Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT)

This class is designed to enhance your understanding and appreciation of film and television. It operates on the philosophy that the better we understand how film and television texts work, the more intelligently and perceptively we will be able to consume them, which is an invaluable skill to have in our media-saturated world. You will learn about the basic elements that distinguish films and television programs from other aesthetic forms, such as editing, cinematography, sound and set design, and how these components work together to develop stories and characters. We will also work with interpretive frameworks that uncover deeper meanings and patterns in film and television, such as genre theory, the idea of authorship, political economy, and ideological analysis. Finally, you will acquire the skills and tools needed to write your own educated analyses of film and television texts. The class screenings present a range of films, from Hollywood classics to independent and international films, as well as television shows both old and new. This course is required for all concentrators in Film and Television.

Introduction to Film

A study of theatre viewed from three perspectives: historical, literary, and contemporary production practices. Through lectures, readings, and discussion, students will study this art form and understand its relevance to their own life as well as to other art forms. A basic understanding of the history of theatre and the recognition of the duties and responsibilities of the personnel involved in producing live theatre performances will allow students to become more objective in their own theatre experiences.

Theatre Appreciation

Collaboration, the Art of Making Theatre explores the roles of the artists who create the material world in which a performance exists and most importantly, the collaborative nature of those relationships. Students will be challenged to understand the thinking behind the work of the designers, writers, directors, and off-stage personnel who bring stories to life on stage. Incorporating hands on projects as well as lecture/discussion formats, students will experiment with story telling through the visual elements of scenery, costumes, lighting, etc. Collaboration, the Art of Making Theatre is an excellent entry point to the Theatre Concentration.

During the lab times, certain films will be viewed for further discussion in class.

Certain films will be viewed for further discussion in class.

A tutorial in conjunction with Basics of Film & Television.

This writing intensive course will be devoted to a variety of different topics in film, television, new media and theatre depending on the individual instructor's interests. Note: Freshmen only.

How do form and style structure our experience of film? This unit provides a critical introduction to elements of film making and viewing, moving through an exploration of formal components of film to consider film aesthetics in relation to the history of film scholarship. We will consider films in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, from early cinema to youtube, and introduce a series of "case studies" to explore historical, cultural and material contexts of film production and consumption.

This class is designed to enhance your understanding and appreciation of film and television. It operates on the philosophy that the better we understand how film and television texts work, the more intelligently and perceptively we will be able to consume them, which is an invaluable skill to have in our media-saturated world. You will learn about the basic elements that distinguish films and television programs from other aesthetic forms, such as editing, cinematography, sound and set design, and how these components work together to develop stories and characters. We will also work with interpretive frameworks that uncover deeper meanings and patterns in film and television, such as genre theory, the idea of authorship, political economy, and ideological analysis. Finally, you will acquire the skills and tools needed to write your own educated analyses of film and television texts. The class screenings present a range of films, from Hollywood classics to independent and international films, as well as television shows both old and new. This course is required for all concentrators in Film and Television.

This class is designed to enhance your understanding and appreciation of film and television. It operates on the philosophy that the better we understand how film and television texts work, the more intelligently and perceptively we will be able to consume them, which is an invaluable skill to have in our media-saturated world. You will learn about the basic elements that distinguish films and television programs from other aesthetic forms, such as editing, cinematography, sound and set design, and how these components work together to develop stories and characters. We will also work with interpretive frameworks that uncover deeper meanings and patterns in film and television, such as genre theory, the idea of authorship, political economy, and ideological analysis. Finally, you will acquire the skills and tools needed to write your own educated analyses of film and television texts. The class screenings present a range of films, from Hollywood classics to independent and international films, as well as television shows both old and new. This course is required for all concentrators in Film and Television.

Introduction to Improvisation

Ethics in the media.

Interdisciplinary arts

In this course you will explore the genre of the telenovela (a major social, cultural, political, and economic force in Latin America and, more recently, in the United States) by reading about the genre (in Spanish) and watching two condensed telenovelas (also in Spanish). You will demonstrate your understanding of the telenovela and its importance in Hispanic culture through writing and discussion and through application of these ideas as you write, produce, direct, act in, record and edit a mini-telenovela as a class. During this process you will learn and apply basic production (videography) and post-production (computer based video and audio editing) techniques. Course taught in Spanish

The pages of magical realist literature are inhabited with spirits, shapeshifters, and sprites alongside the most mundane phenomena—a leaky faucet, a city bus that doesn’t run on time, a meal that could taste a bit better. What does this juxtaposition achieve? How does the heightened sense of realness and unrealness in this emerging literary genre ask us to think about the worlds these texts create, as well as the world we inhabit when we put the books down? In this class, “Magical Realism: Spells, Specters, and Shapeshifters” we will consider how the genre of magical realism uses supernatural phenomena to engage with very real and, unfortunately, everyday problems like racism, colonization, misogyny, partition, and violence. We will examine how this form adapts to specific circumstances (such as the United States in the aftermath of slavery, or India in the aftermath of independence and partition). We will also consider how its generic conventions transcend nation and region.

Shakespeare's plays were written for the stage, and yet most students only grapple with them on the page. This course gives you the chance to investigate and interpret six of Shakespeare's plays through the dual lenses of text and performance. Particular emphasis will be paid to the relationship between the page and stage in regards to performance history, print culture, editorial / directorial emendation, appropriation and adaptation. We will watch professionally pre-recorded performances and enjoy at least one live performance. In addition to reading, writing, and viewing, you will take "the stage" yourself to perform a scene(s) from the plays, considering staging, props, and other avenues of interpretation. All along the way, we will consider the historical evolution and reinvention of Shakespeare himself from actor/playwright to sage/author, investigating what role (if any) the Bard should play today in grappling topics such as: Gender, Sexuality, Race, Religion, Truth, and Justice.

How does contemporary drama from around the world engage with pressing social, political, economic, and environmental issues? The one-credit course examines prominent new plays from the twenty-first century that provoke audiences—and readers—to think critically about the world in which we live. For each play, we will discuss its development process, historically contextualize its core questions and issues represented, examine innovations in narrative structure and characterization, and connect text to the challenges of theatrical staging. Meets weekly for one hour on Fridays. All readings in English or English translation.

In a 1971 interview, Bruce Lee said "Martial arts has a very very deep meaning as far as my life is concerned because as an actor, as a martial artist, as a human being - all these I have learned from martial arts." By merging multiple aspects of human identity, artistic expression, and cultural activity, martial arts have a unique ability to access the human imagination. From Hong Kong cinemas, to Black Belt magazines and black light posters, to disco songs and shopping mall kiosks for ninja equipment, martial arts are intertwined with popular culture. After more than a half century of association with aesthetic violence, mystical secrets, and Orientalist mystique, the cultural phenomenon of martial arts lends itself to anthropological analysis and critique. This course synthesizes the global dissemination of martial arts with the anthropology of media and symbolic violence. By tracking the proliferation of the martial arts in popular culture, from muay thai action films to karate tournament supply catalogues and dojo iconography, students can simultaneously explore these arts' cultural origins. We will examine these origins in a range of styles from kung fu in China, to jujitsu in Japan, kali/escrima in the Philippines, pencak silat in Indonesia, and savate in France. In this way, the course crafts informative linkages between the cultural variations of martial arts, and their global influence in popular consciousness.

It has long-been a part of Notre Dame's Saturday football tradition. As uniformed players leave the locker room and descend a tight stairwell to the field below, they reach up and touch the iconic "Play Like a Champion Today" sign. Countless players, students, and fans have touched the sign over the years, hoping to imbibe some illusive and ineffable Fighting Irish magic. But what does it mean to "play like a champion today" ... or any day, really? More simply, what does it mean to play? Play is an inescapable and essential part of the human condition. And, yet, the experience's core liminality defies easy definition and explanation. This course provides an introduction to the study of human play primarily through the lens of analog and digital games. It is designed for first- and second-year students from a range of backgrounds and disciplines. Given the variety of play practices across human history and cultures, this class strives to equip students with a critical vocabulary and interpretive framework to help them make sense of play in its many forms. This class will pay particular attention to how rules, goals, game mechanics, and narratives offer reliable and compelling structures for gameplay, and what ludic activities reveal about social power.

A vampire stalks you through a dark tunnel. A mad scientist gives human form to an android. Regimented masses march beneath monumental swastikas. Some of the most enduring images of the twentieth century were crafted by German filmmakers. They filmed in the shadow of the First World War, in the midst of economic turmoil, in the service of the Nazi dictatorship, and in a Germany divided by the Cold War. They used cinema to grapple with the legacies of military defeat, to articulate their anxieties about industrial modernity, to envision utopian futures, to justify the murder of millions, and to come to terms with these monstrous crimes. This course will integrate the disciplinary insights of history and film studies to examine how Germans confronted the upheavals and traumas associated with modernity, the utopian fantasies and cataclysmic horrors of the twentieth-century. Together, the class will pursue three major objectives. First, students will learn about the most important events and developments of modern German history. They will examine how shifting economic, cultural, and political realities shaped the German film industry, and how filmmakers used their work to understand and intervene in their social, political, and cultural issues of their day. Second, students will learn to critically analyze films. They will learn how the structural components of a film - choices in composition, editing, and sound-mixing - craft meaning through immersive spectacles that speak to audiences on multiple intellectual and emotional levels. Students will explore how filmmakers deploy these techniques to produce awe-inspiring entertainments, sophisticated instruments of propaganda, and radical social critiques. As historical artifacts, films reflect the society which created them. But students will also consider how films, as works of art, survive beyond their historical context, and are reinterpreted by new audiences with new priorities. Finally, students will practice the skills of historical literacy. They will digest, analyze, and criticize important scholarship (secondary literature). They will discern the relevance of particular interpretations for important debates. They will use sustained analysis of films as primary sources to develop, articulate, and defend their own historical interpretations and arguments.

Intro to French Cinema

This introductory course uses popular film as a primary text/medium to explore fundamental questions in the academic study of religion. In particular, we will be concerned with the ways that faith, spirituality, religion and religious experience are constituted and defined on film as well as through film viewing. Emphasis will be placed on film's reflecting African Diaspora culture and the inclusion of religions outside of the Judeo-Christian canon for context and comparison. In discussing films from across a range of subjects and genres, we will engage in the work of mythical, theological and ideological criticism, while examining the nature, function, and value of religion and religious experience. We will also consider significant writers and traditions in the field of Diaspora Religions and develop the analytical and interpretive skills of the discipline. Given the depth and breadth of religious orthodoxies and faith-based practices existent throughout the Diaspora, students will be exposed to a variety of film genres including silent films, anime, documentary, drama, biography, comedy and horror. Based on availability, and the student cohort's familiarity or lack of material the scheduled films will include twelve to fifteen selections from the lists below. Weekly readings, writing assignments, and screening sessions are required.

In 1969 Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine wrote the anthem, To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Yet too often, to be Black has been seen or depicted as a predator, a thug, a fetish, or a threat. What are the implicit and explicit messages present in plain sight that contribute to how Blackness and Black people have been defined? This course critically engages with the “longue durée” of film narratives where Blackness is displayed or demeaned, and where the politics of identity, or its discrimination is present or foundational to the arc of a narrative. Relevant critical literature and material topical to the films themselves will complement the visual media, allowing for the potential to subtly illuminate aspects of the human experience, ritual practice, and socio-cultural, religious, or gendered behaviors. Attention will be given to cross-cultural mores, the distinction of communication modes, and references to ethnicity, race, class, and gender as relates to the cultures depicted in each film. This course has a co-req associated with it. You must register for both to be in the course.

This project-based course focuses on the craft of writing, directing, and producing independent theatre. Projects are developed in consultation with faculty mentors, who will work with each student to articulate and realize their creative goals, and develop them into meaningful performances.

Media and Ethnography

This course is intended for actors and directors who work in any medium: film, television or theatre. Students will learn to create and truthfully inhabit imaginary circumstances through exercises, structured improvisation, and scene study. This laboratory style classroom instruction uses Viola Spolin's technique for refining awareness of the actor's impulses through exploration and focused experiments. Acting Process is the prerequisite, but you may request advance approval by the instructor.

If you visit any major city in the United States (and beyond), ghost tours are perennially one of the most popular tourist attractions, whether equipped with spooky, mist-decaled buses or bloody-faced period costumed walking guides. Why does this delightful and disturbing tourist trap thrive in so many locations? Perhaps the best way to understand any person, any place, and culture is to understand their dead. In Haunting: Page, Stage, and Screen, we will examine haunting as a method of representing grief, loss, systemic violence, and survival in spite of all that. By reading haunting across genres of prose, drama, and film, we will consider how metaphors of haunting function as an orientation to the past across mediums and cultural contexts. Does be haunting mean the same thing in different historical moments and geographical locations? What kinds of haunting are made available on the page, on the stage, or on the screen? Can a text or a person be haunted even without a ghost? Beginning with Hamlet (one of the earliest and most important literary ghosts), we will trace haunting to the present. Ultimately, by thinking critically about haunting, we hope to learn a little about living.

A study of theatre viewed from three perspectives: historical, literary, and contemporary production practices. Through lectures, readings, and discussion, students will study this art form and understand its relevance to their own life as well as to other art forms. A basic understanding of the history of theatre and the recognition of the duties and responsibilities of the personnel involved in producing live theatre performances will allow students to become more objective in their own theatre experiences.

A practical introduction to the techniques, processes, and materials used in creating the scenery and lighting for the stage. Students will explore traditional and modern theatrical production methods: carpentry, rigging, scenic painting, stage lighting, and basic sound engineering. Students will gain practical experience by participating on realized projects and productions.

Collaboration, the Art of Making Theatre explores the roles of the artists who create the material world in which a performance exists and most importantly, the collaborative nature of those relationships. Students will be challenged to understand the thinking behind the work of the designers, writers, directors, and off-stage personnel who bring stories to life on stage. Incorporating hands on projects as well as lecture/discussion formats, students will experiment with story telling through the visual elements of scenery, costumes, lighting, etc. Collaboration, the Art of Making Theatre is an excellent entry point to the Theatre Concentration.

This course introduces the non-theatre major to the basic elements of the art and craft of acting. The student will explore the spaces of memory, the body in an external space, voice and diction, and the choices s/he has to make, through the observation and imagination of realities. S/he will explore the process of looking for the sense of truth and urgency in expressing a dramatic text and a character's will and action. This course is participatory and will involve students' scene study presentations as well as written textual analysis to introduce scene studies.

Film, Television and Theatre

This course will shift your attention from watching movies to also listening to them. It will introduce you to anew way of experiencing films by educating your sense of hearing. Amid a strong emphasis oncinema - ranging from musical accompaniment during the silent era to sound in experimental films; or fromclassical Hollywood underscoring to Bollywood musicals - we will consider the soundtrack of movingpictures within the larger history of audiovisual media from lantern shows to television series or from commercials to video games. Based on a core repertory of twelve films, the course will cover various topicsand issues surrounding film sound: aesthetic and psychological (such as representation, narration, emotion);social and political (such as race, ethnicity, propaganda); cultural and economic (such as production,technology, dissemination). After taking this course, you will never quite look at a screen without listening tothe soundtrack, having come to perceive and understand how the powers of sound and music shape our waysof knowing the world.

Acting Process introduces the student to the core techniques of acting for the stage. The course engages both the analytical and the creative mind as students use research and analysis to support their physical, vocal and imaginative approaches to creating compelling scripted and improvised scenes. Students will rehearse and prepare scenes outside of class (with a partner and solo) for in-class performance. All students must see two live theatrical performances and turn in a reflection for each.

This course is designed to introduce actors and directors to the fundamentals of a dynamic technique known as Viewpoints. Viewpoints allows a group of actors to function together spontaneously and intuitively and to generate bold work quickly. It develops flexibility, articulation, and strength in movement and makes ensemble playing truly possible. The Viewpoints further gives directors a vocabulary with which to create and transform their work on stage or in film.

This course is designed to introduce students to creating original work for the theater. The course will explore the writing process as well as models from contemporary U.S. theater with the aim to present a variety of paths toward creating new, vibrant plays. This is primarily a writing course. In addition, by reading and discussing ten separate dynamic play texts, we will analyze dramatic writing. Weekly writing exercises, movement work, visual arts approaches, improvisation techniques and collaborative discussions will create resources for rich play material, which each student will eventually use in a final scene, presented in a public reading at the end of the semester.

During the lab times, certain films will be viewed for further discussion in class.

This is the lab component for FTT 20320, Play Like a Champion lecture. Students must take both the lecture and lab.

​Required lab screening for Co-requisite FTT 20410.

Lab co-requisite for FTT 20478.

A tutorial to be taken in conjunction with the Basics of Film & Television course.

This immersive, one-credit course connects students with an internationally recognized artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Based in Chicago, Brendan Fernandes’ projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Students will collaborate directly with the artist across five class meetings that will include performance workshops, guided film screenings, lectures, and discussions. Students will also travel to Chicago on a group trip co-led by Michael Schreffler and Rebecca Struch of the Notre Dame Arts Initiative.

Taught at host institution. This course, which serves as a first approach to cinematic history, aims at the acquisition of broad temporal markers that constitute its framework, as well as the instilling of a sensibility to the diverse methods that found its discourse. This course will teach about the "New Wave" in particular, a cinematographical movement emblematic of French cinema that critics have qualified as a movement as revolutionary as the time period in which it occurred. The course will both return to the genesis of the formula invented by critics to understand the arguments of the movement's principal authors, discovered at times against their will, and delve into the movement's heritage. We will take up the historical, economic, formal, and cultural dimensions of this New Wave by watching excerpts from filmmakers, and by constructing a commentary based on a number of critical texts (a packet will be distributed at the first class).

Modern media are everywhere; they mediate nearly all aspects of everyday life. Media forms old and new - newspapers, magazines, films, radio, television, pop music, Internet, social media, and mobile phones - are shaping our social and political life, cultivating our cultural imaginations, and articulating our personal experiences and a sense of belonging in a rapidly changing world. This course examines the many roles of the media in the web of modern life.

When Shakespeare came to London in the early 1590s, he found an already thriving theatre business - playhouses, companies, audiences and a hunger for entertainment shared by court and city. The bar was already set high by the spectacular success of men like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, but the newcomer, described as "an upstart crow," soon turned out to be the ultimate "Shake-scene" of the profession. What is often forgotten in the study of Shakespeare is that he could not have realized his full potential without the theatrical business being already in place, i.e., his achievement is best understood in the context of his time. The "Then" in the title of this course positions Shakespeare's plays among those of his contemporaries and attempts to uncover the dynamics of a culture, marked by material and political tensions. "Now," Shakespeare studies and his plays are part of global culture, but this does not apply to his contemporaries. Hence, students will grapple with the question why this is so. Another contemporary aspect is performance. Where possible, performances of the studied plays will be attended and discussed. In the case of Shakespeare, there is also rich film material.

London is for many the theatre capital of the world, celebrated for its rich history, unique achievements and on-going innovations. This course introduces students to the vibrant nature of theatrical production in London from Shakespeare to the West End, including its plays, politics, places and practitioners. Students will combine relevant readings and in-class discussions with practical explorations of live performances in and around the city.

This module provides first year undergraduate students with a detailed introduction to foundational theories and theorists relevant to the field of media studies. It provides historical perspectives on the diffusion and societal effect of key communication technologies. Students will develop an understanding of codes, aesthetics, forms, conventions, and roles of media communication in contemporary society, as well as an introduction to the issues of the technology-society relationship, and of politics and power in mass media.

In this course, the students are responsible for producing an original musical for public performance. Everything from writing to directing to acting will be done by the group of students under the guide of the professors who will teach us proper terminology and techniques.

This course offers a rhythmical and kinetic approach to Ancient Greek Drama through a contemporary lens.

This module explores television as a transformational medium within the broader arc of technological and cultural development, a key step in the transition from ownership to ephemerality in consumerism. From the advent of television to the rise of streaming services, students will analyse how TV has shaped societal behaviours, representation, and consumerism, culminating in the ongoing impact of digital streaming platforms.

The aim of this module is to examine contemporary European cinema to discover what national cinemas reveal about national identity, culture, and values. How does a Nation tell its unique story through its cinematic production? One of the key features of globalisation is the movement of vast numbers of people across national boundaries, a process that has had very significant consequences for notions of national identity in many western European countries. Over the last twenty years or so, European filmmakers have begun to explore the consequences of these multiple diasporas to the extent that it is almost impossible to understand European culture without experiencing its cinematic output. The first part of the module will be devoted to contemporary French films, with particular attention to diverse representations of French national history and identity through the study of La Haine (dir. Kassovitz, 1995) Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain (dir. Jeunet, 2001) and Les Miserables.

This course provides students with an introduction to the fundamentals of rhetoric and how they are applied in oral communication, and how these principles and concepts lead to effective public speaking. Students will learn how to prepare and organize persuasive speeches by learning the fundamental structures of the persuasive speech. In addition, students will begin to acquire basic skills in critical reasoning, including how to structure a thesis statement and support it through a specific line of reasoning using idea subordination, coordination, and parallel structure.

The course seeks to develop a knowledge base, techniques and tools, so that the student learns to know, understand and relate the dimensions, parameters and factors involved in the design of lighting projects for interior spaces and luminaire design.

FS 10010 Perspectives on Film I at UCD; This course will introduce students to the appreciation of cinema in its many dimensions: as medium of story, as aesthetic form, as artistic practice, as historical document, as social mirror, and as discourse on ideas of nation. Using a mixture of contemporary and classic films, it examines a range of issues and approaches in the academic study of film, enabling students to familiarize themselves with important writing and thinking about cinema. It will develop students' understanding of how film works formally and stylistically and of cinema's relationships with society, politics, and culture.

Taught as CPA 101- 'Historia del Cine Mexicano' at a host institution. Course objectives include:To recognize and differentiate stages of cinematography of Mexico from its arrival in 1896 until present day cinema.  To analyze the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, to understand the thematic characteristics of this period, and to learn the intrinsic and extrinsic reasons that started the decay of this industry and the loss of high quality in film.  To recognize and analyze the key periods of national cinematography from the Golden age, to analyze its aesthetic and conceptual transcendence, and to understand the state of the industry and the perspective of the future of Mexican cinema as well as its influence on the public.

The aim of this course is to help you master technical vocabulary of the cinema, i.e.parameters that have a direct impact on the images and sounds on images and sounds, and which are essential to the description essential for describing and analyzing films and other and other audiovisual works. Format, shot scale, depth of field depth of field and depth of field, tracking shot depth of field and depth of field, tracking shots will be just some of the topics covered.

