalents.
Exclusion: INI388H1, VIC276H1, CRE276H1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Hip-hop is a vast cultural aesthetic; as a result, establishing clear boundaries around the genres has been a challenge for fans and scholars. Defining hip-hop only gets harder when we consider a broader range of objects—hip-hop architecture, fine art, hair, etc. This course explores hip-hop aesthetics on screen, tracing the culture’s shift across our audio-visual landscape and its movement from the margins to the mainstream. Through close attention to form in contemporary hip-hop visual culture (cinema, fashion, dance, music videos, album art, etc.), we will try to understand how hip-hop’s expansion over the last five decades has confronted the cultural logics that shape race, gender, sexuality, labor, and technology. Our primary objective is to identify sophisticated research questions—using tools from Sound Studies, Black Studies, Queer Theory, and Performance Studies—that respond to hip-hop’s theorization of culture and aesthetics.
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 15:00-17:00, Thursday 13:00-15:00
Location: Wednesday IN-313E, Thursday IN-223E
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
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 13:00-17:00
Location: IN-313E, 2 Sussex Avenue
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 takes as its basic assumption that a director’s films can be examined critically as the expression of his or her “personal vision.” This assumption has been controversial since its introduction in the 1950s by Francois Truffaut at Cahiers du Cinema. And we will discuss some of these debates. However, the general purpose of the course is to apply the authorship model to four candidate auteurist directors. The course selects directors from four different contexts: the French New Wave, the classical Hollywood cinema, the American independent cinema of the 1990s, and the Polish, and then European, cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. In the first term, the directors are Francois Truffaut and Howard Hawks.
Truffaut was among the first to champion the auteur idea when he was a young film critic at Cahiers du Cinema, though at the magazine it was termed la politique des auteurs, a “policy” developed at the magazine under its editor, Andre Bazin. As a film director, starting in 1959, Truffaut practiced the auteurist approach consciously and became a leading figure in the French New Wave and soon became an internationally admired director. While his practical experience in making films caused him to temper his youthful auteurist stance, he never abandoned it and in the mid-1960s he prepared a long book of interviews conducted with Alfred Hitchcock and the book effectively boosted the director’s auteur reputation in the U.S.
In certain respects, Howard Hawks exemplifies the role directors performed in the Hollywood system of film production, though he was independently minded. For most of his career, which began in 1926 and continued to 1970, his name was unknown outside the film industry. The Hollywood system was the site of the important test cases for auteurism, none more important than Hawks and Hitchcock, and once the auteurist approach had spread from Cahiers du Cinema to the British journal Movie, and to the U.S. where it sparked fierce debates after Andrew Sarris mistranslated the politique into “auteur theory” in an article published in 1962 in Film Culture, Hawks was one of the select directors to be lauded and debated.
The first term, then, is devoted to two classic formulations of film authorship in two well-understood historical settings.
In the second term, the directors to be studied are David Lynch and Krzysztof Kieslowski.
David Lynch is a highly idiosyncratic filmmaker who troubled the increasingly family-friendly Hollywood cinema of the last three decades. He began as an art student-painter, then had an apprenticeship at the American Film Institute where he made a short, The Grandmother (1970), and then, after a long gestation (and more shorts), he broke out with the black and white feature, Eraserhead (1977). It circulated mainly through midnight screenings to become an important cult film. Lynch was then recruited to direct two commercial features, The Elephant Man (1980), which was very successful, and an expansive adaptation of the science fiction novel Dune (1984), which was a critical and commercial failure. These films suggested Lynch would, at best, become an oddball stylist, like Tim Burton (who made Edward Scissorhands [1990] and Batman [1989] in the service of popular filmmaking. Instead, Lynch made Blue Velvet (1986), which re-established him as a dark-vision auteur. The film’s unexpected success made Lynch a beacon to the then-rising independent American cinema. Lynch consolidated this reputation with Wild at Heart (1990). Simultaneously, with Mark Frost he developed and launched a very peculiar TV series, Twin Peaks (48 episodes,1990-91) on ABC TV. The series brought Blue Velvet’s surrealist ethos to American network television over two seasons. (There was and a prequel feature, Fire Walk with Me [1992].) Lynch returned to features with Lost Highway (1997) and followed it with a surprisingly gentle film, Straight Story (1999). A failed attempt to develop another TV series resulted in Mulholland Drive (2001), his most successful feature film since Blue Velvet. Lynch has not made a feature film since 2006’s hermetic (and seldom seen) Inland Empire. He came back go to television with Twin Peaks: the Return in 2017 with eight episodes and has made shorts and a web film horror cycle, Rabbits (2002).
