Semester II 2020-21

FMS 101: Introduction to Film Studies

This course provides an overview of film studies by focusing on three areas: history of film, production (the basic tools of film-making), and theory (the basic vocabulary of film analysis). Students develop visual literacy through engagement with the primary structures, methods, practitioners, history, ideas, and vocabularies of film studies.

FMS 140: Film History

This course provides a broad overview of the cinema from its beginnings to the present day, while introducing students to historically informed methods and arguments that have contributed to the shape and continuing development of film studies as a formal discipline. In addition to adopting a global perspective to explore the cinema’s role as a powerful aesthetic, social, and cultural force, students examine key movements, conventions, practices, and periods that inform film history. Offered annually in the spring semester.
Prerequisite: FMS 101 or permission of instructor.

FMS 160: The Media Landscape

This course encourages students to critically assess and shape their personal relationship to the media landscape. Its premise is that we are all, to some extent, uninformed and uncritical consumers of media products, services and effects rather than conscientious and civically engaged users of them. In this spirit, this course is designed to give students a theoretical, as well as practical, experience with issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality as they manifest in mediated artifacts of popular culture. The course is taught from a media studies perspective where students gain skills in critical analysis and media literacy. Concepts of power, privilege, justice, representation, hegemony, consumption and resistance are woven throughout course readings, images, assignments and discussions.