From the Lumiere Brothers to the transition to talkies in the late 1920s, the courses will trace the history of European and American silent cinema, combining aesthetic and economic considerations. They will also recall the conditions of projection of a cinema that may have been silent but that the sound effects artists, a lecturer, a pianist or a large orchestra made sound in some way.

This module offers an in-depth study of Irish cinema and television from historical, cultural, social and economic perspectives. Spanning different cinematic and televisual genres from documentary to political thriller, and from the sitcom to reality television, students will develop an understanding of how Irish people and society both shape and are shaped by screen culture through an analysis of key texts. Eschewing unhelpfully narrow definitions of Irishness, this module offers an examination of the Irish experience both at home and abroad, examining how these films and television programmes shape our conception of national identity at a time of increased cultural and migrational flows both into and out of Ireland (both North and South).

In this course the basics of traditional Japanese dance is taught. This includes the proper way to put on a kimono, what makes a dance distinctively feminine and masculine and so forth.

Opera embraces voice, music, theatre, poem and visual arts, making it the "total" art form. It is endlessly reinvented by a changing society, which it also contributes to shape. Sometimes forbearing political events (revolutions started in opera houses), often used as propaganda by the rulers of the time, opera entertains a unique relationship with the political power. From the Age of Enlightenment, opera became a vector of subtle social criticism or political utopia. Today, contemporary issues such as the #metoo movement can sometimes be controversially taken on board when staging operas. The course therefore will propose a cross-thematic journey into opera, power and politics from Monteverdi to Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, John Adams and many others, confronting musical works with the dynamics of power, based on collective watching of numerous video extracts from operas. This will allow students to develop a personal and critical perspective on the complex relationship between opera and power, whether political, economic or social.

This course explores the relationship between music and film, delving into the historical development of production and the dramatic function of film scores from mainstream to independent cinema. Focusing on the work of a variety of composers and film directors, the course will examine the collaborative process between these artists to achieve these goals.

Students receive a contextualized analysis of the history and social landscape of Mexico through studying the country's cinematography.

This course explores the art of theatrical fencing as both a physical discipline and a performative practice. Students will develop skills in stage combat, historical fencing techniques, and the dramatic elements of storytelling through movement. Emphasis will be placed on precision, control, safety, and the historical context of fencing in performance. By the end of the course, students will be able to choreograph and perform duels, integrating both historical and dramatic techniques.

Many 20th century Chinese films were concerned with issues of nationhood, identity, trauma, and a national past. In recent years, however, while some directors have continued to focus on the nation s past, others have chosen to look at the present and the effects of globalization on Chinese society and culture. This course asks that students begin to understand Chinese cinemas as transnational, a triangular composite of Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong cinema that has also been influenced by Hollywood, Japanese and Korean cinema, amongst others. Students will be introduced to Chinese film history and criticism via an examination of twelve films directed by some of Greater China s most skilled directors.

This course will examine British society through the lens of genre, in both classic and contemporary British cinema. Each week, we will analyze a British genre film in terms of craft (including story structure, visual design, and performance), critical contexts, and academic scholarship. By comparing British films with American films and tropes out of Hollywood (which will be more familiar to our American students), we will identify what is innately “British” about these pieces of cinema, and how they meet or defy American expectations of their respective genres. We will then decide how these variations reflect differences in our respective societies.

This ten-week course offers participants the opportunity to explore the evolution of the indigenous art forms of Ireland, through the media of film, drama, music, song and oral presentations. Students will gain an alternative perspective on Ireland's literary, cultural and performative heritage through reading and viewing a selection of iconic texts, film and performances which represent the traditional art forms of Ireland in their broadest sense. A key element of the course is the emphasis on the Irish language, surely the most salient emblem of Ireland's indigenous culture. Classes will consist of lectures, film presentations and discussion of reading and viewing materials. Participants will also have the opportunity to engage with the practices of traditional song and dance during classes. Archive and contemporary film, where appropriate, in both documentary and fictional genres will provide a comprehensive background to the selected art form and will provide a context for active discussion at the end of each session.

A survey of films, directors and film styles in Italy from the 1940s to the present. The films are examined as aesthetic objects in their own right and in relation to the wider social and cultural environment of post-war Italy. The role of cinema as a tool of historiographic inquiry is also investigated. Realist, modernist and post-modernist aesthestics are discussed in relation to Italian cinema in particular and Italian society in general. Directors treated include Amelio, Argento, Bava, Bertolucci, De Santis, De Sica, Fellini, Leone, Monicelli, Moretti, Nichetti, Pasolini, Petri, Risi, Rosi, Rossellini, and the Taviani brothers. Films are shown on video, in the original Italian version with English subtitles.

TBA

The aim is to present what is a social approach to cinema and to show how it opposes formalism. The social approach has two meanings. This is first of all a certain interpretation of the films that opposes the formalistic approach, which criticizes its apoliticalism: it is interested in their political or social text or subtext. he the second is an approach that claims the plurality of discourses on cinema, because on a film, it's always an interpretation of a film from a social point of view - that is from the point of view races, classes and genres. In other words, a discourse on cinema is never objective, on the one hand, and it is never universal, on the other hand.

This course proposes a crossing of the history of documentary cinema since the founding figures that are Flaherty and Vertov up to contemporary trends in the cinema of the real, including the film autobiographical or memory film. By making dialogues works and words of filmmakers with writings on the documentary, it will be a question of becoming familiar with various practices but having for common project represent a reality that never gives itself "in itself". Following the chronology of the great periods documentary, we will meet the films of filmmakers as different as Grierson, Ivens, Rouch, Perrault, Marker, Wiseman, Depardon or Cabrera, whose documentary designs are sometimes divergent. On a theoretical level, this course will allow us to question the specificities of the object documentary, but also its affinities with fiction.

What is the British contribution to world cinema? Everyone's heard of Alfred Hitchcock, but what about Terence Davies or Ken Loach, two of the greatest film makers? Here we will study examples of the work of great directors and those whose names may not be obvious and look closely at their themes. We shall also study the subject through gender, ethnicity and class and theories of ideological conflict and social division. Britain has a small film industry. We tend to make films differently from Hollywood and the techniques we use differ too, from the ideas of lighting and cutting to the very scripts we embrace. Many British films are darker and more 'realistic' than Hollywood with overt political messages and without the stars of the Hollywood system. We have made some of the most influential films with the most prestigious directors and win plaudits around the world. This course concentrates on film (between 1929 and the present) from James Bond movies to Witchfinder General, from Blackmail to Time and the City to 'television' films such as Yasmin and from the avant-garde work of the counter culture to working-class realism. Introduction to British Cinema is aimed at students who wish to deepen and broaden their understanding of the British psyche through an understanding of the films we watch.

London is one of the most artistically diverse and culturally rich cities in the world—but how can you as an American student abroad find connection to the arts in this city? This class will challenge you to answer that question yourself, both as a consumer and a creator. To do so, we'll explore film, immersive entertainment, social media, musical theatre, stand up comedy—and many more types of performance-centric art that define London’s cultural history and present. The end goal of this course will be to create a piece of work that reflects how you have spent your semester in London. We will use Shakespeare as a starting point: pick three great speeches and explore their presences in pop culture, watch them in traditional, modern, and experimental performance, and play with them as actors and creatives. Whether you're passionate about history, engineering, politics, music, or theology (and more!) this course will encourage you to use your special academic interests to make a personal connection to the world of London entertainment. This class will use the context of Early-Modern British drama to examine the media landscape of modern London, as well as the personal, academic, and existential experience of being a student in this city. We will experience some of the best entertainment London has to offer, explore ourselves as both audiences and artists, and learn what makes theatre important not only to Britain—but to each of us.

Athens is considered one of the most vibrant theatre scenes in Europe. We will focus on current practices in theatre and performance mainly in Greece, but also in Europe and the United States. We will undertake a critical, historical and creative overview of theatre and performance making in periods of crisis, in Europe and the United States, and examine how contemporary Greek artists address issues such as: theatre and society, the human body/the body politic, and the stage and the city. We will also perform a slight backtrack into the ancient past and the beginnings of theatre in its birthplace. The course will include visits to different theatres and other performance spaces: a theatre in a train, a 19th century proscenium theatre, underground performance spaces, together with backstage tours and talks with artists.

Fremantle course number CO 231/331 - The aim of this course is to develop a critical understanding of how media texts engage the viewer/reader and construct their own representations of reality. It enables students to write critically about media texts using simple analytic principles.

This course will analyze art through the lens of Theology. Using literature, visual art, and film, students will be exposed to many different forms of art that all have Theological underpinnings. Students will lead seminar sessions and ask critical questions to their peers that will assist them in understanding the Theological implications of the text.

This Summer course is intended for Notre Dame faculty and graduate students who would like to incorporate films into their courses but have hesitated to do so because they have had little or no formal training in film studies. I have designed a week-long intensive course that will solve that problem by exposing seminar participants to the different pedagogical strategies they might use to incorporate films in their courses.We will begin with a crash-course in close visual analysis because I think that's the chief source of anxiety. So I've got this image up on the wall, what do I do with it? How do I get my students to be analytical about those images? Then we'll explore the various ways that really productive interdisciplinary study can be achieved through film analysis. How can we use films effectively to pursue aesthetic, political, philosophical, or theological issues? Most importantly, how can we talk about film as a "way of knowing" in what are increasingly visual cultures? During each morning session, I'll introduce a variety of approaches through lecture, scene analysis, and short selected readings. We'll have a screening each day, right after lunch, and then we'll discuss pragmatic utilization of those methods in our afternoon discussions of the film, focusing on specific applications in courses now being taught or in the process of being developed. Screenings and discussions in the Browning Cinema in the Performing Arts Center.

We will explore the rich cultural history of shadow puppetry and its translation into modern theatrical performance. Through lectures and workshops students will shepherd their ideas from the classroom to a final public performance.

In this class, we will participate in the Notre Dame Theater production process, learn what goes into its creation, and who is involved. We will explore the design and literary context for the theater productions during each semester, discuss the roles and duties, and support its execution. Students will participate in show crew duties, help to construct designs, and academically research related topics. Ultimately, we will be creating a conversation about the Notre Dame Theater production experience.

This course explores how theater, film, and TV actors, directors, and artists can implement best practices to create equitable production and rehearsal environments. Through readings, case studies, and hands-on lab work, students will examine the politics and history of the mind/body relationship and its influence on contemporary creative processes. Topics include creating open and inclusive spaces, Check-Ins, and the role of intimacy direction in harm-reduction practice, culminating in a workshop with a professional intimacy choreographer. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to become more radically inclusive and conscientious artists and leaders.

This course will expose you to basic stage combat while exploring physical risk and maintaining safety measures. We will engage in unarmed fight choreography, as well as practicing sword technique.

In this course students will learn the principles of vocal production for acting in any medium. The class will use physical and vocal exercises to explore the relationship between alignment, respiration, and relaxation. Articulation and phonetics will be emphasized throughout the coursework. In addition to learning the standard dialect rules of American English, students will research and analyze the sounds and ethnographic influences of several dialects, as well as perform short monologues and/or scenes in those dialects. Students can expect to work on three to five dialects throughout the semester

This course introduces students to some of their artistic ancestors, including Commedia Dell'Arte, Absurdism, and American Vaudeville, as a scaffold-format for investigating comic acting traditions, leading to meeting the demands of heightened characterization and style in both classic and contemporary theatre work. A class designed to help actors overcome the anxiety that comes from a sense of obligation to be funny and to develop a comedic point of view: emphasis is on the need to approach comedic material with the same process and commitment appropriate to any other acting challenge. Class exercises and scene study focus on continuing the discovery and development of imaginative and technical skills gained in previous class(es) to enable the student to discern the living world of a play and to embody a vibrant character within it.

From Shelley to Kubrick and beyond; robots have played a pivotal role in film, television and theatre. This course will exam and reflect upon the ways in which non-human constructs are used on the stage and screen; and how they inform us of what it means to be human. Warning: Interaction with automatons is expected.

In this upper level acting course, students will learn to translate their traditional acting skills for non-visual mediums. When the global pandemic closed theatres and abruptly halted film and television sets, many actors pivoted to professional voiceover work. The skill set(s) required by commercials, radio, podcasts, video games, audiobooks, and radio drama vary depending on the genre/sub genre. The hybrid course will look at vocal production, diction, script analysis, tone, style (in relation to medium), character creation, technique, and studio and microphone setup. Students will record and edit project based assignments, offer peer review, and develop original content.

Writing papers can be stressful. It is not always easy to know what's expected. The standards for writing in college are different than in high school, and the bar gets raised again as one enters upper-level courses. Sometimes it is hard to know what counts as a good paper or why one paper receives an A and another a B or C. How does one write a good paper? What is the difference between a reflection and a research paper? What is a good topic? How much plot summary is enough or too much? How should readings be incorporated? What does the teacher really want? This course aims to help students write better academic papers on film (and TV or other screen material). It is for students who struggle with writing; students who just want to feel more comfortable writing papers in class; students who write well, but want to improve or understand what they are doing better; students writing a thesis, or thinking of graduate school: any student who wants to focus on their writing. This course will teach students how to write academic film papers. It is not a class in film reviewing. We will discuss how to develop a topic that is arguable and compelling; how to imagine and address your reader; how to write an introduction that makes clear why your topic matters; how to organize and structure your paper; how to make transitions (and how not to); how to find, evaluate, and engage with sources; how to cite sources; what counts as evidence; how to make your writing clear; the importance of titles; and more. Students will use prompts and papers they are writing in other classes as material. Students will be expected to attend every session, submit writing and/or revisions every week, and review a peer's work every week. Individual papers will not be graded: our focus is on process. Course grades will be based on improvement. This one-credit course will meet for twelve one-hour sessions.

This course focuses on some of the most influential art films of the twenty-first century. While each of them has been critically acclaimed, we’ll use a comparative approach to explore their points of contact and divergence. How do prestige or “indie” films function as a particular type of content in entertainment landscapes defined by streaming and transmediation? How can we use films to pose questions about the relationship between national and global cultures? Featured films will likely include: In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Drive, Spirited Away, Lagaan, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Moonlight, Roma, Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, Mustang, Grand Budapest Hotel, The Great Beauty, Timbuktu, Happy as Lazzaro, Faces, Places, etc.

María Irene Fornés (1930-2018), considered by many to be the mother of Latinx playwriting in the United States, was an influential and award-winning playwright, director, and teacher. Born in Havana, Cuba, Fornés immigrated to the United States in 1945 and resided in New York City for the rest of her life. Fornés wrote and directed more than fifty plays that were produced throughout the United States and internationally. Tango Palace (1963) was her first produced play and Letters from Cuba (2000) was her final play. She won an unprecedented nine Obie Awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. This one credit course will engage in an analysis of the entire published Fornés canon: eighteen award-winning plays written from 1963 to 2000, with topics as diverse as an absurdist musical exploring class struggle, a 1930s Anglo women's fight for education, a 1940's Cuban-American woman's search for empowerment, a 1890's British female actors' efforts to produce Ibsen and a 2000 Cuban-American woman's connection to her Cuban brother. Taught by Professor Anne García-Romero, a leading Fornés scholar, this seminar provides a unique immersion into the work of one the most important female playwrights of the twentieth century.

The course supports the creation of FTT's spring production 2023: "TUKO! TUKO! or Princess of the Lizard Moon" (Alexander Onassis International Award for Playwriting) written and directed by Dr. Anton Juan (his final production for FTT). Student artists enrolled in the course will form part of the acting and production ensemble itself. They will have the opportunity to learn and engage in the aesthetics, principles, practice and methods of production and expression in a variety of genres and styles of theatre: 1) Yu-gen and Sound-Sense - the essence of Noh and Kabuki; 2) Bunraku - the unity of puppeteer and the puppet; 3) Butoh- tracing the inner spaces in the movement from memory to history; 4) Cubism in dramatic narrative- breaking the moment into non-temporal presences and surfaces. 5) Contrasting styles between Eastern and Western Theatre techniques The plot, based on historical documents, counters historical revisionism and resurrects the buried voices of the oppressed through poetic theatrical expression. The ghost of a comfort woman in World War II and the ghost of a tortured murdered sex slave in Japan 1990's meet in the memory of a Butoh actor who embodies them and claims justice for them. TUKO! TUKO! has been performed in Greece, in Korea, Philippines, and Chile.

This course explores how films are booked and exhibited and, moreover, how to best serve audiences through thoughtful, engaging, and provoking film curation. Students will collaborate to program Notre Dame Film Society's weekly screenings, which involves writing copy, recruiting discussants, and creating programs involving feature films, short films, and other media.

Film festivals are pivotal in shaping film history, curating (trans)national film canons, and discovering new filmmakers. They foster industry networks and cultural dialogues and serve as platforms for negotiating identities and experiences. The rapid growth of film festivals and their increasing function within the production, distribution and exhibition of film has led to the rise of film festival studies. This seminar introduces students to key theories and methods in film festival studies. The first part covers the history and theories of film festivals, examining them as networks and ecosystems. This section will also cover methodological approaches in the study of festivals. The second part focuses on specific festivals, analyzing their role in negotiating identities and shaping film history, the formation of audiences and communities through curation and exhibition practices. Attendance at film festivals during the semester is encouraged.

What can we learn about Europe by exploring its cinema? Based on an extended version of the Institute's film series each semester, the content of this course will focus on the relationship between contemporary European cinema and the European ideas and realities it finds compelling in terms of social and imaginative power. The course will include some history of cinema, but emphasis will be laid on using cinema as a way of stimulating questions about the nature of Europe today. Open to students of all years and majors.

This course introduces students to the critical analysis of gender in media culture. Focusing primarily on U.S. film, television, popular music, and social media, we will examine how gender is constructed, challenged, and reimagined in the three primary sites of media culture: texts, production, and reception. We will explore both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of gender and media, and the relationship of identity, media, and power will be central to our discussions. In addition to exploring how gender is portrayed in a variety of media texts, we will examine the strategies used by media producers when representing gender, while also considering who is creating such texts. Both the mainstream/commercial and alternative/independent spheres of media production will be explored. In turn, we will consider the broader impact of gendered media representations on consumers as well as the various ways audiences engage with and respond to such texts. We will enrich our studies of gender through attention to its intersections with race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability, paying close attention to how such identity categories differently impact the representation of people in media, the labor of people in media production, and the practices in which people engage while consuming media.

Storytelling allows us to make a place, and a past, come alive, and it is through narrative that certain people, locations, and experiences lodge themselves in our memories. How, and why, do we reshape our own environment to convey certain stories about our past, our accomplishments, and our collective experiences? Why is it that road-trips loom so large in American cultural memory, and what do they have in common with other placelore stories, such as those featuring Native Americans, Irish saints and TV characters like Northern Ireland's "Derry Girls"? How can words, sounds and imagery be used to map out and draw us into new and often fantastic virtual geographies? In this class, we will think about how stories gain power by being anchored in evocative depictions of specific places, both real and imagined. We will examine verbal and visual stories, from medieval manuscripts like the Book of Kells and tales of St. Patrick's travels around Ireland, to contemporary animation (Song of the Sea), murals from Northern Ireland, place-based television series (Derry Girls) and Chicago-based road-trip films (The Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller's Day Off). We will contemplate how icons of ancient Ireland were used to create new spaces in Chicago, and we'll look at the massive 1893 World's Fair that put a newly rebuilt Chicago on the world map, as well as dramatic histories of Chicago and some of its murderous inhabitants (Devil in the White City). We will also turn to regional storytelling traditions and will study songs and stories about "home" composed by those who experienced diaspora and migration.

Animation is everywhere. In feature films, video games, visual effects sequences, live-action shows, Saturday morning cartoons, documentaries, television ads, mobile phone apps, websites, movie trailers, title sequences, social media content, roadside billboards, art installations, and more - we are surrounded by animation and it permeates our visually-oriented world. Now more than ever, it is important to understand what animation is, its origins, the multitude of forms it can take, how it represents diverse cultures and ideas, and of course - how to create it. We will learn the history of the art form from the late 19th century to present; different techniques used in its creation, including hand-drawn, experimental, stop-motion, and computer-generated; and how it represents a variety of global cultural perspectives. We will approach these topics critically, and then apply what we learn towards animation production projects using Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. Through critical reading assignments, video essays, film screenings, and hands-on production assignments, we will gain a holistic understanding and appreciation of animation as an art form as well as practical skills that can be applied to a variety of higher level courses and creative careers. This is a hybrid critical studies and production course, and as such, we will "learn by doing" in both lecture and lab settings.

This course is a practical and conceptual immersion into the world of contemporary sports journalism. Students will learn how to write and report for multiple journalism platforms, including newspapers, magazines and digital media. Students will practice a variety of reporting techniques and study writing styles ranging from features to news articles to profiles, while also taking a rigorous look at the legal, ethical and cultural issues surrounding the intersection of media, sports and society. In addition, students will gain hands-on sports writing experience by preparing articles for the university's independent, student-run newspaper, The Observer.

Applied Multimedia for Journalists - The main focus of this course is that students will learn how to shoot and edit videos. It will briefly touch on how to produce audio stories and podcasts. Students will also study the legal and ethical issues surrounding the use, creation and publication of digital media. The use of drones and the legal issues surrounding them will also be discussed.

The Art of Production Design explores the area of production design and art direction as narrative art forms in cinema and other media. The term “Production Design” and its affiliated disciplines are constantly evolving, but essentially are responsible for creating the atmospheres, settings, and characters which establish a film’s look or “feel”. It can also help with narrative, move the plot, comment on the action, or add symbolic content. Art directors, scenic designers & painters, set decorators, property masters, special effects, costume designers, and hair/make-up personnel are just a few of the many craftspeople that work under the title, “Production Design”. In this course we will examine these areas and the evolution of mise-en-scene. We will explore the many choices with regard to production design through multiple media, (film, tv, theatre, branded content, music video, commercials, & print). Through lectures, screenings, visual presentations, and guest speakers; students will get an in-depth perspective of the overall involvement production design plays in storytelling. Students will also explore their own creative choices through exercises and assigned projects. This may include but is not limited to: architectural, decorative, costume, and cultural research, location scouting, set dressing, lighting design, color theory, graphic design, and photography. In this course students will be asked to extend their knowledge and experience of the arts while developing their critical and reflective abilities. Students will interpret and analyze particular creative works, investigate and explore the relations of form and meaning, and through critical and creative activity, come to better understand the intended audience for a given work of art and how its meaning and significance changes over time.

