Please check this webpage for the most up-to-date information.
Friday, March 1, 2024 - Priority course enrolment begins
Monday, March 4, 2024 - All Faculty of Arts & Science students may enrol
Tuesday, April 8, 2024 - St. George Campus students may enrol
Wednesday, April 9, 2024 - UTM and UTSC students may enrol
Y courses run May 6 - August 23, 2024
F courses run May 6 - June 24, 2024
S courses run July 2 - August 23, 2024
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: Lectures on Tuesday and Thursday 10:00-14:00; Tutorials on Thursday 15:00-17:00 or Friday 10:00-12:00 |
Group C: Social and Cultural Practices
CIN240H1F - The WesternA lone gunslinger. A frontier town under siege. Tumbleweeds. The Western’s symbolic potency has never disappeared even as the genre’s popularity has waned over the years; we see remnants of its iconography in television, music videos, and advertisements. CIN240H1F - The Western will explore the fraught relationship between Western films and North American history, the genre’s global popularity, and its social conscience. We will examine concepts such as mythology, nationhood, freedom, necessity, (so-called) civilization, nature, genocide, and settler colonialism within a genre that is constantly shifting in relation to its socio-political moment. This course will offer students the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the trajectory of the Western genre, get to know important critiques of it, and learn its potential for nuance and complexity. Day and time: Tuesday and Thursday 15:00 - 19:00 |
CIN336H1F - Queer Film and Media: Bad QueersQueer Film and Media focuses on films that are populated with bad queers—the drifter, the hustler, the loser, the disobedient child, the blasphemer—and other unruly subjects. How is queerness deployed, structured, and otherwise utilized on-screen outside of questions of “good” representation? Or, what makes someone a “bad queer”? Moving broadly from the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s to our contemporary moment, we will critically engage with texts across cinema studies and queer theory while also interrogating our own reception to watching “queers behaving badly.” By developing reading and viewing practices beyond considerations of “good” cinematic representation, what can these bad queer subjects teach us in all of their disruptive, discomforting, and antisocial articulations? Day and time: Monday and Wednesday 10:00 - 14:00 |
CIN340H1S - The Global TV SerialCrash Landing on You, Ertugrul! Serials have long captivated audiences’ imaginations across the globe. This course will examine TV serials on a global scale. We will highlight three corners of the world in the six weeks of the course: (1) the Americas; (2) the Balkans and the Middle East; and (3) East Asia. Every week, we will visit a TV serial genre or subgenre that has emerged in a particular social context: the American soap opera, Mexican telenovela, Turkish dizi, Levantine Arabic musalsal, Japanese asadora, and Korean drama, or K-drama. What differentiates these genres of seriality, and what do they have in common? What is TV, or TV “flow”? How do we define the TV serial and, by extension, the TV series? Posing these somewhat broad and abstract questions will initiate our international and intercontinental journey: we will be flowing through TV serial forms or formats to test our answers to these questions. Can thinking with these fluid concepts teach if TV genre conventions are contingent across place and time? Our readings will include excerpts or chapters from some of the foundational texts of (global) television studies, such as Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form (2003 [1974]), along with later edited collections like Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar’s Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (2003). Our screenings will range from the American classic Dallas (1978 – 1991) and the Canadian touchstone Degrassi: The Next Generation (2001 – 2015) to more recent international TV hits including Resurrection: Ertugrul (Diriliş: Ertuğrul, 2014 – 2019) and Goblin: The Lonely and Great God (2016). Day and time: Tuesday and Thursday 17:00 - 21:00 |
Group D: Theory and Criticism
CIN260H1S - Canadian CinemaHow do we define Canadian cinema? By those who make films, fund them, consume them, theorize them, or by featuring recognizably Canadian spaces? This course will explore the narrative and formal hallmarks of English, French, Indigenous, and diasporic Canadian narrative films by concentrating on the creative energies of influential filmmakers (Michel Brault, Patricia Rozema, Atom Egoyan, Mina Shum, David Cronenberg, Jeff Barnaby, Tracey Deer, Graham Foy) and independent and regional film co-ops (Winnipeg Film Group, NIFCO). Students will learn and interrogate the key debates and themes in Canadian cinema developed in its scholarly canonization as well as the historical, cultural, industrial, economic, and social factors that led to the emergence of Canadian narrative cinema (institutions like the National Film Board, Telefilm, TIFF). Dovetailing our examination of the industrial and artistic struggle to establish Canadian narrative cinema and its study will be a consideration of various pivotal social, cultural, political, and ecological crises (October Crisis, Oka, the ongoing climate crisis). Day and time: Monday and Wednesday 10:00 - 14:00 |
Group E: History and Nation
CIN371H1S - (New) Media AestheticsInvestigates the theory and history of media technologies as sites of aesthetic investment in a wide variety of artistic practices, focusing on contemporary digital media work, including experimental cinema, gallery installation, net.art, and avant-garde videogames. One important emphasis lies in the aesthetic possibilities new (and newly inexpensive) media technologies have made available to marginalized artists, including especially women and queer artists. We will study the work of Maya Deren, John Cage, Tony Conrad, Yoko Ono, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Marina Abramovic, Marlon Riggs, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Anna Anthropy, and others. Day and time: Monday and Wednesday 15:00 - 19:00 |
CIN378Y0 - Black BritainThe course is offered through the Summer Abroad program. Please visit their website for details and the application form. Application deadline is February 1, 2024. 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 post-imperial migrant city, “political Blackness,” Black Power and black music’s transnational remit, Black film collectives and aesthetics, among other topics. Media objects will range from documentary, Art cinema, television, to moving image installations. In our field trips we will literally trace Black presence in Britain, beginning with an overnight trip to Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum. This trip will also include exploring the Liverpool Art Biennale and a Beatles walking tour. Our two trips to London will consist of a Black History bus tour, visits to the Museum of London Docklands and various venues that feature works by Black artists or register the existence of Black Britons, ranging from Tate Britain, Sir John Soane’s Museum to Autograph, among additional exhibitions that consider contemporary issues of Blackness and the image in Britain. We will begin the course by exploring African artefacts culled during Britain’s Imperial era housed at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Instructor: Kass Banning |