Advanced Film Theory and Criticism

Catalog description

Description: This capstone course builds upon scholarly ideas and experiences in COMM 150 to familiarize the student with various theories of film, and their application to specific films and categories of films. This course requires media studies and film/video majors to develop the ability to perform criticism: that is, to select among philosophical, analytical, and rhetorical tools those which best fit the goals of a specific critical engagement with a media text, and to execute this criticism in a manner that will be persuasive to readers, listeners, and/or viewers. Because this extended critical and evaluative act is fundamental to both the study and making of media, this course is designed to have broad applicability to a variety of media-based professions. Among the concepts students will engage in this course are: neoformalism, semiotics, auteurism/authorship, genre theory, feminist film theory, theories of difference (including race, class, and sexuality/gender), theories of national and transnational cinema, cultural history, realist and montage theories, behavioral studies, psychoanalytic and apparatus theory, reception studies, political economic and convergence theories of the cinema, and theories of the digital in cinema. Students will engage a selection of film styles: narrative, documentary, experimental, and animation; silent and sound, national and international. Students will analyze the cinema as an art form, and as a mass communications medium. Students will also gain knowledge of the history of theory and the history of criticism in the cinematic medium. During the course of their semester's work, students will use the tools of reading, discussion/presentation, analysis, examination, and particularly writing to develop performative skills in criticism. Students are expected to become proficient in the practice of criticism, as well as understanding the principles of criticism. In their summary work in this course, students apply the theories they have learned to cinema in various ways: in group projects, in individual research papers, or through multimedia and digital scholarship settings. Students are expected to demonstrate a synthesis of ideas and experiences from previous course work in cinema studies and media studies. In some iterations of this course, students will address a single overarching topic, such as "Authorship and the Cinema," through which the broad learning objectives and capstone nature of the course will be realized.