This course is a practical immersion into the world of broadcast journalism. Class will function much like a television newsroom, with time dedicated to workshopping and exploring a variety of reporting techniques. Students will spend time outside of the classroom engaging with asynchronous materials, practicing on-camera skills, and exploring the many roles that make up a newsroom. Students will build a professional reel or portfolio to demonstrate storytelling techniques essential to broadcasting the news.

A generation ago, students looking to pursue careers in media were likely journalism or broadcasting majors who could aspire to master one platform and work for the same news company for decades. No more. People don't consume news in the ways they once did; the media landscape is changing. There are new challenges -- how to regulate misinformation, how to fund big investigative projects -- but also new opportunities. Digital tools are eliminating ‘start-up' barriers and giving storytellers more control over their fates. Aspiring news writers or producers no longer need to work their way up in a legacy company, hoping to someday catch their big break. You could manage a YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers from your dorm room. Some of you probably already do. But how do you monetize such ventures? How do you turn a side project or a cool idea into a career? In "Media Entrepreneurship," we'll explore how you can combine your passion and skills - skills cultivated as a student of the liberal arts -- to capitalize on media's exciting new frontier. You'll gain the knowledge, tools, and confidence to see "being your own boss" or "launching your own brand" as a realistic career possibility. And it's not just about you. When you hear the word "entrepreneur," you might think of a guy pitching an idea to venture capitalists on Shark Tank. But, at its best, media entrepreneurship is an act of service. It's about building trust, meeting community needs, and expanding whose voices we hear as a society. In this course, you'll practice conceiving of a media project and creating your own startup business plan.

This course aims to change the way you think not only about the way that we play games, but also about the way that video games teach their players to behave within their digital worlds. This course will encourage students to reflect on and utilize their lived experiences as players, and utilize these experiences to locate themselves within their analysis and writing as well as their design practices. This course will undertake an intensive, interdisciplinary focus on the history of video game development, representation in video games, and the languages that digital games work in as well as decolonial theory and diverse theories of design. This class will engage with a variety of scholarly texts, video games, media posts, videos, and design exercises, in order to illustrate the ways in which video games have shaped the ways we play, think, and behave within their spaces. Students will be required to write and design around these lessons and address and push back against the problematic behaviors and colonial narratives around violence, race, gender, sexuality, and relationship to the land that these gamic languages and lessons have created.

Taught by former ESPN anchor, Emmy award-winning sports reporter, and President of Game Day Communications Betsy Ross, Game Day Media will delve into the preparation and performance of game day media opportunities: play by play personnel, color analysts, Public Address talent, news conference moderators and more. This is a 50/50 zoom and class will meet in person and over zoom/ class. Students will record play-by play/analyst segments from campus sports, conduct pre-game interviews and post-game news conferences and observe the intricacies of public address announcing.

Football is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Since the late 19th century, football has occupied an important place for those wishing to define and understand "America." And Notre Dame football plays a central role in that story, with larger-than-life figures and stories, from Knute Rockne's Win one for the Gipper line to the Four Horsemen backfield that led the program to a second national championship in 1924. The mythic proportions of the University's football program cast a long shadow on the institution's history, cultural significance, and traditions. This course focuses on Notre Dame football history as an entry point into larger questions about the cultural, historical, and social significance of football in the U.S. Who has been allowed to play on what terms? How have events from Notre Dame football's past been remembered and re-imagined? How has success in Notre Dame football been defined and redefined? In particular, the course will focus on how Notre Dame football became a touchstone for Catholic communities and institutions across the country navigating the fraught terrain of immigration, whiteness, and religious practice. This course will take up those questions through significant engagement with University Archive collections related to Notre Dame football, working toward increased levels of description and access for these materials. This course will include hands-on work with metadata, encoding and markup, digitization, and digital preservation/access through a collaboration with the University Archives and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. Readings for this course will include chapters from texts such as Murray Sperber's Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (1993), TriStar Pictures' Rudy (1993), Steve Delsohn's Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame Football (2001), Jerry Barca's Unbeatable: Notre Dame's 1988 Championship and the Last Great College Football Season (2014), David Roediger's Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (2005), David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (1995). Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with library and information science technologies and systems. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work with data, and a final project. Familiarity with archival methods, library/information science, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.

This course will survey the history of representations of Latinos in American cinema from the silent era to the present. We will examine how stereotypes associated with Latinos have been produced, reinforced, and challenged in American films - from greasers and Latin lovers to gangsters, kingpins, and border crossers. We will explore the fascinating contradiction that, despite a long history of misrepresentation and under representation, Latinos have made significant contributions to Hollywood and independent cinema. We will also examine the rise of Latino directors in recent years and their drive to reframe the Latino image for American audiences. Screenings will range from the silent epic Martyrs of the Alamo (1915) to more recent films such as Maria Full of Grace (2004). Our interdisciplinary approach to the subject will draw upon readings from history, film theory and criticism, and ethnic/American studies. Students will take a midterm exam and make class presentations.

What role does a local reporter play in their community? How does the unique nature of a small community impact the journalism profession? Local reporters are the backbone of journalism, an unsung majority holding up a field on minimal resources and stretched for time. Oftentimes, local reporters are the only members of the public present at government meetings where decisions are made that impact everyone in a municipality. This class is meant to prepare you for the work required to be a reporter in a small community. This class will revolve around consuming, understanding, and producing local journalism. Students will write local news stories, read examples of good local reporting, and interact with local and regional journalists. Students will learn to understand their unique local audience, and how to interpret the importance of news for that audience and through their lens. Note: the only required text for this course will be a subscription to a local newspaper.

A story centered on one person can be a useful way to illuminate a big issue. For example: An immigrant student living in fear of government policies on immigration. A local store owner forced to close shop because the economy is changing. A worker afraid of being put out of work by AI. In this class, we'll focus on that kind of story and on the building blocks of any good story: How do you find the right people to interview? How do you earn your subject’s trust? How do you conduct an effective interview? How do you bring a person to life with details, quotes and action? How do you weave the person’s life with the bigger issue? How do you collect facts—and check them? How do you structure a story? How do you convey meaning and feeling? We’ll examine stories—short and long—to see how the writers did it. We’ll listen to some good interviews. You’ll build several stories of your own.

Video Games of the American West will utilize digital games as the primary case studies to examine the modern cultural image, understanding of, and interaction with the "space" of the American West. This class will provide historical understandings of the vast, varied, and often mythologized history of the American West, as well as its place as a cite of continued colonial narratives and hegemonic imagery in contemporary popular media such as film, television, and video games. Through the close-playing of a variety of Western games including installations from the Call of Juarez series, Red Dead Redemption, series, Horizon, series, and many others, students will be asked to apply their knowledge of the historical and contemporary understandings and employments of the West as a physical space and a cultural space to the visual and mechanical recreations of it within the digital realm of video games.

“Paul Robeson in the American Century” examines the life and times of one of this nation’s most famous yet understudied figures during the middle decades of the twentieth-century. Over the course of the semester, our readings and discussions will revisit Robeson’s accomplishments as a preeminent college athlete, intellectual, and cultural icon, to better understand the social and political history of the U.S. prior to the legal dismantling of racial segregation. We will also trace how Robeson became one of America’s most internationally recognized entertainers and political activists, despite formal and informal efforts to undermine his commitments to the civil rights movement at home, and human rights abroad. Drawing on scholarly tools that are central to the discipline of American Studies—e.g., the critical analysis of social categories, citizenship and imperial politics—our readings, lectures, and conversations will investigate and unpack how Robeson reshaped the meaning and geographic scope of modern freedom. Required texts will range from primary documents preserved in archival collections to carefully-selected excerpts of secondary materials written by leading Robeson scholars and biographers.

How has the HIV/AIDS crisis shaped U.S. political culture, public health, and artistic production since coming to public attention in the early 1980s? In this course, we explore the history of the AIDS crisis, including medical, religious, and moral constructions of the epidemic that arose amid heated culture wars debates over gender and sexuality. We look at competing strategies to define and combat the epidemic, from Christian Right leaders who have described AIDS as a divine punishment to public health workers and religious leaders who championed comprehensive AIDS education. We will be especially attuned to grassroots activism that emerged from the communities most affected by the AIDS crisis, including LGBT communities. We explore how AIDS activists drew upon the lessons of feminist, queer, and Black civil rights movements to fight for political and medical resources for people with AIDS. And we will see how art became central to these efforts by exploring how feminist and queer activists and other people with AIDS produced a vast (and still growing) archive of cultural production, including visual and performance art, film, and literary work, through which they processed the grief and trauma of this crisis while forging new political and artistic visions.

This course will examine the global field of Indigenous Cinema. This class will utilize screenings of Indigenous film along with accompanying lecture, reading, and discussion, to examine the ways in which Indigenous filmmakers, actors, and communities are subverting genre and decolonizing the industry to tell and reclaim Indigenous stories and make room for Indigenous futures.

From the Olympics to Formula 1, sports are a central part of global culture and everyday life. Our experiences of sport, however, are largely shaped—and often even constructed—by media. Rather than simply presenting sport, media play an active role in producing the values, identities, emotions, and conflicts we associate with it. This course examines the historical roots and current conditions of the convergence of corporate sport and corporate media. We will analyze how media—from early 20th-century newsreels to live Twitch streams—do more than distribute sport content; they shape its cultural meanings and social impact. Centering sport media as both an industry and a cultural practice, we will explore how it intersects with issues of gender, race/ethnicity, labor, nationalism, and globalization. By analyzing the forces shaping sport media production and consumption, we will consider the meanings audiences make of those messages, we will consider the ways sport media production and consumption might be reimagined. Assignments in the course include a variety of reflection and application projects, as well as larger research project.

This course offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the vast variety of theoretical approaches used to understand media and technologies. From film, TV, and videogames to computers, internet, and social media, we will study different methods and concepts that help us understand our mediated condition(s) better. Moving historically and geographically, we will also encounter the many ways in which the term 'media' itself gets deployed and critiqued in scholarship across humanistic and social scientific disciplines. We will plug some of these (critical) theoretical understandings of media and culture into the longer histories of politics, philosophy, language, and literature, considering, for example, books as media technologies. And finally, we will ask what studies of media and mediation can do for our comprehension of the politico-economic, sociocultural, racial, and environmental crises surrounding us today.

This class traces major developments, movements, artists, and aesthetics within global film culture from the beginning of cinema in the 1890s to about 1950. We will consider different national cinemas from Europe and Asia, as well as the rise of Hollywood and emergent African American cinema. We will consider certain prominent directors and film movements with attention to how they conceive of cinema, and will read contemporary theories and critiques of cinema. We will consider the development of the film industry and technical developments that shift the aesthetic, and changes in modes of production and distribution, and spectatorship. We will consider cinema in the context of modernity to consider how cinema reflects, refracts, transmutes and negotiates the effects of modernity to consider cinematic responses to urbanism, changing gender roles, mass production, race and immigration, among other topics.

This course traces the major developments in world cinema from the post-WWII era to the present. The course will examine the shifting social, economic, technological, and aesthetic conditions of this period, especially the demise of the Hollywood studio system, the rise of new technologies and auxiliary marketing outlets, and the increasing globalization of cinema. The course will not be limited to Hollywood filmmaking, but will also look at various international movements, including Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and recent Asian cinemas.

In Apocalypse Now (1979), a single phrase marks an iconic enemy and creates a chain of associations that separate Western Selves from Eastern Others. The story behind the phrase, "Charlie don't surf," is one of many complex narratives characterizing the Southeast Asian region that call for further critical understanding. This course is an anthropological journey through Southeast Asia, a region rich in cultural diversity, linguistic complexity and archaeological significance. Including the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma), students can explore the ecological, historical, and socio-cultural patterns of this ethnographic region through analyses of its societies and institutions. With a holistic approach to the cultural influences that characterize Southeast Asia, we will chart the region's indigenous, social, political, economic, artistic and religious formations over time. The course offers a broad overview of the historical factors affecting the region, including the impact of Indian, Islamic, Chinese, and European exchange, colonization, and violence. These transregional influences provide a window from which to view contemporary issues in the cultural politics and economics of Southeast Asia. The course provides an overview of the major cultural features of the region to enable students to gain a better understanding of the current developments within the region and the lives of Southeast Asians. Overall, we will contribute to the development of anthropological ideas about Asia while also providing a means to organize and analyze Asian ethnographic perspectives.

This class will focus on how print, broadcast and online journalists work - how they think and act as well as the ethical dilemmas they face today in delivering news, analysis, and commentary. We will study the processes involved in the creation of news and the effects or consequences of the news on the public. This is not a course that teaches the techniques of journalism. Rather it is an examination of the practices of professional journalists and a survey of the impact of what they do.

This course is an introduction to the theory and craft of dramatic screenwriting. The class explores how a script is developed from concept to final written form. Through lectures, film viewing, and weekly exercises, emphasis is placed on plot and story structure, the adaptation of ideas into cinematic forms, how to tell a story with images, character, plot, and dialogue development. Each student writes two short 8-12 page scripts developed within the context of the workshop.

Through its transition from sport to pseudo-sport to sports entertainment, professional wrestling has long held the popularity to fill arenas and stadiums. This course takes a look at that popularity's effect on the medium of television. From its inception in the 1940s to the golden age of the 50s to the modern boom of the 80s and 90s to the streaming area of the present day, students will observe, analyze and critique the unique storytelling and production elements of professional wrestling that have made it such a television juggernaut and mainstay.

This course will look at how political conflict in Ireland from the 1916 Rebellion and the War of Independence up to and including what became known as "The Troubles" in the North of Ireland has been represented on the screen. Students will analyse a wide variety of cinematic texts, mainstream commercial Hollywood features as well as independent Irish and British films. Documentary film will also be analyzed. Certain seminal events such as Bloody Sunday and the 1981 Hunger Strikes which have a diverse representational history on screen will be given particular attention. Among the films discussed will be <i>Mise Eire, Saoirse</i>, <i>Michael Collins</i>, <i>The Wind that Shakes the Barley</i>, <i>Some Mother's Son</i>, <i>In the Name of the Father</i>, and <i>Bloody Sunday</i>.

There is perhaps no place more sacred in Hollywood than the writers' room of a half-hour TV comedy. Often a place of deep vulnerability (and vulgarity), "the room" is shrouded in mystery. Its inhabitants are sworn to secrecy, their words uncensored and legally protected by the controversial Lyle v. Warner Bros lawsuit. As such, aspiring writers cannot possibly learn how to conduct themselves in a writers' room without actually participating in one. In this class, we will do just that: learning the art of "punching" and "pitching" to revise your peers' scripts alongside them as a writing staff.

What does it mean to love—deliberately, politically, rhythmically—under conditions of precarity, displacement, and exhaustion? How does love shape legislation, organize communities, and drive political movements? What does love do for the body? How does love structure who we eat with, grieve with, fight for, and tend to? This course positions love not as a private sentiment, but as both a research methodology and strategic form of political action. Drawing from Black studies, performance theory, feminist thought, and critical data studies, students will examine love across multiple analytic scales: from saved voicemails and lullabies to photographs tucked into wallets and letters never sent. Moving between the quantitative and the qualitative, the archive and the body, students will interrogate those critical gaps between ‘countable’ institutional metrics and the depths of our affective lives. In doing so, we might be able to build a world accountable to both.

This course will interrogate and examine representations of the West of Ireland in various twentieth century texts focusing, in particular on the role of "the West of Ireland" in state formation and legitimization during the early decades of independent Ireland and its role in the construction of an Irish identity. We will look at how images of the West of Ireland were constructed in various utopian or romanticized formulations as well as examining more dystopian versions. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the visual arts and film as well as on literary texts in both Irish and English. (Irish language texts will be read in translation).

In this course we'll focus on some of the central concerns in contemporary European cultures: how to construct a meaningful sense of historical memory (and post-memory), how are gender and class struggles impacting national and increasingly transnational identities, and how can artists develop new forms of representation to depict those changes. In each unit we'll compare how films, novels, television series, and conceptual art frame these issues, zeroing in on points of both commonality and divergence. We'll also be incorporating films from the Nanovic Film Series at the Browning Cinema. (Some of the texts we'll be discussing: Pawlikowski, Cold War, Tykwer, Babylon Berlin, Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, Sorrentino, La Grande Bellezza, Donnersmarck, Never Look Away, Almodovar, Pain and Glory, Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 2, Rohrwacher, Lazzardo Felice, Price, Borgen)

In this course, we will engage with the academic fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender Studies. Inspired by groundbreaking work of Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, we will explore how the body has constituted (and continues to constitute) a site for Indigenous peoples to explore gender identities and gendered community roles. Throughout the course, we will engage with cultural productions by Indigenous peoples in various media, including literature, music, theatre, public performance, and film to learn about the fight of Indigenous peoples to reclaim sovereignty over their own bodies. Using this survey of Indigenous ideas about gender as a frame of reference, students will critically explore their own ideas and beliefs. The course’s geographic focus is the Americas, from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the South American mainland.

From Bora Kim’s House of Hummingbird to Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, Korean cinema is a contemporary cultural force that circulates in and beyond Korea. This course examines how Korean cinema is globally inflected in its content, production, and reception. We will explore independent and blockbuster films by Korean filmmakers from the 1950s to the present day that encompass melodrama, auteur cinema, comedy, science fiction, documentary films, historical dramas, and more. We will engage scholarship from fields such as cultural studies, cinema and media studies, performance studies, and gender and sexuality studies. All course materials are in English and no knowledge of Korean is required. This course fulfills the literature and culture requirement for the Korean minor.

Over the last two decades of Putin's presidency, Russia's geopolitical strength and imperial ambition were placed at the center of Russia's political line. Military incursions in the neighboring countries have expanded Russia's territorial claims and reasserted its aspirations to former Soviet spheres of influence. While Russian identity continued to be imperial after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians set off on a journey of building their national identity. The course considers how post-Soviet cinema revives tropes and aesthetic tendencies of the earlier periods, such as stark depictions of the self and Other, spiritual superiority and monumentalism, as well as updates them for a contemporary context. The class explores the Putin-era Russian cinema and Ukrainian national cinema of the last two decades in the light of the common past that these two countries share and how the past is reshaped for the present. No previous knowledge of Russian is required, the course is taught fully in English.

The goal of critical media literacy is to provide a toolkit that helps to improve our knowledge of media culture and thereby facilitate our agency when consuming, producing, interpreting, and responding to media texts. This course will introduce you to the basic theories and practices of critical media literacy so that you can in turn teach these concepts and skills to students in your future classes. In this course you will learn how to critically analyze U.S. media culture—including media texts in specific formats (films, television programs, social media posts, journalism, etc.) as well as their production, distribution, regulation, marketing, reception, and criticism. You will also learn about, discuss, and apply such concepts as medium specificity, convergence, representation, realism, authenticity, consumerism, citizenship, and democracy. Approaching media culture as a fluid structure inflected by competing objectives, ideologies, and power dynamics, we will examine mainstream and independent media production, as well as how media shape our identities and values as well as our relationship to the public sphere. In addition, we will survey and analyze media literacy education in the U.S. public school system and various youth programs, focusing on both state- and organization-based initiatives. Students will have opportunities to develop and workshop sample critical media literacy lessons.

An introductory Summer course in the fundamentals of writing, shooting, editing, and lighting for narrative film and television productions. This is a summer hands-on course emphasizing creativity, aesthetic, and technical expertise. Students learn the many aspects of filmmaking while making short films of their own. Requirements: Three short digital video assignments, selected readings, and a final exam.

This upper-division course introduces students to "essayistic" approaches to media analysis and production. As the name signals, this class explores the sometimes experimental and sometimes playful "video essay" mode of expression with the goal of understanding how media makers and artists utilize sounds and images for fictional and non-fictional ends. By emphasizing the multiple points of connection that exist between media theory and praxis, this course aims to help students understand how to craft compelling arguments and evocative, impressionistic sequences using this unique form of storytelling.

An introductory course in the fundamentals of shooting, editing, and writing for narrative film and television productions. This is a hands-on production course emphasizing aesthetics, creativity, and technical expertise. The course requires significant amounts of filming and editing outside of class. Students produce three short film projects learning the basics of visual storytelling, including cinematography, lighting, sound recording, editing, sound mixing, and other post production techniques. These are all essential tools used to tell a story. The course challenges students not only to master basic skills but ultimately to craft compelling visual narratives.

If you've been wondering about the role of a creative film producer, especially focusing on indie, low-budget production, this course is for you. Gain a deeper knowledge and understanding of the roles and responsibilities of a producer in the contemporary film industry. Learn essential tools and gain practical insight into areas as diverse as script development, pitching, breaking down script, scheduling, budgeting and funding, as well as the legal aspects of pre-production, production and post-production and film festivals, marketing and sales strategies.

Are you interested in the world of feature animation, visual effects, and video games? This course will be your first step in learning the tools and techniques of 3D digital content creation, which can be applied to a variety of professional industries, graduate school programs, and higher-level production courses at Notre Dame. You will learn the basics of modeling, texturing, animation, lighting, virtual cinematography, and rendering using the industry-standard application, Autodesk Maya. Through weekly tutorials and projects using Maya, you will receive hands-on, practical experience in the core facets of 3D digital production. Through weekly lectures, group discussions, critical studies reading assignments, and film screenings, you will learn the foundational principles of 3D computer graphics, computer animation, and visual storytelling, and gain a broader understanding and appreciation of the cultural and historical contexts that surround the creation and reception of this art form. This is a hybrid critical studies and production course, and as such, you will "learn by doing" in both lecture and lab settings.

Writer-director George Lucas famously said that "sound is 50 percent of the movie going experience." Director Danny Boyle mentioned in an interview, "The truth is, for me, it's obvious that 70, 80 percent of a movie is sound. You don't realize it because you can't see it." Sound and music design for digital media is oftentimes an overlooked art form that is critical to the effective telling of a story. At its root, sonic design creates mood and setting. It engages the audience on a primal, emotional level, in ways that imagery cannot alone achieve. A cleanly recorded and creatively edited sound effects track can immerse an audience in a fictional, manufactured reality. Music, whether used sparingly or in grandiose fashion, can enhance or subvert the visual component of a film or video game to create cinematic magic. Through feature film screenings, video game play sessions, critical readings, video essays, and hands-on production assignments, you will gain a broader understanding and appreciation of sound design and learn how to direct the emotions of an audience through creative recording, mixing, and editing of sound effects and music. This is a hybrid critical studies and production course, and as such, you will "learn by doing" in both lecture and lab settings.

