Please check this webpage for the most up-to-date information.
Course enrolment begins on March 3, 2025 at 9:00am.
Y courses run May 5 - August 25, 2025
F courses run May 5 - June 24, 2025
S courses run July 2 - August 25, 2025
Group A: Foundations
CIN105Y1Y - Introduction to Film StudyIntroduction to film analysis; concepts of film style and narrative. Topics include: documentary, avant-garde, genres, authorship, ideology, and representation. Day and time: Lecture on Tuesday and Thursday 10:00 - 13:00, tutorial on Tuesday and Thursday 13:00 - 14:00 |
Group B: Genre and Modes
CIN320H1S - Folk HorrorHow do stories about haunted spaces, witches and monsters reflect our anxieties about identity and cultural erasure? This course explores the folklore origins of dread, delving into the stories and legends that linger in our collective nightmares. Focusing on the eerie genre of folk horror, we will examine the manifestations of colonial pasts, gender dynamics, and the darker corners of the human psyche in films like Midsommar (2019), The Witches (1990), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Strigoi(2009), and The Windigo (2024). Each week, we will engage with a different legend from around the world, immersing ourselves in diverse cultures and folklore traditions. To enrich this exploration, we will look at the literary origins of thesefilms by analyzing excerpts from texts such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Roald Dahl’s The Witches. This will help us understand how these works use aesthetic and narrative techniques to create the mood and atmosphere of their era, enhancing our understanding of the relationship between the original texts and their cinematic adaptations. Special emphasis will be placed on themes of belonging, dislocation and “otherness” alongside the role of the rural landscape as a space of dangerous autonomy. The mode of delivery for this course is online synchronous. Students must have access to fast internet, a microphone, and a web camera. Day and time: Tuesday and Thursday 19:00 - 21:00 |
Group C: Social and Cultural Practices
CIN240H1F - Anime!
Especially over the past two decades, the prominence of “anime” - often understood simply as Japanese animation - on the global stage of visual culture has become increasingly difficult to deny. Major streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ are increasingly investing in acquiring or producing anime to be offered on their platforms. Anime feature films, such as 2022’s Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero and One Piece Film: Red are receiving worldwide theatrical releases and are going toe-to-toe with Hollywood products. In 2020, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Mugen Train became the first non-Hollywood film to be the highest-grossing film of the year, also becoming the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time. Even should we want to limit our questioning to what cinematic culture is in a Canadian/North American context, we will arrive at an incomplete answer if we fail to factor in anime. This course offers an introduction to a growing body of existing interdisciplinary scholarship collectively aimed at understanding what we call anime. What is anime – a style? A meta-genre? A “mode of existence”? Who makes anime, and what are the conditions under which they make it? Who watches anime, and why do they watch it? To answer these questions, this course will be structured around three units: text/image, industry, and culture. The first, text/image, will look at what it means to analyze anime as individual texts or groups of texts – how does anime position us as spectators or as readers? How do we think of anime in terms of gender/genre? The second, industry, will look at what forms of economic organization support anime as a commercial industry. What forms of outsourced or precarious labour support anime’s existence? Why are “media mix” strategies crucial to anime’s operations? The third, culture, will look at how we think about the presumed consumers of anime. What kinds of desires direct anime consumption habits? How do informal flows of fan production interact with formal flows? By design, our understanding of anime will emerge from interrogating the sites at which these units bleed into one another. Day and time: Tuesday and Thursday 17:00 - 21:00 |
CIN340H1F - Cinema as Fashion