The fourth director is Krzysztof Kieslowski, widely regarded as one of the most important European directors of the 1990s. Although working in the remote Polish cinema for most of his career, and focused on making observational documentaries, Kieslowski later assumed the mantle of European art cinema. He initially came to filmmaking haphazardly and was accepted to the Lodz Film School only on his third try. For fifteen years, he made documentaries on everyday Polish life. When he turned to fiction films, he retained his documentary style and used non-professional actors. He came to be associated with a loose Polish movement called “cinema of moral anxiety.” Several of his fiction films were held back from release, like Blind Chance (shelved for six years) and others felt a storm of criticism, like No End (1984). Then, in 1988, Kieslowski made a suite of ten one-hour television films, Decalogue. He expanded two of them and they were released internationally to great acclaim. They enabled Kieslowski to secure foreign finance for his final four “European” films, The Double Life of Veronique and the “Three Colors Trilogy.” These works had a great international impact over the 1990s. After the last of these, Kieslowski announce his retirement but was at work on scripts for a new trilogy when he died of a heart ailment in 1996, at 54.
Day and time: Tuesday 17:00-20:00, Wednesday 18:00-19:00
Location: Deluxe Screening Room, IN-222, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Bart Testa
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: INI244Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course seeks to not only provide a history of the concept of the teenager (both within media and outside of it), but also to theorize the position teenagers occupy in regards to time, taste, and aesthetics. Frequently iterated in a pejorative register, media objects for teenagers have often been illustrated as disposable, mindless, or even immoral. Rather than take this understanding of maturity at its word, this course posits teen media as a challenge to adult sensibilities and subjectivities, as a mode that opens up strange, ambivalent, or otherwise speculative relationships to realism, “growing up,” and notions of expertise. By extension, the screenings will cover a broad range of approaches to teen media production and reception, imagining “teen media” as a capacious term that can be used to describe popular forms, experimental works, and art pieces that are made by teenagers themselves. In emphasizing the multiplicity of what can be construed as teen media, this course considers both how adolescence becomes such a fraught political and cultural space, as well as how audiovisual objects present versions of teen life unbound to the paranoid narratives of adults. Potential media objects include Hausu, Sadie Benning’s Pixelvision videos, Euphoria, Rebel Without a Cause, boy band music videos, Shirkers, Moonlight, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and Gone Home.
Day and time: Monday 15:00-18:00
Location: Innis Town Hall, IN-112, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Erin Nunoda
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course examines contemporary theoretical, historiographical, and philosophical approaches to cinema and moving images that have profoundly impacted the field of film and media studies since the 1990s. With this in mind, CIN360H1S asks two fundamental, intertwined, and correlating questions: How do we read cinema today? And: How does cinema read, interpret, and represent our world(s)? Taking up topics ranging from post-cinema and the digital to queer feminist phenomenologies; from philosophies of time to posthuman considerations of vision; and from the liveness of networked media to the ephemerality of cinematic archives, CIN360H1S - Contemporary Film Theory asks students to consider the political, aesthetic, historiographical, and cultural impacts of cinematic images in our contemporary moment. Together, we will watch films from around the world to tackle the question: What is cinema now?
Day and time: Tuesday 17:00-19:00, Wednesday 17:00-19:00
Location: IN-312E, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Amanda Greer
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 2. Thought, Belief and Behaviour
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: Tuesday 14:00-16:00, Thursday 13:00-15:00
Location: IN-313E, 2 Sussex Avenue
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 13:00-15:00, Wednesday 13:00-15:00
Location: IN-313E, 2 Sussex Avenue
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
This 400-level seminar provides a historical and critical context for the rise of gallery-based moving image installations, outlining their distinctive features and their 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 three optics: cinematic, philosophical, and art historical. We will study moving image 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’ works, we will consider 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 consider the commonplace that the moving image comprises thought. Studying screen-based installation’s aesthetic 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. Contingent upon exhibition schedules, field trips to local art galleries will be planned.