This course is a technically-driven course that introduces different softwares to spatializing video and expanding the physical and virtual possibilities of video art. Exploring various ways to manipulate the visual experience of video into imagining and implementing spatial design, students are guided through approaches that involve VR (virtual reality), 3D world-building, and installation mock-ups. Students will combine applied skills using softwares such as Autodesk Maya and Adobe After Effects with lens-based camera tools. We will look at contemporary examples of video art with global significance as inspiration, with the goal of creating immersive video experiences that break the passive relationship between the screen and the viewer. Students will learn to problem solve and acquire critical awareness as they are challenged with new frameworks. Over the semester, the goal is to discover unique approaches within the technical methods to develop a unique voice and narrative as a digital maker.

This course introduces a foundation for making and understanding video art for artistic exploration and creative expression. Looking at a variety of experimental production methods and approaches to moving image, the course will provide insight into a wide range of video artists and artworks produced since the conception of video art to the present. Using such examples as possible models for conceptualizing original ideas, the course encourages critical expression and learning from failures and new attempts. Modules in the course include appropriation, sound, animation, participatory art, internet /new media art, and multi-channel projection. In addition, we will look at several seminal media art texts that will help students gain critical judgement for one's own and others' work.

The name "Disney" has achieved nearly mythic status in U.S. and international film and culture. For many, the name evokes treasured childhood memories of watching the The Lion King or The Little Mermaid or of discovering Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck for the first time. Among film scholars, Disney cartoons stand as some of the finest examples of carefully crafted, naturalistic, character-centered animation. For business majors and professionals, The Walt Disney Company has come to symbolize a modern, competitive corporation that seeks to leverage its stories and characters across a variety of media platforms in a global marketplace. While many love Disney films, and see Walt Disney as an American icon, his popularity and "American-ness" have sparked controversy in other countries and in various historical periods. This class examines Walt Disney, Disney films, and the Disney Company from a variety of perspectives that will help us understand both Disney's enduring popularity and the kinds of suspicions its worked has raised. Our readings will draw from biographies of Walt Disney; histories of the Disney studio and of the animation industry in general; critical analyses of the films; and cultural studies of Disney merchandising, theme parks and theatrical productions. Screenings will include the classic films of the studio era, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Cinderella, and Peter Pan, as well as more recent works such as Mary Poppins, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast. Requirements include weekly reading responses, exams, and an extended research paper.

This course offers an introductory survey of the primary critical approaches used to analyze television, and thus serves as a foundation for other TV-specific courses within the major. Through an examination of pioneering and contemporary studies of television, we will explore how television has been analyzed as a communication medium, a technological apparatus, a commercial industry, and a cultural forum, as well as a form of recreation, education, and social bonding. We will also consider critical approaches that focus on how television shapes our personal identities and values. While examining methods developed to study TV production, reception, and texts, we will explore such concepts as publicness, liveness, quality, art, and representation. In addition to discussing how television was analyzed in the past, we will consider how both television and TV studies have changed as a result of globalization, industrial convergence, digital media, and participatory culture.

In this course, students will learn different theories, methods, and approaches to understanding and writing about screen cultures. We will explore approaches that consider aesthetics/style, narrative, authorship (directors, show runners, stars), genre (e.g. the musical, horror), history (history of film/media industries, history of visual spectacle, historical context for films/media, etc.), technologies (sound, color, digital technologies, etc.), identities (considerations of gender, sexuality, race, nation, age, etc.), and audience (reception, fandom). Students will: Read theories that articulate and advocate each approach; consider the parameters, value, and appeal of that approach, as well as its limitations; practice each approach in written exercises; and research and write a final paper using one or more of these approaches. Students may also use video essays or other media as tools of analysis and critique. This is a course in academic criticism, not journalistic reviewing. Strong emphasis will be placed on argumentative writing.

An introduction to the study of gender and rock culture, this course provides students with a broad, foundational understanding of the concepts, theories, and methodologies used in critical analyses of rock's various gendered constructions. Rather than taking a musicological perspective, this course uses a socio-cultural approach to examine a myriad of gendered sites within rock culture, including performance, music video, and rock journalism. Therefore, music and song lyrics will not be our only or primary objects of study; our exploration of rock's gendered culture will also include studies of the various roles, practices, technologies, and institutions associated with he production and a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach is employed which draws on theories and methodologies formulated in such fields as popular music criticism, musicology, cultural studies, sociology, ethnography, literary analysis, performance studies, and critical media studies. In turn, the course is informed by feminist scholarship and theories of gender.

Television has been widely available in the United States for only half a century, yet aleady it has become a key means through which we understand our culture. Our course examines this vital medium from three perspectives. First, we will look at the industrial, economic and technological forces that have shaped U.S. television since its inception. These factors help explain how U.S. television adopted the format of advertiser-supported broadcast networks and why this format is changing today. Second, we will explore television's role in American social and political life: how TV has represented cultural changes in the areas of gender, class, race and ethnicity. Third, we will discuss specific narrative and visual strategies that characterize program formats. Throughout the semester we will demonstrate how television and U.S. culture mutually influence one another, as television both constructs our view of the world and is affected by social and cultural forces within the U.S.

This course charts the transformation of US television from the network era of the 1970s and 1980s to the present day. We will explore the broadcast networks' responses to the new competition posed by original cable programming and satellite tv, as well as the rise of multichannel and streaming platforms in the digital era. Though the central focus is on US television cultures and infrastructures, we will also explore the increasingly international and global reach of the medium. We will also consider the ways in which the legacy of broadcasting informs current debates about internet regulation and broadband access. Throughout, the course explores the medium as a central arena for the negotiation of public life, ranging from electoral politics to the medium's engagement with, and participation in, shifting cultural norms of race, gender, and nationhood. Screenings and case studies will include examples of scripted prime-time series, but also local, daytime, documentary/reality, sports, and non-US programming.

Sports have played an integral role in the television industry since the medium's early days. This course will highlight the history of sports on television and focus on the nuts and bolts of how television sports programming works today. The course will also examine the impact of televised sports on our culture as well as the ethical issues raised by the media's coverage of sports. Taught in the Fall only.

The Game, as we experience it on screens big and small, is an ever evolving story. A human competition turned into a visual narrative by producers, directors, and broadcasters. How is that three hour ebb and flow of emotions turned into an engaging narrative for fans? How has that story evolved over decades? How has the evolution of technology changed that story? And has the televised broadcast changed the meaning of the game itself? From the Super Bowl to March Madness, ESPN Sportscenter to WWE Smackdown, we'll dissect the process, storytelling techniques and technology that form the American sports story on television, as well as experience the actual game production operation from inside the control rooms of Notre Dame Studios. Assignments include on-camera and off-camera production exercises, as well as written assignments deconstructing historical and current broadcasts. No prior television production experience required.

Public Speaking and Debate is a skills-based course designed to prepare students for the real world necessity of public speaking, while also cultivating the skills necessary to be competitive on the college speech and debate circuit if they so desire. Students will have the opportunity to join our Speech and Debate Travel Team and compete across the country in various events if they wish. The events range from 2 person team debate to individual persuasive speeches, to mock congresses, and even dramatic monologues! Team members are also eligible for scholarships for their participation. Day one of the course will be lectures and activities to allow students to become familiar with all competitive events as well as traditional public speaking for those students who do not wish to compete. We will dedicate day two to practicing the skills we learned the day before! Students will leave the course with an increased comfort with public speaking, extensive knowledge of persuasive speech, expanded analytical and critical thinking skills, and familiarity with the art of argumentation.

This interdisciplinary course addresses the climate crisis as both a scientific challenge and a crisis of communication and culture. Team-taught by a climate scientist and a media historian, the course explores the underlying scientific research behind key topics of public debate, while also analyzing the media technologies, infrastructures, and cultures that have made it so difficult to act on an established scientific consensus. Our approach to climate media is not simply "science, illustrated", but rather a vigorous exploration of the climate crisis as a cultural knowledge, information, and policy problem. Students will work collaboratively to develop case studies that profile significant areas of public and scientific concern, including global climate modeling, global imbalances of political agency, public trust of science and scientists, the growth of AI data centers, and local and state case studies in environmental technologies.

Students will be able to improve their argumentative and analytical skills through the study of key issues and concepts in film studies. Film form and narrative, gender, class, stereotypes, the film auteur, cultural industry, violence and social denunciation will be some of the topics explored for the exploration of Brazilian case studies. Special emphasis will be given to the retomada -the rebirth of Brazilian cinema from the mid 1990s on - with in-depth analyses of feature films such as Carlota Joaquina (Carla Camurati, 1995), Central do Brasil (Walter Salles, 1998), CIdade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles, 2002) and Tropa de Elite (Jose' Padilha, 2007); documentary movies such as Edifcio Master (Eduardo Coutinho, 2002) and Santiago (Joao Moreira Salles, 2007) , as well as short movies such as Recife Frio (Kleber Mendonca Filho, 2009) and Eu nao Quero Voltar Sozinho (Daniel Ribeiro, 2010). Taught in English.

When war comes, many might imagine that theatre and other forms of performance stop. But, among the many forms of resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a vast increase in the number of new plays representing the suffering and the resilience of the Ukrainian people, many of which have already been translated into English. There has, in contrast, been less attention paid to other forms of performance writing: for example, poetry being created for, or disseminated through, digital media, reaching audiences instantly with all the urgency of the moment. This course has as its central aim the exploration of these materials, both ones already in English translation and ones that might become available. It seeks to understand what has been created and how it is disseminated as cultural practice during the Russian invasion. It will run as a classroom on the Notre Dame campus, meeting simultaneously with one taught in English at the Ukrainian Catholic University, enabling collaboration and shared learning between ND and UCU students.

This survey course will take a critical studies approach to the aesthetic, historical and ideological issues in avant-garde art, film, and media. This course will be structured around major phases of experimental, independent and radical non-narrative/non-commercial cinema from the 1920s to the present. In addition to considering new modes of production, we will address alternative forms of distribution and exhibition. We will also examine how these historical moments speak to contemporary calls to provide more diverse and inclusive modes of representation. Students will be required to attend weekly class lectures and discussions as well as weekly lab screenings.

Shocking, brutal, sensational, lurid, and just plain gross: no genre enjoys more diehard fans and steadfast detractors than horror cinema. Fan or foe, these movies provoke rich debates about media theory, aesthetics, and cultural politics for how they voice a range of fears and anxieties. This course introduces students to contemporary international horror cinema with the goal of understanding how this maligned genre explores themes of difference concerning race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality. The horror genre is at once local and global. These harrowing stories simultaneously articulate regional folklore, myths, and cultural traditions, and they connect viscerally with audiences for how they articulate our shared humanity. What goes bump in the night, you ask? This class will answer that question. Timid students need not enroll.

Cinema and hospitality in a broad sense: how do films embody the art of welcoming, of hosting, of including and caring? Three months after his election in 2013, Pope Francis visited the Island of Lampedusa (Italy), one of the world’s deadliest forefronts of the humanitarian catastrophe often referred to as the global “refugee crisis.” He denounced the “globalization of indifference” in which no one wants to take responsibility for “our brothers and sisters” migrants who suffer and die. Ten years later, while the Pope is again addressing the “crisis” in Marseilles, in the month of August 2023 alone, 2,095 “migrants” have lost their lives in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean Ocean. Through a general concept of “hospitality,” our class will offer a holistic, cinematic approach to a world scene in which an unprecedented number of individuals are forced to flee their homes. We will focus on the (extremely) old notion of hospitality (a decisively matrixial one) and analyze films that put this concept at their core both formally and narratively. One critical goal will be to explore the various cultural understandings and practices that forge the highly cultural, both idiosyncratic and universal art of inviting, including, unconditionally hosting, and caring for the guest, the stranger, the child, the unknown. An ideal of protection, empathy, and compassion without which there is no responsibility, no ethics, all concepts that are the cornerstone of a feminist ethics that will nourish our research. This class will, in most parts, consist of seminar discussions and lectures. Two written assignments, group work, oral presentations as well as active participation in our class will constitute the basic requirements.

Since long before Janis wowed Monterey and Hendrix blew up Woodstock, rock musicians have been captured and constructed by filmmakers eager to explore their non-conformist values and creative practices while amplifying their rebellious sounds. This class examines how gender operates within rock culture, using some of the world’s best rock’n’roll films as both evidence and touchpoints for critical conversation. From musicals and concert films to biopics and music videos, we will use these texts to study a myriad of sites associated with rock music production and consumption, investigating how rock culture has served as a significant site for gender conformity as well as gender trouble.

This course will survey the history of representations of Latinos in American cinema from the silent era to the present. We will examine how stereotypes associated with Latinos have been produced, reinforced, and challenged in American films - from greasers and Latin lovers to gangsters, kingpins, and border crossers. We will explore the fascinating contradiction that, despite a long history of misrepresentation and under representation, Latinos have made significant contributions to Hollywood and independent cinema. We will also examine the rise of Latino directors in recent years and their drive to reframe the Latino image for American audiences. Screenings will range from the silent epic Martyrs of the Alamo (1915) to more recent films such as Maria Full of Grace (2004). Our interdisciplinary approach to the subject will draw upon readings from history, film theory and criticism, and ethnic/American studies. Students will take a midterm exam and make class presentations.

This course explores the phenomenon of Shakespeare and film, concentrating on the ranges of meaning provoked by the conjunction. We shall be looking at examples of films of Shakespeare plays both early and recent, both in English and in other languages, and both ones that stick close to the conventionalized and historicized conceptualizations of Shakespeare and adaptations at varying degrees of distance toward the erasure of Shakespeare from the text. The transportation of different forms of Shakespearean textualities (printed, theatrical, filmic) and the confrontation with the specificities of film produce a cultural phenomenon whose cultural meanings - meanings as Shakespeare and meanings as film - will be the subject of our investigations. Students will be required to view screenings of films on a regular basis during the semester. Note: this course is delivered fully online. The course design combines required live weekly meetings online with self-scheduled lectures, problems, assignments, and interactive learning materials. To participate, students will need to have a computer with webcam, reliable internet connection, and a quiet place to participate in live sessions. Cannot have taken: FTT 40600 , FTT 44600, FTT 60600

The goal of the course is to compare the processes by which social scientists and filmmakers/photographers engage in social documentation. Students explore how global social problems such as rural and urban poverty, race and gender inequalities, immigration, and violence are analyzed across the social sciences, and depicted in a variety of documentary film and photography genres. The course also explores the role that documentary photography and film play in promoting rights and advocating for social change, particularly in the realm of human rights and global inequality. It examines the history of documentary film and photography in relationship to politics, and to the development of concerns across the social sciences with inequality and social justice. It also looks at how individual documentarians, non-profit organizations and social movements use film and photography to further their goals and causes, and issues of representation their choices raise. The course is also unique because it requires students to engage in the process of visual documentation themselves by incorporating an activity-based learning component. For their final project, students choose a human rights or social problem that concerns or interests them (and which they can document locally — no travel is required), prepare a documentary "exhibit" on the chosen topic (10-12 photographs), and write a 12-15 page paper analyzing how 2-3 social scientists construct and frame the given problem. Students also have the option to produce a short documentary film.

Long Title: Drunk on Film: The Psychology of Storytelling with Alcohol and Its Effects on Alcohol Consumption. Alcohol Use Disorder is a chronic relapsing brain disease. But when presented on screen, it's entertainment. Why do we laugh, why do we cry, why do we emulate fictional characters whose drinking habits result in a life of debilitating addiction? From James Bond to Jonah Hill, the psychology and seduction of alcohol on film, television, and online will be analyzed. Furthermore, what is the relationship between the manner in which alcohol use/abuse is presented on screen and the manner in which alcohol is used and abused on, for example, college campuses? Surveying recent film history, we will examine how alcohol is used in story structure, as a character flaw or strength, and as a narrative device in the story arc of films across multiple film genres, (action/adventure, comedy, romance, etc). Why do characters drink, where do they drink, and how does the result of their "getting drunk" advance the narrative? We'll also look at non-fiction films that tackle issues of addiction, as a way of comparing character development in Hollywood films to the results of this same behavior in everyday life. Film materials will include weekly screenings outside of class, and academic articles relating to portrayal and analysis of alcohol use in film and television, including the business of marketing alcohol in print and television advertising. From the psychological perspective we will discuss the topic and process of social influence and how the presence of others influences our behavior. Questions of interest will include the following: what are the mechanisms by which group influence unfolds? How and why might we be persuaded? Does the manner, and if so how, in which alcohol use is portrayed in movies and the media reflect the processes and principles of social influence? Readings will include chapters on social influence, persuasion and academic articles evaluating the manner in which alcohol is portrayed and advertised and the effect this has on alcohol consumption. In addition, issues of addiction will be discussed - from understanding the basis of addiction to examining the efficacy of addiction treatment.

What does it mean to be a successor state to the Nazis? Can one live in hope, and yet still take honest account of a genocidal past? How might cinema be deployed to bring about the elusive Communist utopia, a true democracy; or, conversely, how could it figure as a means to protest an authoritarian government or decry oppressive social conditions? These are questions posed not only by postwar Germans--in the East and West--but by people the world over. Yet the particular "German" contexts of the two Cold War states and now of the Berlin Republic are unmistakable and continue to exert a particular fascination for filmmakers from around the world. This course will treat a dozen great films that attempt to record history, make history, and sometimes even defy history. We will treat film not merely as a reflection of politics, but as a potential intervention that may still be relevant to contemporaries. Directors include: Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Billy Wilder, and others

Technical Concepts of Visual Effects I seeks to introduce students to fundamental concepts of 3D modeling and animation as used in the field of visual effects. Lessons will focus on the technical implementation of concepts such as polygonal modeling, texturing, scripting, rigging, animation, and rendering. The software used in the course is Autodesk Maya, Adobe Substance Painter, and DaVinci Resolve for editing rendered video. The class is taught from the perspective that it seeks to introduce and prepare students for a typical production studio work environment, with emphasis on a pipeline workflow. This course consists of class lectures, tutorials, and projects.

In 1900, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. Often discussed as a quintessentially American fairytale, this children's novel and the fantasy world in which it takes place has spawned a wealth of sequels, revisions, and adaptations across a multitude of media platforms--from print sequels and revisions to films, serial television shows, cartoons, games, and Broadway shows. This course will investigate not only the cultural significance of Baum's fantasy world within American culture, but also the theoretical concept of adaptation. Looking closely at multiple iterations of Oz across different platforms, we will discuss questions such as: what is the cultural significance of Oz? what does it mean to adapt a text? how does a story change when it moves from page, to stage, to screen, and back again? Why is it important to examine these changes? What roles do historical/cultural context and audiences play in adaptation? For students of film and media, American culture, and literature this course will provide an opportunity to explore critical concepts of culture and myth, examine the relationship between popular culture and identity, and develop and practice skills in formal analysis.

This one-credit course provides an overview of the history of drag performance on screen. We will consider televisual drag, comedic and dramatic fiction films, documentaries, and silent films. We will consider uses of drag as disguise, cross dressing for comedy, ballroom culture, drag contests, female to male drag, and more. Students will be asked to read essays on drag, write weekly reflections, attend class discussions, and attend weekly screenings, as well as a symposium on drag and performance on Friday, November 3, 2023.

Digital technologies present many opportunities for people to work, play, and find community online, but there is a persistent desire to unplug and avoid the ire of social media, information overload, and mass surveillance. Abstaining from technology involves actively assessing how a given tool may enhance, detract from, or reconfigure one’s values, whether that be for reasons of privacy, health and wellbeing, leisure, community, or others. This will look different depending on the context: the traditional lifestyle of Amish communities, the neo-luddism movement, Catholic contemplative practices, and “digital detox” trends each have something unique to say about the potential to abstain from technology (even if only temporarily or unsuccessfully in some cases). How do we identify when a tool is working for or against our needs? What are some strategies to reclaim mindfulness and agency over the barrage of social media and generative AI? What are the potential affordances of making more attention in non-digital spaces? At the same time, is it possible to develop an ethical stance on refusal when we are living in a digital society that appears nearly impossible to disconnect from? This course will explore perspectives from human-computer interaction, media studies, philosophy, theology, and psychology on what it could mean to rethink digital engagement not as a default but a deliberate choice. Students will be asked to complete oral and written communication assignments and engage in debates and discussions about the topics at hand.

The intention of this course is to provide you with a context within which to understand the history of the American Broadway Musical, while cultivating your own opinions about the art form and how it relates to society. You will track the progression of the musical by studying its path through the Operetta, Minstrelsy, Vaudeville, Golden Age, Sondheim and the Concept Musical, the Modern Rock Musical, the Juke-Box Musical and the Post-Modern Era. This course is a research based course. Research topics are assigned by eras so that we may analyze and compare the material to the history of society. You will apply your growing knowledge of musical theatre history and context to intelligently observe and engage in discussion of the thoughts and presentations of your peers within a structured setting. Throughout the course there will be group discussions, group research, independent research, group presentations and weekly writing responses to prompts, which will require critical thinking and self reflection. There will be two papers due throughout the semester while ending in a one on one meeting with the instructor.

This course introduces the theory of movement in regards to musical theatre, and how it relates to style and character, while exploring physical and emotional risk. This class will be a physically rigorous approach towards body awareness with the study of dance, choreography and theatre movement for the musical. We will be engaged in a variety of iconic dance choreography from a variety of different musical styles, while working on overall movement for the musical stage. Throughout the course there will be exercises to explore our physicality as well as creating a physically based ensemble within the class through dance and movement. We will also gain experience in learning dance choreography and what it would be like to be in a rehearsal process for a musical. You will sweat.

The intention of this course is to provide you with a context within which to understand the techniques of musical theatre performance and the foundational skills needed to personally inhabit these techniques. This course will give you the tools to "act a song." You will work on analysis and performance of five songs from the following categories: Golden Age, Modern, Rock, Pop and any other kind of song you love. These songs are assigned by era sequentially so that we may simultaneously introduce the context of this material within the genre-at-large. You will also apply your growing knowledge of technique and context to intelligently observe and comment on the work of your peers within a structured setting. Throughout the course we will incorporate short group exercises to better explore performance technique and promote a deeper understanding of the differences between traditional script/text analysis and score/lyric analysis. There will be reflection papers due after the exploration of your songs.