In what ways is cinema like fashion? Traditionally, discussions on fashion and cinema have centered on costume design and aspects of star persona. In this class, however, we will broaden the ways that cinema and fashion are thought together by exploring their similarities and differences at a range of scales. We will move from microscopic questions of texture and fabric (can a film be said to have a feel like a fabric?) to global questions of labor and distribution (how do films and clothing circulate through the world?), exploring issues relating to style, trend cycles, and “the look.” At each level, particular attention will be given to the everyday: to the political, poetic, and aesthetic choices of something as simple as picking today’s outfit or tonight’s movie. Ultimately, approaching cinema as fashion (and vice-versa) generates some pressing questions: is there a “fast fashion” for film culture? How does cinematic style compare to the sartorial style? Do spectators 'fashion' themselves with cinematic images? To answer these questions, we will read works from film theory as well as fashion theory and look to such films as Phantom Thread (2019), In the Mood for Love (2000), The Grand Bizarre (2018), and Saint Laurent (2014). Day and Time: Monday and Wednesday 10:00 - 14:00 |
Group D: Theory and Criticism
CIN260H1F - Disaster FilmsHow do films show us catastrophe? This course probes the ‘disaster film’—a popular genre typified by depictions of large-scale disasters—with the aim of considering both the spectacular appeal as well as the discomforting aspects of the genre. Offering a critical overview of the disaster film, the course provides a survey of the variety of cinematic techniques that have been developed throughout film history to simulate disastrous events. We will pay close attention to how these films work to represent real-world hazards at an expanded scale, from infrastructural collapse and natural hazards to nuclear war and more cosmic threats. In turn, we will study how cinema has come to shape contemporary understandings of these sorts of ‘disastrous’ phenomena. For example, we will think through how the narratives of disaster films serve to offer proposals for living through drastic historical and ecological shifts. The genre will thus be read as engaging in various historical debates surrounding topics like nuclear power, industrialization, climate change, and the global extraction of natural resources. The mode of delivery for this course is online synchronous. Students must have access to fast internet, a microphone, and a web camera. Day and Time: Monday and Wednesday 14:00 - 16:00 |
CIN260H1S - Beyond Chick Flicks
What makes a film a “chick flick” and why do these films spark both adoration and critique? How do filmmakers around the world challenge or reinvent its conventions? In this course, we will examine the compelling, and often surprising relationships between gender and media genres, especially as they shape our worldviews about femininity, masculinity, romance, ambition and relationships. Often dismissed as frivolous or formulaic, films and TV shows geared towards women have remained a staple of popular culture, from classical Hollywood ‘weepies’, to rom-coms and television soaps. We will ask: what is it about the intertwining of gender and genre that draws large audiences? Is the gendering of a genre simply a marketing gimmick, or does it reflect deeper cultural anxieties and desires around gender, romance, and emotional expression? We will look at how recurring themes such as love and heartbreak, friendship and rivalry, empowerment and conformity, come through in different ways for global audiences that are drawn to media that tell the stories of women. Women - cis, trans, those who do not fit neatly in any gender categories - emerge at the centre of many films and television shows across the world, as main characters for stories of romance, nationhood, and even the experiences of colonialism and political resistance. Beyond chick flicks, we will ‘travel’ across different cultural contexts, to examine the powerful ways gender and genre shape and transform each other. Day and time: Monday and Wednesday 10:00 - 14:00 |
Group E: Theory and Criticism
CIN378Y0 - Aspects of a National Cinema: Black BritainThis course is offered through the Summer Abroad program. Please refer to their website for details. This course explores Black British cinemas while examining categories of race and nation specific to post-Imperial Britain and its Black diasporic subjects’ world-making. Institutional practices and networks that have shaped the development and aesthetics of Black British film culture from the 1960s to the present, will be highlighted, when, in the words of Stuart Hall, filmmakers sought to “find a new language” to challenge post-war norms and culture that led to seismic shifts towards imagining postcolonial Britain. Studying Black British media on UK soil offers the opportunity to be immersed in the cultural ethos of Black Britain. We will experience locales and re-visit histories that, in part, inform deeper understanding of the unique film and moving-image practices under study. Topics will include London as a postimperial migrant city, “political Blackness,” Black Power and black music’s transnational remit, Black film collectives, among other topics. Media objects will range from documentary, Art cinema, television, to moving image installations. Day and time: TBA |