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 9:00-12:00
Location: IN-313E, 2 Sussex Avenue
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 E: History and Nation
This course explores ideas of space, place and the nation-state across Canada’s nonfiction film history, from early treatment of colonization and European settlement, into today’s globalized political economy, sovereignty struggles, and continued re-invention of the nation. Through a series of readings, thematic case studies and close readings of nonfiction cinema spanning documentary and experimental film and video, we’ll uncover some of the tensions in so-called Canadian cinema in order to think more broadly about how ideology, culture and place co-constitute one another. Who belongs to the nation and who is excluded from that belonging are active questions that we’ll be asking throughout our survey of films and videos, precisely because these questions have also determined who has access to the production of cinematic images. Foregrounding critiques of Canadian settler colonialism, we will ask questions such as: What do nonfiction images do? How do they inscribe scientific and historical evidence? What kinds of technological, political, social and cultural transformations have shaped the production of documentary and experimental film throughout the past century? And how do these films and videos in turn produce or challenge hegemonic ideas of space, place, and nation through their mediations of reality?
Day and time: Monday 10:00-12:00, Wednesday 10:00-12:00
Location:
Instructor: Brett Story
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: FCS391H1, INI385Y1, INI385H1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Welcome to CIN372Y1Y - Contemporary World Cinema. I am very excited to be teaching this 300-level seminar where together we will interrogate ideas around “world cinema” while exploring the ‘national’ cinemas of a select group of countries and regions. In our globalized world, where co-productions are increasingly becoming the norm, the idea of national cinema has been called into question and supplanted by the term ‘transnational’. While I understand and agree that the terminology must be broadened, I still think that the term national cinema is extremely valuable when thinking about film around the globe and understanding how these cinemas interact with one another. In my work as a film programmer, I've dedicated much of my work to cinema beyond Hollywood and Western Europe, and I’ve witnessed firsthand the nascence of the New Argentine Cinema Movement and by chance, was invited to the jury of the second edition of the Transylvania Film Festival, around the time that the new Romanian Cinema was emerging. In our time together I’ll be able to share those experiences as we explore select national cinemas and the many facets that converge for new cinemas to emerge. We'll explore cinema from Latin America, the UK, the Greek Weird Wave, Romania, the African diaspora and Korea through their unique production and cultural contexts, as well as the networks of distribution and reception that exist.
The regions that we are going to be studying are incredibly rich in their cinematic traditions. We will think about these films within the framework of recent debates on world cinema including: national allegory; the rise of co-productions, core/periphery relations (Hollywood/other, and its critique);; the role of film festivals; intersections with exilic or diasporic cinemas; the geopolitics of art cinema; and, more broadly, the local and global encounters present in the flow of cinema internationally. We will do this cognizant that the industry has just experienced a major disruption that will affect how we produce, distribute, exhibit and watch film for years to come. While the future is uncertain, it’s also exciting to be a part of that change and this will shape our dialogue in the coming months.
Day and time: Monday 16:00-18:00, Thursday 13:00-15:00
Location: Deluxe Screening Room, IN-222, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Diana Sanchez
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: INI380Y1, ENGC83H3
Recommended Preparation: CIN201Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations, 3. Society and its Institutions
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: Tuesday 14:00-17:00, Wednesday 15:00-17:00
Location: Deluxe Screening Room, IN-222, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Bart Testa
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: INI390Y1, 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: Thursday 9:00-13:00
Location: Deluxe Screening Room, IN-222, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Kass Banning
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
How to understand the proliferation and vitality of cinema in the Indian subcontinent? What is “Indian” about these films that extend across 28 states and a minimum of 26 different languages? And why is the popular film form structurally obsessed with romance, heroism, melodrama, and (yes, a lot of) singing and dancing? What modes of cultural criticism and new conceptual grounds for love and desire are generated through these compulsions at the level of form and content? More broadly, how do we understand and decode the various aesthetic intentions behind the pleasures of cinema in a nation that is shattered within by an expansive diversity (in race, ethnicity, religion, caste, and language)? This course will serve as an extensive introduction to a mix of classical, modern, and contemporary films from India spanning across its various regional output and stylistic variety; we will look at both sets of popular and critically acclaimed films from Tamil, Hindi (“Bollywood”), Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Malayalam languages.
The objective of the course is two-fold: 1. To examine the formal tendencies and cultural particularities of the Indian film form beyond the limited notion of Bollywood. 2. To undertake theoretical investigations of both filmic and extra-filmic representations of love and desire—especially considering India’s well-established and robust cinematic disposition for masala i.e., the blending of distinct ingredients like genres, attractions, moods, and emotions. Accordingly, the selected films and readings will furnish new ways for us to look at the unique traditions and peculiar motifs employed in the subcontinent’s cinematic imaginations of romance, marital drama, star-fan relations, love’s revolt against societal norms, secret passions and dark desires, caring for the dead, and lastly, the difficulty of existential and ethical demands on our practices of love and togetherness. Alongside several prominent Indian film scholars, we will also engage with Roland Barthes, Arjun Appadurai, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, V. Geetha, John Paul Ricco, and Theodor W. Adorno through their theoretical meditations on love, desire, modernity, caste, poetry, death, and extinction.