Roche Schulfer '73, Executive Director of the Goodman Theatre, will present a series of five talks about the Business of Theatre in the United States. Covering such topics as the Economics of the Performing Arts, Non-profit vs Commercial Theatre, Fund Raising, Strategic Planning, and Careers in the Performing Arts; Mr. Schulfer will bring the lessons he has learned over the years of his career to our campus. Theatre Management Seminar may be taken as a one credit course or as a zero credit lab component for FTT30703 Stage and Theatre Management.

Course Objective: The intention of this course is to provide you with a context within which to build upon the foundations of the techniques of musical theatre performance and how to navigate character from book scenes into songs. Course Content and Structure: You will work on analysis and performance of multiple songs and scenes from musicals, focused on book scenes, duets, and group numbers. These songs/scenes are assigned by era sequentially so that we may simultaneously introduce the context of this material within the genre-at-large. You will also apply your growing knowledge of technique and context to intelligently observe and comment on the work of your peers within a structured setting.

This course will begin with an investigation of the many meanings of revolution in changing contexts, then deal with specific models of how modern artists portray revolutionary ideas, events, and consequences. We will consider contemporary theatre, music, and visual art from Latin America and the Middle East,among other examples. Students will be expected to do independent research about movements and artists, give in-class presentations about their findings, and work in groups to better understand worldwide revolutions. There will be assigned readings, film screenings, gallery/museum visits, and performances, which will require written responses (short form and essays) and frame class discussions

This course introduces the theory of acting through movement and how it relates to character, while exploring physical and emotional risk, all while telling a story with the integration of the mind, body and voice. This class will be focused on self-exploration based on a physically rigorous and athletic approach to acting, utilizing elements of Clown and Grotowski.

This course examines world theatre history from the origins of performance to the present. Students learn techniques of script analysis, performance analysis, and independent research as tools for analyzing theatre from the literary, aesthetic, and historical perspectives. Throughout, the course emphasizes the importance of cultural context and historiography to understanding the creation and transformation of theatre as an art form. Each semester will be a stand-alone course and can be taken in any order. Students are encouraged to enroll in adjacent semesters. At least one semester of this sequence is a prerequisite for the upper-level electives required to complete the major.

This course examines world theatre history from 19th century popular entertainment performance practices to the present. Students learn techniques of script analysis, performance analysis, and independent research as tools for analyzing theatre from the literary, aesthetic, and historical perspectives. Throughout, the course emphasizes the importance of cultural context and historiography to understanding the creation and transformation of theatre as an art form. Each semester will be a stand-alone course and can be taken in any order. Students are encouraged to enroll in adjacent semesters. At least one semester of this sequence is a prerequisite for the upper-level electives required to complete the major.

This course takes a historically centered look at the use of theatre in the Anglophone postcolonies. We will start by exploring the role of theatre in colonialism—how it was deployed to both Europeanize the colonized subject and simultaneously to enforce ideas of cultural superiority. The rest of the course will analyze how colonized subjects use theatre to write back to empire, write around empire, or write through it. In order to do this, we will study indigenous forms of theatre and performance to best understand how theatre becomes a site for contesting colonial legacies through strategic mixes of European and traditional theatre practices. This course will begin by looking at the emerging Irish theatre as it was reacting to anti-colonial nationalism before moving on to similar movements in Nigeria, South Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean.

Directing New Work for the Stage explores the collaborative relationship between directors and playwrights in developing and devising new theatrical works. Students will study various directing and devising methods that enable directors to effectively support playwrights throughout the creative process. The course brings together perspectives from accomplished directors working in professional theater while fostering direct partnerships with student playwrights. Through this collaborative exchange, students will develop practical skills in script development, creative problem-solving, and ensemble work. The course culminates in a staged reading of new scenes, with student directors applying the techniques and insights gained throughout the semester.

A class for actors, writers, and scholars, The Big American Play will dig into theatre's role in the American conversation on race, class, and gender. Students will analyze scripts, research cultural contexts, rehearse scenes, and perform up to four public readings of selected plays. All students will participate in each approach at least once, then will have the option to focus on either acting or dramaturgy. Students will also curate a season of plays for the current American moment, choosing their ideal performance context for each event and articulating the vision that drives their choices. Pulitzer prize-winning plays include musicals, comedies, dramas, and cutting edge experiments by diverse American playwrights like Suzan Lori Parks, Michael R Jackson Paul Vogel, Lynn Nottage,, August Wilson, Annie Baker, Sam Shepard, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Neil Simon, and Zona Gale.

This course introduces the advanced student dancer to various methods of dance training. When appropriate, the student serves as the teaching assistant for Musical Theatre Dance, under the supervision of the instructor.

US literature and popular music between the mid-19th century and the end of World War II. This interdisciplinary course will incorporate methods from performance studies, sound studies, and musicology in addition to literary criticism. We will read key works of American prose (as well as some poetry) from the period's principal literary movements, including realism, naturalism, modernism, and multimedia documentary. We will also listen to musical works--Broadway tunes and blues songs, spirituals and symphonies. We'll pay particular attention to how segregation and other racial politics, changing roles for women, and the mass production of commodities influenced the art of this period. Texts will include writing by Stephen Crane, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Harriet Jacobs, and Edith Wharton, as well as music by George M. Cohan, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, Paul Robeson, and Bessie Smith. Course requirements will include two argumentative essays, several shorter writing assignments, regular online reading responses, and active class participation.

An introduction to the tools and techniques used in painted and textured scenery for the stage and screen. Students will learn and apply the variety of methods used in creating a wide range of painted effects; from the basic wood treatments to the advanced marbling and faux finishes. Outside of class painting time will be required.

This is a beginner's course in basic scenic design techniques and hand drafting for the stage. This course will take the student through the process of design from how to read a script, research, presentation, rendering, basic drafting, and if time allows, model building. No previous experience necessary. Materials fee TBA.

This class will teach you what is involved in creating and executing a lighting design. We will cover lighting equipment and safety. You will design and draft a light plot, and you will learn how to write and use paperwork. Most importantly, the goal of this class will be to teach you how to see light. There will be lectures, videos, projects (take-home and in-class), hands-on training, and required attendance at TWO performances. The semester culminates with a final design project, as well as written components.

This course teaches the principles of costume design for the stage. The course will explore the use of costumes to express character traits by analyzing play scripts. Students will design costumes, and explore the process of organizing the script from the costume designer's viewpoint. The course will include projects, discussions, and lectures. The course will end with a portfolio presentation of the work completed throughout the semester. Students will be expected to provide their own materials and supplies.

Story Structure is designed to engage students in exploring a variety of approaches to playwriting and screenwriting structure. The course will delve into structural analysis utilizing models from contemporary world theater and film with the aim to present a variety of paths toward creating new, vibrant plays and screenplays. Students will write one act plays and short screenplays throughout this course, which culminates in a public reading of their work. This course is ideal for any student interested in writing for theater and film.

Students will learn how to develop sewing patterns for theatre costumes through the two standard methods used in the profession: draping and flat pattermaking. Students will learn the basics of creating various patterns needed to construct contemporary and period costumes for stage and film.

How do the contemporary film and television industries work? How can an analysis of the "business of entertainment" enable a greater understanding of contemporary media aesthetics and culture? This course will explore these questions by focusing on the structure, practices and products of America's film and television industries, and students will engage with academic readings, screenings, trade publications, current events, guest lectures, and written and oral assignments in order to understand the activities of the film and television industries. By the end of the course, students should be able to understand prominent practices employed by media conglomerates and independent companies today, recognize the ways in which industrial structures and practices can shape media products, and examine how television shows and movies are influenced by business strategies. The course should be especially beneficial for students intending to pursue scholarly or professional careers related to film and television through its comprehensive overview of how these industries work, why they work as they do, and the broader practical and theoretical implications of media industry operations.

From Singing in the Rain to Star Wars to Beauty and the Beast, special effects existed before CGI. This course will cover the Design, Budgeting, and Execution of special effects.. Theoretical and hands on experience with some common and not so common effects used on the Movie Studio lot and Broadway stage.

Whether we "dress for success" or wear our pajamas to the grocery store, the clothes we are putting on our body all have a meaning. Though clothes are an essential part of our everyday life, do we really stop and think about what they really signify, how they are perceived by people who look at them? In urban environments, where millions of fellow city-dwellers can scan the clothes that everyone is wearing, fashion often has a more significant meaning. Dressing up is such a mundane action we barely wonder why we do it, but shouldn't we consider this act an art? Fashion has been a crucial aspect of literature, cinema, paintings, and graphic novels. Text and textile both mediate a form of language, and fashion is indeed an idiom in itself. In this course, you will explore the representation of fashion in literature, cinema and the arts. We will dive into a range of texts, films, paintings, and graphic novels that will enable us to better grasp the importance of clothing surfaces, their meaning, implication, and significance regarding issues related to gender, social class, sexuality, and (post-) colonialism. An individual's identity, personality, and desires are both inscribed on and influenced by the clothes he or she is wearing. The large set of signs that are carried by fashion therefore constitute a closed system of signification, linked with culture itself as well as the senses. The course aims to give students an insight into a broad range of visual and textual materials, as well as to develop their analytical and critical skills. During each class, students will be asked to discuss the themes emerging from the visual and textual materials, supported by the critical readings related to them. The objective of this interdisciplinary course is also, through materials spanning across a broad variety of genres, media, places and periods, to provide the students with an open and intercultural approach of the humanities. Finally, the course aims to develop the students' awareness of their place within a globalized world in which the image of the self - often carried by clothes - is predominant. This puts into perspective the socio-political questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, and sexuality. Taught in French.

In the summer of 1946 French cinemas were flooded with the likes of The Maltese Falcon, Laura, and The Woman in the Window, films that had been delayed for international distribution because of the war. When Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton saw these American films made during the war, the critics decided that the films and their characters were "black" or "dark," thus defining the genre as film noir. In this genre, the mostly white characters occupy an indeterminate space, commit moral transgressions, and border on nihilism. In discussions of the noir genre, films and novels by and/or about black people are marginalized. Novels such as Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go or Donald Goines's Never Die Alone complicate the genre because the works are black in ideology and essence. These characters do not need to fall from grace to be black, they are black and, consequently, the pursuit of duplicitous lifestyles in black noir works tends to highlight the social injustices black Americans suffer in America making many black noir titles protests against mainstream white America as well. In this course, we will study black American literature that focuses the noir genre on black people themselves. Gritty, urban crime novels that attempt to expose inequities in black American lives and dispel the notion that a descent from whiteness results in blackness. Rather, the black people in these texts exist in darkness because they are living in alienated communities. We shall investigate how the noir genre is altered when "noirs" are the subjects and the authors. In addition to primary texts, the course will also engage critical responses to these works.

The second course in the acting progression, this course expands on basic methodology and incorporates physical techniques for building a character. Students explore psychological gestures, Laban effort shapes, and improvisation as they develop a personal approach to creating a role.

A course designed to help the advanced acting student focus on kinesthetic awareness. The actor will identify and work to remove physical and vocal tensions that cause habituated movement and impede natural sound production. Through movement and vocal exercises created for actors, students will experience what "prepared readiness" for the stage consists of, and how to meet the demands of a live performance.

A workshop course in the process of theatre production in which students assume a major nonperformance production responsibility including, but not limited to: stage manager, assistant stage manager, prop master, costumer, technical director or assistant director. This course can be repeated for up to four hours credit. Requires Instructor's permission.

Directing Process is a class intended to help a director develop their own particular directorial voice or vision while encouraging their theatrical imagination. The class will focus on fundamental principles and tools in the fields of play analysis, acting, design, and staging.

This upper level acting course will focus on the intersection between written and embodied (performed) text. The class will use scripts from film, television and theatre to practice the actor's craft of close reading: students can learn to look beyond the explicit facts in a given scene to uncover the implicit information that feeds objectives and intentions. Daily classes will explore the relationship between close reading and strong artistic choices. We will begin the semester solidifying the basic acting techniques of improvisation, physicality, intention and subtext and move quickly into textual analysis. Students will be required to create detailed scene breakdowns with scene studies and to rehearse weekly outside of class time.

This course is open to students interested in becoming involved with specific performing/non-performing roles on a departmental production. This research driven course will examine the history of the production and research prior performances and the significance of the play in the overall scope of Theatre History. Additional areas of research include dramaturgy of the production, historical context of the story, historical sources and innovative performance techniques, etc. This research will support the work of the designers and performers, as members of the class work to implement their research in an finished production. The course also seeks to teach the students all of the lesser know aspects of bringing a play and a musical into performance.

Screening that accompanies FTT 30030, Contemporary Global Cinemas lecture

Acting Shakespeare is an active and participatory exploration of the works of the world's greatest playwright from the perspective of the actor. You will be acquainted with basic analytical, physical and vocal techniques for unlocking the meaning and emotional content of Shakespeare's texts. The structure of this course allows you the opportunity to create and present multiple roles through the performances of monologues and scenes.

Lab Screening for FTT 30201-01.

Lab/Screenings for FTT 30202 (Global Cinema II)

Lab for FTT 30302 Envisioning Contemporary Europe

Over the last two decades of Putin's presidency, Russia's geopolitical strength and imperial ambition were placed at the center of Russia's political line. Military incursions in the neighboring countries have expanded Russia's territorial claims and reasserted its aspirations to former Soviet spheres of influence. While Russian identity continued to be imperial after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians set off on a journey of building their national identity. The course considers how post-Soviet cinema revives tropes and aesthetic tendencies of the earlier periods, such as stark depictions of the self and Other, spiritual superiority and monumentalism, as well as updates them for a contemporary context. The class explores the Putin-era Russian cinema and Ukrainian national cinema of the last two decades in the light of the common past that these two countries share and how the past is reshaped for the present. No previous knowledge of Russian is required, the course is taught fully in English.

The lab portion of FTT 30410, a course in the fundamentals of writing, shooting, editing, and lighting for narrative film productions. This is a hands-on production course emphasizing aesthetics, creativity, and technical expertise. Expect significant amounts of shooting and editing outside of class as well as helping classmates on their shoots.

Lab to FTT 30456

Lab Screening for Corequisite FTT 30459

Lab Screening for Co-requisite FTT 30505.

Personal Storytelling introduces students to the art of live storytelling and the craft of writing and performing true, personal stories. This course will examine different forms of autobiographical storytelling including The Moth Story Hour as well as diverse, theatrical solo performances. The course will include in-class writing and physical theatre exercises that ignite imagination and help students identify and generate the stories they wish to tell. Students will write and develop a 6-minute story, learn performance skills that explore depth and sincerity, as well as techniques to engage an audience. The course will highlight the vulnerability and power of sharing personal stories and the impact this can have on an audience, and will culminate in a public performance.

Lab for FTT 30531 Avant-Garde Art and Film

This is the screening for FTT 30533 lecture.

Lab section for FTT 30649. Enrollment is limited to Employee Non-Degree, Graduate Non-Degree, Holy Cross College, Non-matriculating, St. Mary's College, Undergraduate or Undergraduate Non-Degree level students. Enrollment limited to students in the Main campus.

This course is the lab/screening for FTT 30665.

Visual anthropology involves the cross-cultural study of images in communication and the use of images as a method for doing anthropology. This course proceeds through a non-linear integration of visual themes including water, earth, light, fire, flesh and blood with analytical themes including aesthetics, poetics, violence, history, materiality and subjectivity. We explore still photography, film, and popular media in domains from ethnography, social documentary, war photojournalism, to high art. Students watch, read and write about, and generate visual products of their own in multiple media.

Korean popular culture permeates transnational mediascapes as evidenced by the virality of films such as Parasite and K-Pop Demon Hunters and the international success of writers such as Han Kang. We are witnessing the ongoing global popularization of Korean culture and its widespread circulation to the public in Korea and around the world. This course will examine Korean popular culture through film, literature, television, and streaming media with a focus on how popular culture shapes the human experience as well as our global geopolitical realities. We will think about Korean popular culture in creative ways that include a variety of forms and explore scholarship from an array of fields such as cultural studies, cinema and media studies, and performance studies that debate history, reception, identity, and soft power among other topics. All course materials will be in English and no knowledge of Korean is required. This course fulfills the literature and culture requirement for the Korean minor.

This seminar will explore privilege, power, place, and concepts of labor within digital economies of communication and information exchange. As digital technologies continue to blur the boundaries between leisure and work, surveillance and data collection become invisibilized and normalized processes. This class will combine methodologies from feminist research practices and critical digital studies while exploring the rapid coevolution of labor and technology. By interrogating what constitutes “digital culture,” this course aims to introduce students to cultural studies through the lens of digital humanities and digital literacy. This course will provide an opportunity to learn and apply feminist media analysis to cultural texts.

HK - Hong Kong, China - Understanding Japanese Culture and Society Through Movies: Film is always regarded as an important medium for understanding society and culture. This course looks into the formation and characteristics of Japanese mentality and behaviour, through Japanese movies and academic readings of Japanese studies. This course consists of two major parts: 1) Lesson 2 to Lesson 7: Japanese Self-Image as Revealed in Japanese Movies; 2) Lesson 8 to Lesson 12: Comparison of the Thinking Patterns of Japan and Others. This course emphasizes interdisciplinary research and study methods, including film criticism, history and cultural studies. The lecturer will commence each lesson by referring to various academic readings, and will show movie clips if necessary, to serve as the basis for in-class discussions.

University of Galway - Gangsters, Narcos and Wise Guys: Crime, Representation and Media This module examines how crime, criminality, and justice are represented across news media, television drama, and film, and how these representations shape public understanding, cultural identity, and political debate. Focusing on gangster, organised crime, and narco narratives, the module explores how crime is constructed not only as social reality but as a mediated cultural form. Through critical engagement with news reporting, popular culture, and long-form television drama, students will analyse how media representations frame issues such as violence, masculinity, power, race, class, gender, policing, and social order. The module interrogates whether media portrayals of crime function as accurate reflections of social conditions or as distorted narratives that contribute to moral panic, stigmatisation, and policy formation. Drawing on media studies, cultural criminology, and communication theory, the module treats crime as a system of representation rather than a set of isolated events. Students will evaluate how different media forms — including tabloid news, prestige television, and cinematic crime narratives — invite audiences to sympathise with, normalise, or condemn criminal figures, and how these representations circulate within wider political and cultural contexts.

This course will examine both historical and contemporary Australian films. Students will consider the means by which cinema is an expression of Australian history and culture, as well as how film provides a medium through which our society and national identity might be interpreted. Films considered will deal with such themes as legend and myth, suburban Australia, Aboriginality, Anzac, and the bush, the city and the beach. Finally, this course will examine how Australian film has been both influenced by and an influence on international cinema.

In this course, students, working in crews and using broadcast standard technology, participate in key film crew roles, assigned in consultation with their lecturer, to make short films or TV dramas. The substantial processes of pre-production, production and post-production are assessable and students are graded on the basis of significant work in their designated roles. Production scripts generated in other Film and Screen Production courses may be used.

This course aims to offer a broad view of the Italian cinema in its historical passage from the widely recognized Neo-realist foundations to the great divide of the revolutionary sixties, which we see as the culmination of its golden age. The modernization of Italian society, the building up of the urban space over the agricultural tradition, and the problem of Italian identity as reflected in the cinema of the sixties will be among the main points discussed in the course.

FS 30050 Whiteness, Ethnicity, and American Film at UCD; Since the mid 1990s 'whiteness' has become a critical keyword in humanities scholarship. Entering into current debates about the nature and function of whiteness while maintaining both a historical and a critical focus, this advanced module invites students to reflect on the cinematic fictions of whiteness while considering that category as hierarchical, contested and unstable. The advanced module is designed to raise questions concerning the representation of a variety of ethnicities in American film from the silent cinema to the classical period and New Hollywood. Using a variety of films from as early as 1915 and as recent as 2002, we will examine depictions of ethnic identity (Irish, Italian, French, Hispanic, Polish, Greek, Arab, Jewish, etc.) and consider the ways ethnicity is claimed and disclaimed, repressed, romanticized and nostalgically rendered. We will look at the complex relationship between American popular culture and immigration and assimilation issues and investigate the ways ethnicity intersects with issues of genre, stardom, nationalism/citizenship, nostalgia and tourism.

This course will introduce students to contemporary Italian media and popular cultures. The course has a thematic approach and applies the analytical theories of critical cultural studies. Students will be exposed to development of various media forms as they have been shaped by and their impact on Italian culture and society.

This module examines a range of methodologies for the critical analysis of television drama to trace the recurring themes, images, plots, settings and modes of characterisation and the patterns of change emerging in these over the years. It reflects on the relationship between the shifting shapes of TV drama and the larger pattern of social experience, to facilitate an intensive study of particular TV drama series.

By applying media literacy tools to examine paradigms of communication and ecology, we'll seek to understand how media impact environmental concepts and explore media strategies for addressing issues such as global climate change.

This course will introduce students to the lexicon of film and the diverse techniques through which films generate meaning. The course will encompass major movements in film history and theory: Silent to Sound, Auteur and Genre Theory, Transnational Cinemas, and the Digital Revolution in Cinema. It will challenge students to think analytically about the ways in which films construct meaning, including the uses of cinematography, editing, art direction, screenplay and sound. The course will denaturalise and deconstruct the proverbial magic of the silver screen, firmly locating film within its cultural and ideological discourses. This course is specifically designed to equip students with the analytical tools required for the Film and Screen Production major and is, therefore, a prerequisite for a number of upper level Communications and Media courses.

The number of sources through which we experience music has proliferated over the past several decades. Even though the use of music in many of the earliest films and televisions programs was common, the use of popular music in contemporary film and television has become all but ubiquitous in recent years. This unit of study will examine the use of popular music in a broad range of multimedia forms from film and television to video games and the use of digital media to disseminate a multitude of musical multimedia productions. The primary goal of this subject is to help you produce original interpretive, evidence based scholarship on some aspect of the interaction and use of popular music in film, television, video games and online sources.

This unit examines the development of film genre in the context of technological and industrial change in the making, delivery and consumption of audiovisual media. The unit considers changing artistic, commercial, ideological and social functions of genre in terms of the needs of film industries, filmmakers and audiences. Each year two genre case studies will be covered in depth, such as the action film, the art film, the coming-of-age film, film noir, the gangster film, horror, melodrama, the musical, science fiction, the thriller, or the western.

This course is designed to deepen your understanding of film music, exploring its historical, technological, and artistic contexts. You'll learn to analyse and interpret film music, examining its relationship with the screen & storytelling, and its effect on audiences. We'll compare various approaches to creating and "reading" screen music, with a focus on mainstream Hollywood practices, including the impact of commercial forces on the industry. Along the way, we'll also explore some fantastic film music from further afield. I look forward to your contributions and insights as we explore music in film together.

This course will examine Chinese cinema from its infancy to contemporary film within a social, political and cultural context, focusing specifically on films produced in mainland China. While acknowledging the importance of examining Chinese cinema in the general framework of national tradition and identity, this course also emphasizes the transnational or pan-Asian nature of Chinese film productions at present. In this way, it is hoped that the course will not only help students cultivate a greater command over current trends and debates in analysis and theorization of Chinese cinema, but also help facilitate students' understanding of Chinese cinema/culture/history in the context of globalization.

This module provides an examination of how digital technology has transformed every aspect of the film industry, and of how these transformations have subsequently affected film studies. For digital technology (computers, cameras, etc) has shaped not just the Hollywood film industry, but all film industries everywhere, at all stages of film production, distribution and exhibition, and in all genres. The module will take in a range of films and other texts from different regions, including the USA, Europe and Asia, straddling big budget spectacles, costume dramas, documentaries, games and more.

The Anthropocene is a term proposed to indicate a new geological era characterized by the irreversible alteration of the bio-geo-physical processes of the planet, product of human activity. Undoubtedly, it is a problematic concept that opens up different challenges, both ethical and epistemological. At the same time, we have experienced how the effects of climate change have built a scenario of generalized anxiety about the fate of the Earth, and with it, of life itself. How can the critical analysis of images of the socio-ecological crisis help us to build alternative futures? From the production of collaborative and interdisciplinary visual and/or audiovisual works, The readings will include works by Marisol de la Cadena, Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and texts oriented towards the analysis of images by authors such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Hito Steyerl and Susan Sontag, with the aim of providing theoretical references that problematize the recent inaugurated geological era called Anthropocene.

The crisis that the mass media industry is experiencing today has been called the digital tsunami due to the relevance that digital has for the media, both as a cause of the problem and as a possible solution. The workshop seeks to develop prototypes that allow the delivery, through digital media, of quality media content. In this way, it is hoped that readers will have an experience similar to or better than what they have had up to now when being informed in the traditional media.

This module examines the history, style, and content of Hollywood film musicals from the late 1940s to the decline of the classic musical in the 1960s. In addition to considering musicals made in the traditional maimer, such as The Pirate, Gigi, and The Sound of Music, departures from the canonical style are evaluated, both for the challenge they offered to convention mad as reflections of society m rapidly changing times. They include Rock Around the Clock, West Side Stmy, and Sweet Charity. Context will be provided by examining some early musicals, and various attempts will be made to find a working definition of the film musical as a genre, including engaging with Rick Altman's theory of genre. A small number of musicals from the 1970s will be included.

This class studies the evolution of film from early days to modern times. It also focuses on the technologies used.

Analysis of the presence of Ireland and Irish people in film throughout the history of film. This will delve into the representation of Ireland from a national and international level and from various perspectives within the nation. Different genres of films are analyzed and how each contributes to perception of Ireland. Throughout the entire course, stylistic elements and cinematography will be taught in relation to how it expresses the themes of the film.

Students learn to synthesize the narrative and visual theoretical information, in the writing of pilot programs of T.V. series. The course explains the dramaturgical characteristics of the different modalities of soap operas. Students develop plot lines for pilot programs of television series in addition to write a number of scripts.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Binge, Stan. With the emergence of online viewing platforms and the prevalence of personal devices, the distinctions between traditional broadcast television and cinema screened in theatres have decisively changed. In this unit we look at televisual and cinematic drama. In particular we examine what is being termed a new 'golden age' in televisual drama that has coincided with the paradigm shift toward online streaming. But we also look at the continuing relevance of cinema, particularly the cinematic language of Hollywood which provides the basic formal structures of screen narrative.

This course offers an introductioin into the key terms and fundamentals approaches, the examination of narrative techniques, cinematographic stylistics features of film analysis. It provides an opportunity to get acquainted with some of the most important movements or schools and some of the gratest masters of European film.

This unit traces the history of screen cultures from film to apps, focusing on how popular media is used to produce and represent masculinity and femininity. Students will consider cinema, television, videogames, the internet and mobile devices, asking how changing media forms and practices impact on our gendered identities and everyday lives.

In this module, we examine how television has constructed childhood and how children have, in their turn, shaped television. We use theoretical and methodological maps to investigate the past and present of children's television, including things like: cultural studies, media ethnography, genre studies, gender studies, and production studies. We look at a range of topics that include: Saturday Morning Television, children's variety shows, animation, children's broadcasting, children's satellite channels, censorship, consumerism, pressure groups, and gender.

This is a French theater class that focuses on the Greek tragedy of "Iphigenie". Students read plays, engage in role exercises and improv, and mainly focus on creating scene work and re-interpreting scenes and lines in group setting.

This course explores the contribution of female film and television creatives in Britain. From the recent global successes of directors such as Emerald Fennell and Molly Manning Walker to the long-standing triumphs of producer Tessa Ross, women in the British Film and Television industry exemplify the, often overlooked, significant contributions made to global screen culture by women. Early screenwriters such as Alma Reville and Muriel Box carved a space for women in the film industry, while British women particularly thrive in television today. Showrunners such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Micaela Coel wittily confront issues faced by contemporary women in their critically acclaimed series. The intersectional identity markers of these various female creatives enable important discussions about what stories get made, whose stories are told and by whom. The course develops these discussions through considerations of race, class and gender in on-screen representations as well as the festival as a site for emerging female voices. In doing so, it critiques globally exported notions of British femininity. Engaging with the local cinema culture, this class will include field trips to popular London cinemas, exhibits and events, guest speakers from the film and television industries, and, where possible, film festivals.

This unit focuses on some of the most influential works of cinema, from silent film to Hollywood cinema and both independent and mainstream film. It charts film's exciting and historically significant developments, providing a deep understanding of cinema's form and genres, and familiarises students with the central principles of film studies. Topics discussed include film narrative and mis-en-scene, editing and film sound, auteur theory, art-house cinema and national cinema, documentary and experimental film practice. Attention is also given to recent film theories to extend students' understandings of the socio-political significance of the medium and to progress their skills in close-reading and critical analysis.

This course provides students with performance skills designed to suit the screen. Working with scripts and improvisation, students learn industry practices that include creating a narrative, performance techniques and basic camera operation. While students gain valuable skills in performing before a camera when acting, this course may also suit professional application in other forms of media.

RE - Rome: This course provides students with a number of theoretical approaches to critically assess how digital media function and their expanding and expansive role in contemporary culture. The course further investigates digital media convergence in order to develop a critical lexicon that can both chart its development and engage in intellectual interventions in its use within the transformations occurring in more traditional cultural forms such as television, film, popular music, print, and radio. Special emphasis will be placed on the specific cultural, political, economic, and social issues raised by digital media forms. IR / UCD: Dublin, Ireland: Digital media cultures wield an enormous influence on 21st-century life. This module equips students with the theoretical means to evaluate the role of digital media within contemporary culture and understand its history. Students will engage with a variety of perspectives on digital media. They will look beyond pervasive discursive constructions of digital utopianism and critique the infrastructures and institutions that shape the use and creation of digital media content. The module will adopt a non-Eurocentric approach to addressing some critical debates in contemporary lives, including access and representation, inequalities, and transnational communities and diasporas. Students will engage with the main discussions around the role and impact of global media players, including the tech companies, on digital economies and futures. Throughout, students will investigate and critically reflect on how class, race, place, and gender shape contemporary digital culture.

IR / UCD - Dublin, Ireland: This module presents a history of music in narrative film, predominantly in the Hollywood and European traditions, by examining the development of key trends and significant composers from the "silent" era to the present day. It shall consider the place of music- and the soundtrack more generally-in the film production process. Classes shall alternate approaches based upon broader themes, specific composers and directors, and individual films. A number of guest lectures are delivered by practitioners and/or researchers in film music scholarship.

In this class, I am learning about the basis of world cinema from black and white films and silent films to recent world films. We are learning how to use Adobe Premiere Pro and performing various projects to learn it. This class was pre-approved by the film department to count for the Global Cinema 2 class at ND.

Obtain from D. Younger in Office of International Studies

While Post-Revolutionary Iran continues to be viewed with political suspicion in the west, the output of the national film industry has, since the 1990s, been critically celebrated and achieved significant success in film festivals and through international awards. The very unique aesthetic and political circumstances that have led to this highly successful and original national cinema will be examined in this module by looking at the work of individual Auteurs and by placing the films within a wider socio-political, economic and religious context. Students will become familiar with a recent history of Iranian filmmaking, with Iran's unique tradition of representation, this cinemas confrontations with questions of realism, and with how these representations are affected by censorship.

This course will explore the ways in which Rome has been envisioned by photographers and filmmakers from the early photography of 1850's to the digital culture of the contemporary period. Our main focus will be the tension between the touristic and artistic impulses that have shaped the visual culture of Rome across the past three centuries. How does Rome come to us already mediated? How do we envision our Rome out of that vast reservoir of images? We can begin to answer to those questions only by creating our own intersections between histories of visual culture, museum studies, urban theory, and digital critical studies.

This course will provide students with an introduction to postcolonial studies.

This module offers an introduction to feminist film studies - history and theory whilst addressing questions of representation, aesthetics, ideology, and politics as related to gender and intersecting identities. We will explore what makes a particular film or media practice feminist, and what role media production, distribution, and exhibition have in the process. How do media - images and practice - participate in and/or resist dominant ideas? And in what ways do feminist film studies challenge our received knowledge of film and media theory to date?

This survey course will allow students to discuss key European issues as portrayed in a representative selection of European films. The course will be tackled in two ways. First, by reading a selection of films as representative of European culture and history, students will learn about issues and events that are instrumental for understanding contemporary European societies such as the controversy surrounding national and supra-national identities, the rise and return of fascism, the onset of social revolutions, feminism, diversity of sexual identities, immigration, post-colonialism, and globalization. Second, by focusing on the production and form of films, students will develop their critical and analytical thinking skills through the examination of different styles of authorship and production, film movements, film festivals, and transnationalism in connection with social developments. The language of instruction is English.

This is the first module of a three-part course designed to equip students with the skills of a theatre director/maker. After six weeks of weekly laboratory classes using a workshop approach to explore aspects of the directing/making process, students will prepare a 5- minute work in progress performance. In week 12, students will prepare a 10-minute performance either devised or directing a play text. The aim of the course is to provide a fundamental grounding for directors/makers from which they can go on to engage with different approaches and theories of directing/making

Glued to the Screen emphasizes television as a cultural, social, and political outlet in popular culture that has shaped societal values over time. Comparisons between American and Scandinavian television shows will demonstrate the importance of studying TV in its respectful social context, while examining stylistics and aesthetic choices of the narrative.

Spring 2024: This year’s Third Year production module participants will design, construct, produce, market and perform a full-length play Diarmuid and Gráinne by Paul Mercier. Please note that this is a full 30 ECTS module which constitutes your entire coursework for the semester and that the devising/rehearsal process will be run as a professional theatre experience. The higher number of contact hours is because we are producing an outward-facing production for the University of Galway campus and wider Galway community as well as partnering with the University of Galway’s Arts in Action Programme.

In this course we will examine popular culture as a valid form of cultural expression, which is not only closely linked to our contemporary view of the world but also coincides with the rising of modern life styles in the 20th century, and complex philosophical questions of our time.

This unit provides an in-depth examination of Australian film and theatre, beginning in the colonial era and leading up to the present day, exploring the importance of theatre and film in the Australian cultural context. You will be exposed to exemplars of Australian film and theatre, and gain a deeper understanding of Australian culture, identity and contradictions. The unit involves mandatory excursions to two original Australian works for the stage, and will feature at least one guest lecture provided by a prominent member of Australian film or theatre industry. In this unit, you will be required to undertake a deconstruction and textual analysis of Australian films and theatrical works, in three take-home assessments only. There is no exam in this unit and as a result of the mandatory excursions, this unit has only eleven sessions as opposed to the regular thirteen sessions. In this unit of study, you will examine the nature of Australian theatre, film, and media in diverse cultural, social, and educational contexts. Because theatre, film, and media are significant and exciting components of Australian culture, your experience and analysis of specific performances, in the context of international forces impacting upon them, will help you to understand Australian society in a more complex way that includes multicultural dimensions. Through field trips to several live events, you will experience first-hand some examples of Australian cultural art forms. You will also view and critique Australian films currently being studied in Australian schools including films that deal with First Nations issues. For international students, in particular, this unit of study will provide valuable insights into Australian society and culture.

Digital Effects are increasingly important in screen arts production. This unit of study will equip you with a conceptual understanding and technical expertise in the use of digital effects for film and video projects. You will be introduced to the use of compositing software such as Adobe After Effects to explain how moving images can be transformed over time in combination with text, masks, animation, filters, effects, and sound. You will learn how to work with After Effects through an intensive series of tutorials, film/video screenings and practical studio workshops, and use this knowledge and skills to complete a substantial creative project.

British television today is more prominent internationally than ever before. Indeed, many Americans today are bigger fans of series like Sherlock, Downton Abbey, Top Gear, Black Mirror, Planet Earth, Peaky Blinders, The Crown, and Catastrophe as they are of anything on NBC. What's behind the popularity of such shows and their global circulation? How does commercial success affect the public service orientation of outlets like the BBC? Through watching recent British TV programs and covering the economic and cultural contexts behind their creation, this course will explore the state of British television at a time when many traditional practices are transforming due to new digital platforms like Netflix and new competitive pressures are being brought to bear on the world's most influential public service television system.

This course will explore the impact of digital technology on the production and consumption of film and other image based media. Through task-based learning, students will be asked to consider the impact of digital media on our relationship to the world which we inhabit.

This course will provide students with an understanding of our contemporary media environment, with attention to both Irish and international examples. Students will learn about the operation of the media industries, and will gain the ability to critically assess both media texts and the structures that shape them. In the first section of the module students will explore the structure of the mass media, and the social context within which they operate. In the second part, students will acquire skills in critically assessing media and film texts - including in terms of gender, sport and race - and the structures that shape them. Core readings for the module will be available online through the library reading list service and on Blackboard. The materials studied in the module include a number of cinematic works, which will be made available to students in the James Hardiman Library DVD collection or through links to relevant online sources. These will include The Wire, Season 1, Episode 1, Invincible (Ericson Core, 2006), Clash of the Ash (1987), Do the Right Thing (1989) amongst others. Lectures on this material will be predicated on students being familiar with the work discussed.

In this course the connections between different cinemas within East Asia and between East Asia and the rest of the world will be explored from a genre perspective.

This experiential project-oriented music and video technology course will provide hands-on experiences in creating music videos and movie/game trailers by creatively remixing music, recutting video, and applying effects such as time and frequency distortion, time warping, reverse, filtering, and phasing. Students will create music remixes, music/video/actor mashups, and plot twists in their music video storytelling. It will give students a chance to work with emerging video technologies such as deepfakes. Whether students have music or video background or not, this course will provide them a chance to create like a sound designer and director. For each of their music video creations, students will also create a behind-the-scenes commentary video that describes what they did and how they did it. They will share their creations and commentaries in class, and learn from and be inspired by one another.

This course examines how memory is represented and dissected through Anglophone dramaturgies from the second half of the 20th century, exploring the role of individual or collective memory within an Anglophone corpus. Includes works by Samuel Beckett, Suzan Lori Parks, Anna Deavere Smith, and from the companies Headlong and Complicite. It dives into postmodernist and postcolonial issues relevant to contemporary theatre.

In this class, we are studying writers' rooms in TV shows. We will compare creativity with economic limits. We are using American TV shows as examples. And we are work in groups to create a series' bible. The goal is to test different writers' room models.

Explore the transformative waves of feminist cinema. Delve into the liberation of woman's voices within the film industry, which remains predominantly male-controlled. Study the roots of feminist film theory and its key concepts, analyze the cinema of the 1970s, and examine the portrayal of female characters. This course offers a critical lens on the evolution and impact of feminist approaches in the cinematic landscape.

Working in conjunction with Fighting Irish Digital Media and the website UND.com, students will learn the many aspects of producing content for an internet based television network. From the beginning idea to the final upload, this is a creative hands-on production course with students writing, shooting, and editing digital media pieces for an online audience. In addition, as part of a live broadcast production team during numerous Notre Dame sporting events throughout the semester, students will also learn the many techniques used in multi- camera television production.

Taught as CO121 - 'Introduction to Screen Production' at a host institution. This course introduces students to the basic skills and theories required in the production of film and television. Students will research, write, shoot and edit short videos using the latest digital technology. This unit provides an excellent foundation to students who wish to pursue a specialisation in screen production.

This module will develop students understating of how silent-era, classical and post-classical Hollywood has developed as an industry, balancing the twin demands of creativity and commerce. The module will encourage students to analyse how Hollywood works as an industry, the kind of films it produces, and the ways in which they are consumed by domestic and global audiences. Students will engage with a variety of Hollywood cinema and be introduced to a range of theories and approaches for analysing how they are produced and consumed.

This module approaches the history of television from an institutional, formal and cultural perspective. In examining the inception of television broadcasting in the UK and the USA, students will encounter concepts such as the 'public service' ethos that characterised the former, and the commercial prioritisation marking the latter, and, as the module progresses note the adjustment of such positioning over time through comparative assessment. The history of television in Ireland will also be established within these conceptual parameters. In addition to tracing television from its origins to the 'post-network' age, students will also consider the future of television, examining emerging models of television distribution such as 'on demand' broadcasting, and consider the implications new providers such as Netflix have for established television channels as well as the impact of new media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube on older formats.

What is television's fate in the global digital cultures of convergence? The course examines new industrial configurations, the new programming, promotional and advertising strategies within the industry, the development of new global production and distribution strategies and models as well as how these transformations shape actual program content.

The course aims to explain the biological process of reading images in communication. Likewise, it aims to assess the importance of human perceptible structure in the communication processes of the visual communication area, incorporating organizational criteria such as meaningful language. The objectives include: knowing and relating the set of theories about human visual perception, with the purpose of understanding the biological process of reading images in visual communication. 2. To increase reading capacity from a basic audiovisual audience level to a level of conscious and critical reading. 3. To recognize visual phenomena and their conceptual and formal implications in visual communication projects. 4. To use knowledge of the visual perceptual process as tools for creative proposition. 5. To value the importance of human perceptible structure in the communication processes of the visual communication area, incorporating organizational criteria such as meaningful language.

In this course, students will develop tools to effectively relate to the press in a future professional context. To achieve this, the course will analyze the operation of both traditional media print, radio, and television and online media from a journalistic perspective. Through the analysis of cases and exercises in class, the student will be able to understand their work dynamics and the modes of relationship between media and sources.

This is a class to introduce Korean contemporary films and relevant societal discourses during a semester. Students are expected to learn about, after the semester, first, the role of film/moving images in contemporary society, second, the rhetoric of visual media in broader context, and lastly, Korean contemporary films in more concrete realm. By writing critiques on each subjects as well as sharing in class time, students will experience to try to challenge the feelings and thoughts of their own, to broaden the knowledge and deepen the insight on film media.

This course is an introduction to current theories and topics in media studies and theory. Students will explore the varied cultural, social and political implications of media forms that circulate in contemporary society. We will investigate how representations of race, sexuality and social categories enter into relation with media production and circulation across time and space. IC - Co. Galway, Ireland: This class mainly focuses on analyzing contemporary issues in television and digital media, which is perfect for me as I am an FTT major with a Television focus. It specifically focuses on subjects like how public service broadcasting, streaming platforms, and media regulation shape the production, funding, and distribution of audiovisual content in Ireland and the European Union, and also comparing it to America. The main point of the course is to think about where the future of television and media production is going with all of the recent changes in the world.

Students who are offered an unpaid internship by a media or entertainment company must register into this course to receive the required course credit. The course can be taken for 3 credits only once; subsequent internships can count for 1 credit. For three credits, interns must work 10-15 hours per week and compile 150 work hours by the end of the semester (or at least 120 hours for the summer session). All interns will complete a mid-semester progress report and a final evaluation paper, and 3-credit interns must complete an additional academic project. Contact the FTT Internship Coordinator to receive department approval to register or if you have questions about how to find an internship opportunity.

This course is for students who have been approved to take a one-credit internship graded in the Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory mode, including those students undertaking a remote coverage internship. Note: This course does not count toward elective credit for the FTT major.

It's commonly said that there is no set path to a career in the media and entertainment industries the way there is a path to working in, say, accountancy, law, or medicine. But a more accurate description would be that there are many paths because there are so many different jobs one could pursue in film and television, and each can have multiple routes of getting there. There are also arguably more paths than ever before due to technological transformations in the entertainment industry, from digital distribution to DIY production, as well as more interconnected pathways to adjacent industries like music and gaming. But this in turn can make it even more challenging for students to understand not only what paths they can do down but even what jobs exist at the end of those paths and what interests and skills they call for. This class is about helping students learn about paths to the entertainment industry through conversations with industry guests, primarily Notre Dame alumni. This version of the Paths to the Entertainment Industry class will focus on specific jobs in media and entertainment and how they’re evolving in a time of instability and even crisis in some sectors of the industry. Through conversations moderated by Dorothy Kozak Snoke, Career Development Regional Engagement Associate for Southern California, guest speakers will explain their roles in the industry, outline how they’ve changed as the industry itself has transformed in recent years, and propose steps students can take today to join their ranks tomorrow. Students enrolled in the class will be charged with preparing questions for speakers, taking notes during speaker sessions, and adding to a database of Paths to the Entertainment Industry resources that is made available to future generations of students for career discernment and development. Topics and job areas covered in the class may include: development, distribution, marketing, representation (agents and managers), live production, independent and studio production, production outside of LA and NYC, assistants, global media, AI, animation, acting, gaming, music, and brand partnerships.

Advanced production practicum in collaboration with Notre Dame Studios.

The Film Society is a film screening group that meets on Sunday nights in the Browning Cinema to watch an independent, international, or classic film. Students can take the course for either zero credit or one credit S/U. Those taking it for one credit will have a minimum attendance and writing requirement. Contact the sponsoring professor for more information.