Day and time: Thursday 13:00-15:00, Friday 11:00-14:00
Locations:
Instructor: Ganga Rudraiah
Prerequisite: CIN105Y1
Exclusion: CIN360H1F (Fall 2020)
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course will explore the socio-cultural history of film in the city from the first movie theatres to the emergence of film festivals to the changing ways people are now interacting with cinema under social distancing restrictions. We will explore how the film cultures in the city have changed and expanded, as well as look at how historical events impact the way people watch movies. Students will be exposed to historical film research using online archives and digitized newspaper databases.
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: Friday 13:00-17:00
Location: IN-313E, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Stephen Broomer
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course surveys the history and theory of screening multiculturalism in European cinema. Students will be introduced to the pertinent genres, traditions, and tropes of representing questions of cultural identity and difference, as well as their historical development and theoretical implications. We will interrogate transnational film-historical phenomena: the social problem film, the intercultural romantic drama and comedy, the banlieue film, as well as (trans)national traditions such as Turkish German, French Maghrebi, and British Asian filmmaking. Films may include: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974), My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985), La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), Code Unknown (Haneke, 2000), as well as Evet, I do (Akkus, 2008), Ae Fond Kiss (Loach, 2008), Les Misérables (Ly, 2019), and Berlin Alexanderplatz (Qurbani, 2021). More generally, we will also investigate how cinema – beyond formalizing the genre formulae and aesthetic codes of a specifically cinematic grammar of multiculturalism – works through some of the most pressing political topics and concerns in European multicultural and postcolonial societies: the afterlives of colonialism, Orientalism and Islamophobia, secularism, policing, and right-wing populism, among others. Throughout the course, we will ask ourselves what recent trends in cultural theory can bring to the table: what can affect theory tell us about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings in a romantic comedy like Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham (2002); and how might posthumanism compel us to re-read the headscarf debates as conflicts over what sensually registers as supposedly universally human and its othered, not-quite-human opposite in Fawzia Ambah’s Mariam (2016)? Overall, the course will serve as an introduction to the filmic history of multiculturalism in three European immigration nations (Germany, France, UK), as well as to two methods of theoretical inquiry into culture, representation, and identity: first, a classic, more postcolonial- and cultural studies-inclined one, and, second, a recent, more posthuman and affective one.
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 10:00-12:00, Wednesday 10:00-12:00
Location: IN-313E, 2 Sussex Avenue
Instructor: Christian Zeitz
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1 and CIN201Y1.
Corequisite: CIN301Y1
Exclusion: CIN380H1F (Summer 2021)
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Italian-Americans have a long and varied history in the cinematic traditions of Hollywood. Hollywood’s fascination with Italian mobsters and other cultural stereotypes have given rise to some of the most significant films in American popular culture including: The Godfather Trilogy, Goodfellas, Big Night, Moonstruck, and Do the Right Thing. This course examines the history of Italian-Americans in Hollywood with a focus on how diasporic directors, actors, and communities have grappled with their representation in Hollywood cinema.
Day and time: Thursday 14:00-16:00
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 2022 courses by May 1, 2022, Winter 2023 courses by November 1, 2022, Summer 2023 courses by April 1, 2023. 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 or permission of instructor.
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 2022 courses by May 1, 2022, Winter 2023 courses by November 1, 2022, Summer 2023 courses by April 1, 2023. See Undergraduate Forms for application form. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1, CIN301Y1 or permission of instructor.
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 2022 courses by May 1, 2022, Winter 2023 courses by November 1, 2022, Summer 2023 courses by April 1, 2023. See Undergraduate Forms for application form. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Prerequisite: At least 10 full-course equivalents, including CIN105Y1, CIN201Y1, CIN301Y1 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirement Status: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
Group G: Cross-Listed
Please check with the home department for more details.
An exploration of contemporary films of Ireland, Scotland and Wales from 1980 to the present, as they relate to representations of Celtic identity and the formation of national cinema.
Date and time: Monday 18:00-21:00
Exclusion: SMC355H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
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.