In one of the very first films in the history of cinema by Louis Lumière (1895), we see employees leave a factory at the end of their work day. The workplace remains out of the frame. While symbolically going back to the factory, our class will explore examples of films that operate as a powerful telltale of the harsh nature of work and of the workplace environment. We will question our definitions of work and how cinema depicts its changing nature today. While the subject of "money" was featured in movies very early on, in recent history it is only around the late 1980s that we see the economy take center stage in cinematic creations. From social films revolving around the work place by the Dardenne brothers and Ken Loach, to countless movies about Wall Street, to movies describing the economic dynamics behind environmental crises, or films about white collar crime, and more, our class will explore the ways in which filmmakers have used an "unfilmable," complex and cinematically boring discipline in order to turn it into calls to action and entertainment. Call to action? Entertainment? These questions will lead our studies and discussions as making a film on the economy ultimately interrogates the very essence of cinema. This class will, in most parts, consist of seminar discussions (and oral presentations) (40%), lectures (40%), and possible group work activities (20%). Group work will mostly consist in designing video essays made by individuals but potentially elaborated in groups through group discussions (peer-to-peer) and peer-editing. Written assignments (one research paper) and one video essay, group work, oral presentations as well as active participation in our class will constitute the basic requirements.

This course will trace the evolution of "expanded textuality." We'll begin by investigating how serialized narrative emerged in the nineteenth century, focusing on how new delivery systems reached reading publics, and how new forms of story-telling emerged in the process. Once we've established that critical framework, we'll look closely at two interconnected phenomena -- quality television seriality and the conglomerate-driven multiversality which generates adaptations, re-boots, re-makes, sequels, prequels, fan fictions, adaptations, etc. Featured texts will likely include: Watchmen (both the graphic novel and the HBO series); The Many Saints of Newark and the ongoing Sopranos renaissance; No Time To Die and the history of Bond; Alcott, Armstrong, and Gerwig's Little Women; the Marvel Cinematic Universe (WandaVision, Black Widow, the new Hawkeye Disney + series, and maybe even Eternals), Jenkins' The Underground Railroad ... to be continued... Prerequisite: FTT 30455 or 30456

From martial arts blockbusters to extravagant expos to space-age cityscapes, countries in East and Southeast Asia have achieved worldwide renown both for their affinity for mega-events and as spectacular backdrops for filmed narratives, multinational gatherings, and global tourism. But what forces are at work in the creation and dissemination of such spectacle? To what ends and for whom are these spectacles designed? How do different spectators interact with and interpret them? And what resistance, if any, has there been to the seeming excess and superficiality of extravaganza and its attendant mass-mediated images? This course examines recent works of performance, visual art, and film from China, Taiwan, Japan, the Koreas, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines in relation to the politics of spectatorship and theories of spectacle. Covering a period roughly from the mid-20th century rise of the "society of the spectacle" to the present, we will ask how different forms of spectacle--still and moving, mediated and live--come to represent Asian nations and shape viewers' experiences of Asian cultures. Doing so will enable us to better understand the dynamics of seeing and being seen on a global scale, as well as to explore how alternative modes of performance, visual culture, and viewership engendered by Asian contexts challenge established power hierarchies and modes of audience engagement.

The intention of this course is to provide a collaborative space for students to create, develop and/or workshop a new musical. Throughout the process of creation we will explore how to collaborate as a creative team, including directors, writers, music directors, choreographers, actors and stage managers. This is an effort to allow class time to be rehearsal and development time for new artistic work. The hope of this class is to support the innovation of new work and prepare it for the possibility of heading towards production. - Please contact the instructor directly for approval to take the course.

A capstone of the Musical Theatre Minor is a 3-credit course. The capstone will be project based, and individually designed towards the student's interest. The specifics of the capstone will be agreed upon between the student and the instructor and ultimately approved by the instructor. The chosen topic for the capstone project is intended to reflect the student's interest in Musical Theater and how it relates to their studies in the Minor. See instructor for details. Departmental Approval is needed to register for this course.

This class is designed to support the innovation of new work, specifically musicals. The intention of this course is to 1) analyze existing musicals, such as Oklahoma, Gypsy, Fiddler On The Roof, Wicked and study their structures and overall dramatic narratives while 2) begin early stages of writing your own musical. This will involve partnering together new student composers, lyricists, book writers, dramaturgs, designers, etc. At the end of the semester there will be a pitch of the new musicals, generated from the different student groups in class, to the Creative Producer of the New Works Lab with the possibility of one of those musicals to be produced in the future. Contact instructor for approval and "make your case" why you should be granted permission to enroll in the class. (Matt Hawkins mhawkin2@nnd.edu). Book Required: The Secret Life of the American Musical by Jack Viertel

Camp. as an adjective, goes back at least to 1909. In its oldest sense, it was defined as "addicted to actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis, pleasantly ostentatious, or in manner affected.” But from 1920, in theatrical argot, camp connoted homosexual or lesbian and was in general use with that meaning by 1945. In 1964, Susan Sontag's famous "Notes on Camp" defined camp as a failed seriousness, a love of exaggeration and artifice, the privileging of style over content, and being alive to the double sense in which some things can be taken. Sontag aligned camp especially with gay male taste. Camp can be seen both as a mode of performance – camping it up-- and as a way of seeing things and spectatorship – camp as being in the eye of the beholder. This class will consider theories of camp by Sontag and others; camp performance by Mae West, Judy Garland, Madonna, and others; camp spectatorship of horror films, musicals, and more. WE will consider gay male camp, feminist camp, lesbian camp, the mainstreaming of camp, and the meaning of camp today. This is a one credit course that can be taken as satisfactory/unsatisfactory or for a standard letter grade. Course will meet one day a week for 8 weeks.

This interdisciplinary course utilizes performance studies, queer, and black feminist theories to investigate the performance of blackness in film, television, and theatre. We will interrogate blackness as a complex racial signifier that has been constructed and appropriated for a variety of reasons, including political galvanization. Although our case study begins with early European blackface performative practices, the bulk of our exploration focuses on contemporary performances of blackness in the United States. We will view a variety of performances, ranging from Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." to NBC's The Wiz Live!, in order to better understand why blackness, as a performative gesture, continues to matter. Assignments include: discussion prompts, a presentation, and final creative research project.

This course traces the development of African American musicals as they cross different social, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries. The course invites students to contextualize a variety of musical performance traditions - ranging from 19th c. blackface minstrelsy to today's television hip hop era Empire - through the lens of black feminist and queer theories. In so doing, students will engage in critical discussions about how individual artists, spectators and African American musical productions more broadly have signified, reaffirmed, and challenged dominant US society's understandings of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The course is divided into four units of study: "Early Black Musical Performance" reconsiders the contributions of black women minstrel and vaudeville performers; "Hollywood's Black-Cast Musical" explores mainstream representation of black folk culture in iconic films such as Carmen Jones and Show Boat; "New" Black Musicals of the 1970's considers revolutionary off-Broadway musicals and queer reimagining of the 1975 Broadway hit The Wiz; and "Contemporary Musical Performances" brings our discussion to the present with an exploration of gospel musicals on Broadway, hip hop era and Madea mania. Assessment includes: participation; leading a discussion of a film, play, or televised performance; and four short critical response papers.

Politics has always been theatrical, but perhaps nowhere has this been taken to such an extreme as in modern China. From the celebrity-like "cult of personality" surrounding Chairman Mao Zedong to student protests to performances like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China has been home to some of the most spectacular political displays of the last century. This course explores how and why political performance became such a prominent phenomenon in China, especially under the People's Republic (PRC), through two lines of inquiry. First, it examines how theatre and performance themselves have been used as political tools, both in support of and in protest against ruling regimes. Second, it looks at the ways in which political events such as mass rallies, show trials, and protests have taken on highly performative and theatrical qualities in the Chinese context. It considers cases that relate directly to state and Party politics, as well as to the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Through this course, students gain a deeper understanding of modern China, as well as the critical and theoretical tools necessary to analyze political theatre and theatrical politics in China and beyond. All readings in English or English translation. No prior study of China or Chinese language required.

Contemporary U.S. theater ought to value equity, diversity, and inclusion by more consistently producing works that reflect its culturally complex society. This course is designed to introduce students to theatrical texts by contemporary Latinx, African-American, Asian-American, and Native American playwrights. Many of these playwrights' works engage with a variety of cultural experiences that complicate definitions of U.S. society. This course will examine the trajectory of culturally inclusive U.S. theater from the late 20th century to the present. The course will also consider how U.S. regional theaters work toward greater equity by including diverse voices. Students will be expected to read plays and analyze them using methods provided. The course aims to provide students with tools for reflection to develop their own analytical and creative responses to contemporary U.S. theater.

Be in the room where it happens! Creating Theatre and Film as Social Action will prepare students to transform ideas, encounters, and convictions into vivid performative texts. Performers, writers, artists, composers and bold thinkers of kinds will investigate and apply techniques that have created some of the most exciting productions of the current decade as they devise and perform both solo and company-generated productions. Exercises and discussions lay the foundation for creative work as students experience the process of generating text, action, and image from initial inspiration to live performance or film. The class engages both the analytical and impulsive mind in world-building and storytelling as it explores diverse forms of expression. For the final project, students are expected to create a video essay, a multi-disciplinary performance, or a hitherto unseen new experience or happening.

The Big Lebowski. No Country for Old Men. Fargo. For over 35 years Joel and Ethan Coen - a. k. a. the Coen Bros. - have been busy crafting their own enigmatic and idiosyncratic oeuvre that incorporates slapstick comedy, Judaism, dark humor, pastiche, nihilism, irony, and the meaning of life. This upper-division seminar examines their creative filmmaking partnership by analyzing the majority of their Hollywood projects. In particular, we will deconstruct their narrative strategies by attending to their creative choices regarding editing, cinematography, lighting, mise-en-scène, etc., and we will examine their films? major thematic concerns. We will also discuss how their work complicates auteur theory and genre theory as theoretical frameworks for understanding film authorship that defies easy definition and categorization.

This course is an introduction to the theory and craft of writing a dramatic one-hour television series. The class explores how a one-hour series script is developed and written. Through lectures, show viewings, weekly analysis and script/show bible readings, students will learn the process of taking an original idea and growing it into a dramatic series concept, a script, and a show bible. Students will engage in class discussions on the merits and deficiencies of existing dramatic series scripts and corresponding viewings. Weekly written analyses will inform the production of students final 60-70 page original screenplays.

This undergraduate film seminar course will study East Asian cinema and its social and historical context mostly between the 1980s and early 2000s. We will focus primarily on three large topics/movements within East Asia: Slow Cinema, Neo-Noir, and contemporary short form film. Navigating the general arc of Trans-East Asian film history, we will learn to recognise the localized global through readings and films by prominent filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Wong Kar Wai, and Park Chan Wook, that define genres of East Asian film.

Independent or 'indie' film often refers to works produced or distributed outside the Hollywood studio system. By that definition, the Lord of the Rings trilogy are the most commercially successful independent films of all time. Many films labeled as indie are often low-budget productions that adhere to the narrative conventions of dominant cinema. This survey course will consider these intra-industry tensions and trace the development of American independent cinema from its early roots in neorealism to more contemporary hybrid forms. We will consider the role of technology in this (r)evolution including the impact of 16mm cameras, analog and digital video and iPhones. This course will also recognize indie film as a site for inclusion of underrepresented filmmakers including women and BIPOC artists.

Over the past decade or so, the question of how and when cinema was invented has been the subject of a renewed body of scholarly works. In a groundbreaking book, a prehistorian convincingly hypothesized that pre-cinematic objects and paintings already existed over 35,000 years ago; filmmaker Werner Herzog built his film about the prehistoric Chauvet cave around the notion that the paintings were animated depictions of dreams. In an age when the prospect of technological prosthetics acting at the neuronal level is no longer science fiction, we are also facing the possible opening of a new era in the history of how images are produced by our brains. In the meantime, Virtual Reality filmmaking could reach a turning point with AppleTV launching its first VR films. We will study pre-cinematic objects, watch films, do wet-plate photography and go to Paris during Fall break (TBC). Our class will wander on two distinct paths that will meet at some point: how was it necessary to envision time and space so that cinema could be invented? Is there such a thing as the rise of a post-cinematic world shaped by neuroscience and computer science, Virtual Reality, and AI? We will engage in practical experiments: I will invite students in workshops in which we will do early 19th Century photography and we have applied for funding to take available students to Paris during Fall break to visit places and museums to study pre-cinematic toys and devices. We will have a filmmaker working in VR to join our course. One oral presentation and a final essay are the two basic requirements for this course.

Visual Anthropology provides a powerful and engaging means of sharing historical and anthropological stories. This new course is based on the assumption that people think in terms of images, movement and sound and that film can be used to create powerful and important human narratives. This class is designed to train students in how to research, design, manage and produce short documentary film projects using both state of the art production equipment and accessible forms of media capture such as iPhones and GoPros. As a graduate/undergraduate elective, this course thematically focuses on understanding and documenting the historical, social, economic and personal stories centered on 19th through 20th century Indiana local barns, and placing these in a meaningful cultural and historical context. Students will work in teams of two to research an assigned farmstead, focusing on the barn as a material setting and documenting the past through the integration of historical research, oral history and digital video.Students will develop 2 minute videos for inclusion in a video book (as seen here https://islandplacesislandlives.com/) that touches on local history as well as a longer 8 minute video that explores the life, history and social context of the barn. The result will be a collaborative effort that creates a body of work by the class exploring local history and linking Anthropology with filmmaking to tell stories.

Following a production from selection to strike, we will explore the functions and duties of a stage manager. Students will learn about prompt books, performance etiquette, and documentation of a production. They will also create an operational manual for Film, Television, and Theatre Stage Managers.

This workshop focuses on the theory and craft of dramatic writing as it applies to feature screenplays. Through lectures, film viewing, and weekly exercises, emphasis is placed on plot and story structure, the adaptation of ideas into cinematic forms, how to tell a story with images, character, plot, and dialogue development. Students should come to class with 2 ideas for a feature script in hand and be prepared to develop one idea into the first half of a feature length screenplay (approximately 60 pages) at a minimum.

This workshop focuses on the theory and craft of comedic writing as it applies to original half-hour screenplays. Through lectures, film viewing, group projects and weekly exercises, emphasis is placed on plot and story structure and the intentionally comedic expression of student ideas. Students will explore classic half-hour comedy pilots (script and screen) with an eye towards identifying and evolving the concepts of comedic character development and story arcs. Students should come to class with an expectation to write frequently and collaboratively in order to create two original half-hour television episode scripts.

If, as John David Rhodes argues, “the detached single family home is one of the most powerful metonymic signifiers of American cultural life – of the dreams of privacy, enclosure, freedom, autonomy, independence, stability, and prosperity that animate national life in the United States,” that is not to say that then home in American cinema is by no means a simple or stable construct, but is, if anything, represented most often as troubled, precarious, invaded, porous, unstable, or out of reach. This class considers meanings of home in American cinema by looking at films that confront the problem of how to live in a home, offer alternate structures, and show the fantasy of home to be out of reach. The class will analyze films about unhoused figures during the Depression, housing shortages during World War II, the rise of modern homelessness in the 1980s, and contemporary precarity. We will consider fantasies of home related to family, class status, age, and race. We will consider the roles of banks, landlords, gentrification, and other institutions and structural causes of home insecurity and homelessness. Students will read various theories and histories of housing and homelessness to frame understanding of films. Students will write weekly one page reflections, an 8-10 page paper, and a 15 minute conference presentation.

Course Description: Asian theatre- and film-makers have produced some of the most innovative and exciting versions of Shakespeare's work. His strong presence in Asia also speaks to the histories and legacies of colonization and cultural imperialism. This course explores several well-known Shakespearean plays through the lens of Asian adaptation, rooted in both close reading of the plays themselves and the historical-cultural contexts of their adaptations. How, when, and why have specific Shakespearean plays captured the imaginations of Asian theatre artists and filmmakers? How have they transformed Shakepearean texts through translation, the use of local performance forms, new geographic and historical settings, and other techniques? How do these reimaginings rethink what "Shakespeare" might mean? By exploring such questions, students will gain a deeper understanding of Shakespeare, Asian theatre, and the complexities of their conjoining.

What does it mean to write the history of an emergent medium? Is radio a disembodied vaudeville stage show, and television simply radio with pictures? Is cinema an automated magic lantern show, a spectacular attraction, an animated novel... or something else entirely? What is a video game? What precedents and antecedents shaped these and other media, and what industries created them? And how do we write the histories of the vast audiences who mapped their own identities, anxieties, and desires onto them? This seminar begins by placing visual media historiography in a framework shaped by the critical history of technology, microhistory, and the development of social and cultural historiography. We will then explore a range of case studies that each foreground distinct theoretical and methodological challenges. We will address such issues as the productive tension between medium specificity and transmediation, histories of speculative or orphan media forms, the challenge of researching historical audiences and publics, everyday media practices and material culture, and the mediation of gender, race, and nationhood.

Based on focused research, creative work, and collaborative process, the trajectory of class work is the production of a new dramatic/theatre text within the framework of political burlesque, culminating in a public performance. The students will devise a performance of a BURLESQUE BALL where the invited guests, the most infamous dictators who have made the list, shall gather as the invited guests. In sinister jest and debate, they toast and boast, trying to outdo each other: who among them is the most effective in scheme and style, the most evil as dictator and warlord, has the better method as authoritarian strongman and fascist, warlord and ganglord, sinister clown and trickster, strongman and murderer, charismatic liar, adulterer and thief --- all that applies, to be elected by the audience, and crowned, "Emperor of the Ball." The students will delve into the analysis of documentary theatre texts and performance. They will engage with archival research into global narratives of comparative authoritarianism, global parallel histories of power, politics of torture, and impunity. They will recuperate personal narratives of dictators and fascists and process the movement from memory to national history --- or from history to forgetting and historical revisionism. The students will enrich their texts and evocations of their attitudes towards their subject, through inter-cultural contexts, historical objects, sounds, and the five senses), with the aim of providing multiple paths toward creating a vibrant and visceral new devised theatre piece. The course will also be interdisciplinary with intertextual elaborations through theatre, film, music, dance and movement, visual and performance art, international studies in political ruptures and transformations, global studies in obstructions to peace, humane development, and dignity of peoples. This course will be ideal for any student who desires to explore playwriting and performance, theatre and film, as tools to devise and stage compelling national and global issues, explore the creation of original theatre works that document historical events, contemporary community-based issues and social justice concerns.

Over the past decade, network television producers have reimagined the situation comedy with great success by utilizing mockumentary film techniques. This course will examine the ever-changing boundaries between fiction and non-fiction film and television by analyzing a series of works which question these discrete categorizations. We will consider canonical examples of documentary and the challenges posed to these known forms by pseudodocumentary and other media which reveal the devices used to establish cinematic realism. We will also explore a selection of film and television work which ascribes to realist modes of representation while subverting this approach. Issues such as testimony, performance, reflexivity, and ethics will be addressed in an effort to deepen the complex discourse of realism in visual media.

Shortly after Agnès Varda had passed away on March 29, 2019, the subject made the headlines during the Cannes film festival. In the footsteps of Varda, of Akerman, of Wertmüller and Denis, there is a "New Wave" of women filmmakers in Europe (for example, Maren Ade, Frederikke Aspöck, Ester Gould, Barbara Eder, Agnieszka Smoczyńska, Ines Tanovic, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Céline Sciamma, Mati Diop, Alice Winocour...). This "wave" is not only reshaping a whole cinematic tradition and language, it is also profoundly transforming a highly masculine and macho film industry, not to mention... European societies as a whole. We will analyze works, working conditions and modes of production while discussing the lasting impact of the recent feminist movements on the industry. This will offer a window to a European culture and society in which until recently, the word "feminist" had tended to be outmoded... I am a film and literary studies scholar and film director. Please note that one critical academic goal for this class is to develop a critical approach that will strongly revolve around production and creative techniques and styles. This class will, in most parts, consist of seminar discussions (30%), lectures (45%), and oral presentations (25%). Two written assignments (research paper), oral presentations as well as active participation in our class will constitute the basic requirements.

This course examines the evolution of U.S. scripted drama on small screens, tracing its lineage from the 1950s “Golden Age” to today’s mobile landscape. The class will chart how the aesthetic grammar of TV drama took shape in the network era, expanded in the multi-channel and post-network eras, and is currently being redefined by mobile devices and short-form digital fiction. Beyond the screen, we’ll analyze the shift from a television monoculture, where millions watched together, to a fragmented world of personalized, on-demand mobile viewing, assessing the effects of consuming dramatic forms through these different viewership modes. By analyzing formats ranging from the 60-minute broadcast hour to the 60-second vertical video, we will investigate what has changed and what has endured across the history of small-screen scripted drama in the U.S. Assignments may include a mix of exams, written assignments, and multimodal options, such as pitch decks and video essays.

This is a course on cinema, sovereignty and the resistance to oppression, especially in its visual forms (cinema, media, digital devices...). Dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes need images. They depend to a great degree on stories, legends, slogans and choreographies, on music and spectacles, on what I propose to call "sovereign performances" that perform sovereignty. Dictators stage their own actions and persona and their public appearances are always carefully organized in order to dominate the audiovisual field. In this context, it is not incidental that the age of cinema is also that of societal control, of the standardization and industrialization of masses, of the most criminal, dictatorial regimes on record that also lead to the industrial violence of repressive strategies. What is the relationship between cinema and power? How do cinematic techniques play a role in resisting, defying and destroying authoritarianism? This class will, in most parts, consist of seminar discussions (including Canvas discussions and oral presentations) (60%), and lectures (40%).

This course offers an introduction to some of the recent thinking and cultural phenomena on the Anthropocene. In order to do that, we will pay particular attention to contemporary Iberian Cinema, Cultural Critique, and Critical Theory. Although we will focus on contemporary Spain in particular, we will ultimately attempt to come to terms with our current geological and civilizational epoch as mainly humanly driven. For that purpose, under examination and question will be primitive accumulation and Capitalism, humanism and posthumanism, rural depopulation, consumerism, energy use, industrial relocation, technicity (social networks, smartphones, big data, Google, etc.); droughts, wildfires, human and planetary finitude, etc. We will ultimately seek to bear witness to the Anthropocene and its consequences through cinema, culture and thought, if such a thing is possible. Taught in English and Spanish

This course will examine connections between screen media and live performance from the mid-20th century to the present. It will be structured around three key ideas: adaptation, remediation, and intermediality. First, students will look at case studies of plays reworked for film and theories of adaptation. Next, we will examine films about the theatre, in order to understand how newer forms of media "remediate" older art forms and how that affects the relationship between the two. Finally, the course will conclude by looking at instances of intermediality wherein theatre artists incorporate projections, live video feed, and other forms of screen media onstage during their performances or use virtual platforms to perform. What different relationships are engendered by these various combinations of screen and stage? How do artists mobilize media in performance to achieve disparate aesthetic, political, social, and economic goals? And how do films and performances from different countries reflect culturally specific understandings of the relationship among technology, media, and art? This course will emphasize transnational and transmedia connections, while also introducing students to works of theatre and film from around the world. All course materials will be in English (or translated/subtitled in English) and no background knowledge necessary; FTT students may benefit from having completed their concentration core requirements before taking this course.