Date and time: Tuesday 14:00-17:00
Prerequisite: SDS255H1/SDS256H1/CDN267H1 (formerly UNI267H1)/CDN268H1 (formerly UNI268H1) or permission of the instructor
Exclusion: SDS375H1, UNI325H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course covers aesthetic, cultural, and social aspects of contemporary Brazilian cinema. The course examines both works of fiction and documentaries from emerging voices as well as world renowned filmmakers, spanning from Cinema Novo to the present. Topics include: music and urban culture, violence, inequality, environmental justice, and gender and sexuality. Lecture time is divided between film screening and class discussion held in English. Students choose tutorials in Portuguese (necessary for this course to be considered towards credit in Portuguese programs) or English.
Day and time: Monday 10:00-13:00 (See A&S Timetable for Tutorial schedule.)
Instructor: Carolina Sá Carvalho
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
The role of film as a mediator of thought and experience concerning religious worldviews. The ways in which movies relate to humanity's quest to understand itself and its place in the universe are considered in this regard, along with the challenge which modernity presents to this task. Of central concern is the capacity of film to address religious issues through visual symbolic forms. I am excited to explore several new Fantasy and Sci Fi films in the course this term, including Pixar's Turning Red (2022)!
Date and time: Wednesday, 10:00-12:00
Instructor: Sarah Gallant
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
A survey of the Russian cinematic tradition from its beginnings through the first decade following the disintegration of the USSR. The course examines the avant-garde cinema and film theory of the 1920s; the totalitarian esthetics of the 1920s-1940s and the ideological uses of film art; the revolution in film theory and practice in the 1950s-1960s; cinema as medium of cultural dissent and as witness to social change. Students also acquire basic skills of film analysis. Taught in English, all films subtitled in English.
Date and time: Monday 14:00-16:00
Instructor: Zdenko Mandušić
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This course is a critical study of the historical, aesthetic, and cultural formation of the concept of pornography. The course explores the relationship between sexual representation and sex work; works through debates about artistic merit and censorship and how they relate to larger issues of power, capitalism, and technology; and theorizes the relationship between sex and commerce. Readings will include work from feminist, queer, people of colour, and trans theorists in the cutting-edge field of porn studies.
Date and time: Tuesday 12:00-14:00
Instructor: Patrick Keilty
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in SDS (waived for CIN program students)
Exclusion: UNI470H1; UNI475H1, Special Topics: Porn Studies
Recommended Preparation: SDS365H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
An overview of the cinematic tradition in Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, and Bulgaria from the 1960s to the present. Topics include revolution and socialism; cinema as activism; ideology and politics; sex and gender; war and trauma. Taught in English. All films with subtitles.
Date and time: Thursday 12:00-14:00
Instructor: Zdenko Mandušić
Exclusion: SLA427H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 1. Creative and Cultural Representations
This seminar will investigate how filmmakers and theorists have related the categories of fact and fiction to the production of films from early cinema to today's digital moving image. At the center of our inquiry will be the history and theory of cinematic authenticity, historical referentiality, and reality effects. We will track how the framing of material reality in moving images produces new aesthetic relations and political implications. We will begin by considering concepts of fiction and nonfiction in early cinema and the later contentious debates over fractography and historical reconstruction, specifically among Soviet Avant-Garde Filmmakers. Then, we will consider the emergence of biographical films and the use of documentary fiction in the service of the nation state. As part of anti-totalitarian and anti-colonial movements, we will examine how filmmakers undermined the distinction between fact and fiction through collage aesthetics and the fictionalization of reality. Our trajectory will take us toward contemporary developments and the continuing experimentation with combining fact and fiction in digital cinema.
Date and time: Thursday 12:00-14:00
Instructor: Zdenko Mandušić
Prerequisite: 9.0 credits
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
This online course examines the social, political, and cultural contexts of recent Latin American cinema. Topics include: military dictatorship and its aftermath, 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. Focus is given to Argentina and Mexico, though films from other countries will be included. Taught in English. Lectures are online asynchronous. Tutorials are online synchronous.
Instructor: Eva-Lynn Jagoe
Recommended Preparation: CIN105Y1/CIN201Y1/SPA258H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: 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 13:00-15:00, Thursday 13:00-15:00
Location:
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 13:00-16:00
Location: Media Commons Theatre, RL-3025, 130 St. George Street
Instructor: Adam Nayman
Exclusion: INI228H1
Distribution Requirement: Humanities or Social Science
Breadth Requirement: 3. Society and its Institutions