Color is not decoration. It is a narrative instrument as precise as dialogue, as expressive as performance, and as technically demanding as any craft in filmmaking. This course treats color and light as a unified system — one that begins the moment a lens points at a subject and ends only when a final graded frame reaches an audience's screen. Students move through the full arc of that journey: the physics and perception of light, the chemical and digital history of cinema's evolving palette, the craft of cinematography and lighting design, and the technical workflows of color grading and finishing. Weekly assignments draw from the full breadth of cinema history, while lab sessions give students hands-on time with industry-standard tools. Why does Amélie feel warm and whimsical while Parasite feels cold and suffocating? Why did the Coen Brothers drain all the color from No Country for Old Men? And what on earth is a LUT? This course answers all of these questions — and will ruin movies for you forever (in the best possible way).

How does a script become a film? This course explores the creative process of translating a narrative vision into a cinematic reality. Confidence on a film set comes from rigorous preparation. As such, this course offers a deep dive into the artistic workflows that help filmmakers maximize their time and creative output. By stepping into the shoes of key department heads, from director, cinematographer, production designer, editor to producer, students learn how to realize their voices into a singular vision. The course will examine these interconnected roles with a specialized focus on pre-production through hands-on practice and tools that will include shooting exercises, creating shotlists, storyboards, floorplans, line scripts, film budgets, call sheets and shooting schedules.

Through hands-­on, field experience and critical analysis, we will explore the tools and techniques used to produce professional video and digital cinema projects in all genres. We will explore the use of composition, cinematography, color and editing to create a narrative structure. This class will also provide you with a technical knowledge of the tools required in professional filmmaking including a variety of lighting and grip equipment, lenses, filters, light meters, etc. Using RED Digital Cinema RED Raven 4K cameras and various support tools you will produce, shoot and edit short projects or "challenges" including your final short 3-5min film. This will be a non-­‐dialogue driven film based with a post-­‐produced soundtrack. No other digital formats are to be used outside of what we utilize for this class. We will also discuss various filmmaking techniques and current industry topics, including film in relation to digital cinema and current workflows. Post Production will be done using Davinci Resolve.

A hands-on creative course for the advanced production student interested in the production process and storytelling techniques of the documentarian. Emphasizing the cinema verite approach of filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, and Frederick Wiseman, students learn the importance of capturing life's moments, being faithful to a subject, and understanding the filmmaker's point of view. The goal is to produce a short documentary film over the course of the semester which honestly portrays its subject(s), while at the same time, challenges its audience.

This Advanced Filmmaking course will allow you to take the foundation you experienced in Intermediate Filmmaking to a new level and create a dialogue film with an exacting attention to detail using the RED Raven DSMC2 cameras along with more advanced lighting, tools and techniques. We will explore the use of dialogue in crafting a short film story and how the visuals and sound can work together both technically and artistically. You will practice blocking actors and understanding and directing performance. Scripts will be chosen from the Writing the Short Film class. You may submit a script you have written from that class along with select scripts that are chosen by Prof Brown. We will then read and choose the scripts to be produced by the class in groups of three as a collaborative producing team. Films will be finished on Davinci Resolve with a better understanding of workflow and more advanced color grading. The primary goal is to create a collection of solid films as a class working as a small production studio.

Building on the concepts and techniques introduced in FTT 30416: 3D Digital Production for Animation and Video Games, this course delves deeper into the production and study of computer graphics and animation. In Advanced 3D Digital Production, you will explore advanced concepts such as complex object and character creation, digital sculpting and painting, keyframed and motion-captured character animation, and more. You will continue to master the industry-standard 3D application Autodesk Maya, as well as learn Autodesk's sculpting application, Mudbox. You will produce digital artifacts such as character models, virtual environments and props, and short animations that may be used in graduate school and industry job application portfolios. To help critically inform your creative production work, you will study the aesthetics, history, and cultural relevance of computer graphics and visual effects through a variety of reading, writing, and screening assignments.

Often uttered by a director or producer short on time, the dreaded phrase, “Fix it in Post” typically refers to a noticeable mistake on set that, instead of being corrected and reshot, is punted down the road for the post-production department to reconcile. In all reality, “Fix it in Post” refers to pretty much all of post-production, as it is the process of improving and enhancing picture, sound, and story. In this hands-on course we will tackle a wide range of intermediate and advanced post-production topics, such as: green screen and visual effects compositing, motion graphics and 3D title animation, color correction, masking and tracking, workflow optimization, multicam editing, enhancing sound and more. We will delve deeper into Adobe Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve, enter the world of Adobe After Effects, and also learn how to utilize Adobe Audition for our editing needs. Through it all we will examine how the choices an editor makes directly impacts the way the audience experiences the story, and we will learn how to craft effective moments ourselves.

What is the Palestine/Israel conflict about? How did it start? How might it be resolved? Some interpretations rely on claims of ancient hatreds. Others invoke sacred and biblical narratives as their authority for claims to a land deemed holy by many different religions. Still others underscore the ills and legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous accounts of historical presence. Some invoke international law and human rights to make their claims. This course will explore these arguments surrounding the Palestine/Israel conflict through screening and discussion of cinematic representation, narrative argument, and documentary films. Multiple genres provide powerful tools to introduce students to multiple perspectives, conceptions of history, experiences of injustice and grievances and loss, and imagining peace and justice. Each screening will be paired with relevant and interdisciplinary reading material. The students will emerge from this course with a detailed and complex understanding of the Palestine/Israel conflict from the present dating back to the late Ottoman period, the British control of historic Palestine, and the definitional moment of 1948 which is marked both as Israeli independence and the Palestinian catastrophe (the Nakba).

This course introduces students to critical analyses of girls' media culture. During the first half of the semester we will focus on constructions of girls and girlhood in intellectual theory, popular discourse, and media texts (particularly U.S. film and television), paying attention to shifts in such constructions as a result of sociohistorical contexts and the rise of feminist ideologies. The second half of the semester will be devoted to exploring the media and cultural practices of female youth, examining the expansion of girls' culture beyond consumer-oriented activities, such as magazine reading and music listening, to those involving media production, such as filmmaking and blogging. In addition to problematizing girls' sex and gender identity through intersectional explorations of age and generation, and vice versa, we will pay special attention to how issues of race, class, and sexuality impinge upon the formation of girls' identities, female youth cultures, and the representation of girlhood in popular culture.

This course explores the media culture of 1980s America. We will explore such topics as the rise of "high concept" blockbuster Hollywood, prime-time television at the peak of the broadcast network era, the emergence of Fox, the widespread adoption of cable television service, the development of the 24 hour news cycle, and media industry consolidation. In addition to studying these dominant industry practices and media forms, we will also explore such secondary and alternative media cultures as independent cinema, music subcultures, and video games. Our emphasis throughout will be on the interplay between shifting technologies, industrial modes of production and distribution, and cultural practices.

The Walt Disney Company has a long history of adapting literary works for the screen, beginning with Snow White, The Reluctant Dragon, Bambi and Cinderella. Since the 1990s, however, the company has expanded its adaptations beyond "page to screen" to move into transmedia adaptations that extend narratives from literature into animated and live action films, theatrical productions, television, theme park rides and streamed serial narratives. This class will examine the trajectory of Disney's approach to adaptation, beginning with the earliest page to screen productions and extending into more recent reworkings such as literature to film to theatre (Mary Poppins and Frozen); literature to film to theater to live action (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King); literature to film to live action to theme park attraction (Jungle Book, Mulan) and film to novelization to streamed serial (Star Wars and The Mandalorian). We will pay particular attention to the transmedia journey of Dodie Smith's 101 Dalmatians from magazine serial to novel to animated and live action films, to a UK and Canadian television series, and most recently a prequel story in Cruella. Film analysis will be informed by readings in adaptation theory, transmedia studies, and musical theory.

Adaptation is designed to engage students in exploring playwriting and screenwriting approaches to adapt existing texts (i.e. historical or contemporary fiction and non-fiction). The course will delve into analyzing adaptations in theatre, film and television with the aim to present a variety of paths toward creating new, vibrant plays, screenplays and teleplays. Culminating projects will include several short adaptation scripts and the start of a full-length adaptation. Adaptation is for students who have completed at least one playwriting or screenwriting course.

This course explores how video has evolved over time. Starting with the magic lantern, we will study the early models preceding the slide and digital projector, and survey the history of video art since its birth. From the 1960s to now, video art has flourished over its relatively short history. We will look at prominent works from the span of six decades, including contemporary examples of video art and multimedia works by artists who traverse mediums of moving image, photography, and installation. The class includes a hands-on component to make versions of the early “projectors” and video responses. There will also be visiting presentations over the semester from media artists working in the contemporary field.

From Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Red Dawn, this course explores the popular media of the Cold War. The course explores the interconnections between film and television, popular music, foreign and domestic policy, and US social movements. Topics include anti-communism, the Red Scare, invasion films, sub-urbanization and domestic "containment culture", anxieties about the nuclear bomb, Beats and the counter-culture, the civil rights and women's movements, and youth culture. The course centers on the ways in which the Cold War was experienced culturally, with particular attention to its impact on everyday cultural practices and identities.

This seminar examines Alfred Hitchcock, the director of 64 films and many television programs, whose career spanned the silent era of the 1920s through the 1970s, and who became a transmedia icon and brand. We will analyze the themes, visual elements, character types, and narrative structures that recur in his films; consider the role of collaborators such as writers, actors, and composers; and study the directors and film styles that influenced him and his influence on other directors. We will apply various methodologies to our study including the auteur theory, psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, semiotics, queer theory, critical race studies, genre theory, theories of cinematic space, theories of adaptation and more.

This course focuses on critical analyses of identities in media culture. Taking a cultural studies approach, we will interrogate theories and popular discourses of identity while exploring how particular identities are constructed, negotiated, resisted, and transformed within media culture. Our primary questions in this course are: What is identity? How do our identities inform our various relationships to media culture? And, how does media culture impact the construction of our identities? Our particular sites of analysis will be media representation (narrative, performance, aesthetics), media production (industries and political economy), and media consumption (reception practices and audiences). We will examine a broad array of media forms, including film, television, the Internet, games, and popular music. Traditional demographic identities, such as gender, age, race, sexuality, and class, will be central to the course, although other identities, including geographic and lifestyle identities, will be examined also. We will strive toward critical analyses that understand identities as constructed, not inherent, and intersectional, not autonomous.

This course explores the history of Italian film from the silent era to the 1960s, an epoch stretching from Francesca Bertini's Assunta Spina to Federico Fellini's La dolce vita. At the center of this period is the age of Italian neorealism, when directors such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti invented new ways of looking at the world that radically transformed the history of world cinema. Focusing their attention on issues and individuals that had gone unseen in Fascist and post-Fascist Italy, the neorealists challenged established norms by making the experiences of ordinary Italians increasingly visible, developing techniques for representing reality that continue to influence filmmakers across the globe. We will analyze how questions of class, faith, gender, identity, and ideology intersect on screen as Italian directors explore and attempt to intervene in a rapidly transforming modern world. With a filmography featuring both masterpieces of world cinema and cult classics, this course will investigate how the quest to capture reality reshaped every genre of Italian film, including action & adventure, comedy, crime, documentary, melodrama, mystery, thriller and more. The course is taught in English and all films will have English subtitles.

This course begins in the 1960s, when Italy stood at the center of the film world, and traces the history of Italian cinema to the present day. We will focus on the heyday of Italian auteurs – Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini – examining how each brought a singular vision to the collective medium of cinema. Working against the hegemony of Hollywood, Italian filmmakers in the twentieth century created new forms of representation that inspired audiences worldwide. They continue to do so in the new millennium, building on the innovations of illustrious predecessors like Bertolucci and Pontecorvo, Wertmüller and Cavani to reveal new realities to moviegoers across the globe. We will analyze how questions of class, faith, gender, identity, and ideology intersect on screen as Italian directors seek both to expose and to recreate the illusions by which we live. With a filmography featuring both masterpieces of world cinema and cult classics, this course will investigate how pioneering Italian directors reshaped every genre of film, including action & adventure, comedy, crime, documentary, melodrama, mystery, thriller, horror, and more. The course is taught in English and all films will have English subtitles.

This interdisciplinary course examines the historiography of the Black Power and Black Arts movements of the sixties and seventies. The poet and theorist Larry Neal defined the Black Arts Movement as “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept,” encouraging artists to use their work to celebrate Black art and confront contradictions within Western society. The Black Arts Movement encompassed all areas of Black cultural expression—from poetry, art, dance, and music to theatre, film, and television. As historiographers, we will approach the Black Power and Black Arts movements as a sequence of debates, rather than a consistent or monolithic practice. We will investigate how artists, theorists, and activists of the sixties and seventies fostered competing definitions of Black power, yet shared an unwavering commitment to the struggle for Black liberation. Throughout the course, we will focus on the following questions: • What were major aims, organizations, and critical debates within the Black Power movement? • Who were the key figures and lesser-known (today) individuals who furthered Black cultural and political thought of the sixties and seventies? • How did Black women artists and activists amplify, complicate, and/or critique the prevailing notions of Black Power? • What relationship did the Black Power and Black Arts movements have with the rise of the women’s liberation movement and Black feminist drama? • What relevance, if any, does the Black Power struggle of the past have to today’s fight for Black Lives? In so doing, we will explore various articulations of “Black power,” “self-determination” and “nationhood”; engage with critical approaches to the “Black aesthetic”; and consider the role of intersectionality within Black Power discourse.

This course explores the phenomenon of Shakespeare in the cinema/movie theatre, examining ‘Shakespeare and film' by concentrating on the meanings provoked by the "and" that joins the terms. We shall be looking at examples of films of Shakespeare plays both early and recent, both in English and in other languages, and both ones that stick close to conventional concepts of how to film Shakespeare and adaptations at varying degrees of distance from his language, time, plot, reaching a limit in versions that erase Shakespeare from the film. We will also be looking at the recent phenomenon of "Live from" broadcasts of live theatre to movie audiences. The transposition of different forms of Shakespearean texts (printed, theatrical, filmic) and the confrontation with the specificities of film production have produced and continue to produce a phenomenon whose cultural meanings will be the subject of our investigations. There will be screenings of the films to be studied in the Browning Cinema.

This is an introductory course to directing actors for film and TV. You will acquire various tools and methods of directing to create authentic and nuanced performances for the camera. You will learn how to work and communicate with actors to get the best, most believable acting on screen; how to stage and choreograph blocking with regards to camera and how to react and fix problems in a fast and efficient way on set. As such, you will have an opportunity to be both in front of and behind the camera to better understand the specificities and requirements of on-camera acting. You will get a chance to direct scenes of various complexity to practice these tools in a simulated set environment.

Soon after modern printing technology was introduced by western missionaries in the 19 th century, China developed an exciting new culture characterized by tremendous creativity and productivity, enthusiastic experimentation with media technologies, high-speed interaction between creators and users, and countless unique ways of mixing textual and visual material. Ranging from the pictorial magazines of the early twentieth century to the Internet sites of the early twenty-first century, China’s modern culture has expressed and engaged with massive historical, social, and political changes, captured in writing and in images. This course takes students on a whirlwind tour of modern Chinese cultural expression in newspapers, magazines, posters, films, TV shows, websites, and social media, using original visual materials in addition to readings in English translation. The aim is to provide students with a comprehensive overview of the main developments in modern Chinese culture, while training their ability to analyse different types of cultural products. At the end of the course, students will have produced their own blog site, using visual and textual material to express their own critical opinions on the materials we studied.

This course introduces contemporary cinemas of mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan by focusing on a selection of internationally acclaimed Chinese films. In addition to examining cultural background, narrative themes and cinematic technique of the films, we will be exploring how these selected films response to fundamental issues such as history, gender, identity, memory, social justice, nationalism, and globalization. The goals of the course are to introduce students to major films and directors in contemporary China, to learn Chinese culture, value and history through films, and to refine students' abilities to analyze and write about film critically. All readings are in English, no prior knowledge of Chinese language or culture is required. All films selected for the course have English subtitles.

In “South Bend Stories” students will produce reported narratives across a variety of nonfiction genres, including prose writing and documentary filmmaking. This course draws its inspiration and subject matter from the city of South Bend and the greater Michiana region, as you will work with classmates and community partners to tell stories of local interest and significance. Topics may include close-up looks at a wide range of ideas—family, sport, education, history, etc.—but the ultimate goal is to describe real-world truth at the “felt-life level,” revealing something of what it means to be alive in this particular time and place. We wish to highlight the daily lives, cultural events, natural and built spaces, and social issues of South Bend. Projects are collaborative, with students working in teams. With guidance, you will look for stories, request access and permission to tell those stories, and gather material en route to crafting meaningful narratives. Each group will produce several different stories, though subjects and forms will often converse with one another. For instance, storytelling teams may create short moving-image documentaries, works of prose journalism, photo essays, audio narratives, creative nonfiction essays, or more avant-garde documentary projects, etc. The class will interrogate the boundaries between subgenres of these factual artforms. Students will decide which types of stories they will produce. Telling others’ stories is a profoundly ethical act. It is also a creative process that allows us to grow as individuals and as a community. This challenging process demands your respect and your time as a media-maker. The class will regularly engage in discussions about media ethics and accountability, in the traditions of journalism and documentary filmmaking courses. Students must be prepared to use resources to travel beyond campus and engage with people who are not students and may not be affiliated with the university. Additionally, you must act ethically as a storyteller and collaborator. Further, you must solve a range of challenges—conceptual, logistical, and narratological—while being prepared to spend time with your subjects outside of class time and often according to others’ schedules.

Wherever we place it in the pantheon of great plays and in spite of Tolstoy's loathing of it, King Lear is a very extraordinary play. This course will explore its extraordinariness by concentrating on it unremittingly. It will do so in two steps. For the first half of the semester we will slow-read the play together, thinking about anything and, insofar as we can, everything that it provokes us to investigate, from Shakespeare's sources to early stagings and revisions, from its views on power, gender and the spiritual to its verse and vocabulary, and so on and on. In the second half of the semester we will engage with the play in performance and reimaginings through film versions and a variety of adaptations from Nahum Tate to Jane Smiley and beyond.

Ever since Nora Helmer walked out on her husband and slammed the door in Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House, modern drama has been closely connected with the struggles to redefine gender and sexuality that have shaped the twentieth and twenty-first century. In this course, we will look at how this story plays out on the American stage, as we examine the works of American playwrights who have participated in the many long-running debates about gender and sexuality in modern and contemporary America. We will read both canonical American playwrights - Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, etc. - and a variety of contemporary American playwrights, including but not necessarily limited to Maria Irene Fornes, Tony Kushner, Sara Ruhl, and Susan Lori-Parks.

Preparation for acting professionally and/or the advanced study of acting, directing and performance. A course of study is developed between the student and the faculty advisor(s) at the beginning of the semester. Students who are interested in taking this course but are not FTT majors should consult the instructor. Senior Acting majors only. Offered fall only.

In this course we'll explore how smart-phones, ereaders, tablets, and laptops have changed the ways we engage films, television series, books, music, museums, and videos. We'll focus on how the production of art and entertainment is now shaped by the omnipresence of devices which can function, at any given moment, as personal stereos, movie screens, bookstores, TV sets, cameras, or photo-archives. How does that media adjacency within the box impact the relationship between what used to be distinct media but are now transmediated endlessly, for fun and profit. How has curation - practiced by artists, conglomerates, and amateur fans -- become a supra-medium which subsumes watching, reading, listening, and taking pictures into one of the most widely practiced forms of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century? How do we sort out the complicated interplay between media technology, consumerism, and identity formation in those devices? Featured phenomena: Recommendation mania and the listverse, The Song of Achilles and BookTok, the photos in your smart-phone, Wes Anderson and Accidentally Wes Anderson, Lost Children Archive, Questlove, algorithm culture, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, COVID and the "Make Yourself a Masterpiece" craze, WandaVision, playlisting as a way of life (not just a list of songs), The Carters "Apeshit" video, JR's La Ferita...

This class will allow each student the opportunity to conduct in-depth historic fashion research into various periods from the Greeks to the 1960's. Students will express their research in written essays, oral presentations, or creative projects.

The second course in the acting progression, this course expands on basic methodology and incorporates physical techniques for building a character. Students explore psychological gestures, Laban effort shapes, and improvisation as they develop a personal approach to creating a role.

Lab for FTT 40045 The Coen Brothers

This is the lab/screening for FTT 40052, East Asian Cinema

Independent or 'indie' film often refers to works produced or distributed outside the Hollywood studio system. By that definition, the Lord of the Rings trilogy are the most commercially successful independent films of all time. Many films labeled as indie are often low-budget productions that adhere to the narrative conventions of dominant cinema. This survey course will consider these intra-industry tensions and trace the development of American independent cinema from its early roots in neorealism to more contemporary hybrid forms. We will consider the role of technology in this (r)evolution including the impact of 16mm cameras, analog and digital video and iPhones. This course will also recognize indie film as a site for inclusion of underrepresented filmmakers including women and BIPOC artists.

Lab/Screening for FTT 40126 Home/Homelessness in US Cinema

Lab/Screening to 40257 Documentary: Fact or Fiction?

A continuation of the course for the advanced production student interested in the techniques and technology of the video post production world and the digital manipulation of the moving image. Students will produce short projects using the DVCam tape format, while learning advanced non-linear editing techniques with the Avid Xpress DV software, incorporating Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator and After Effects programs, and digital multi-track audio sweetening with DigiDesign Pro Tools.

Certain films will be viewed for further discussion in class.

Lab / Screening with Cold War Media Culture FTT 40469

This seminar examines Alfred Hitchcock, the director of 64 films and many television programs, whose career spanned the silent era of the 1920s through the 1970s, and who became a transmedia icon and brand. We will analyze the themes, visual elements, character types, and narrative structures that recur in his films; consider the role of collaborators such as writers, actors, and composers; and study the directors and film styles that influenced him and his influence on other directors. We will apply various methodologies to our study including the auteur theory, psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, semiotics, queer theory, critical race studies, genre theory, theories of cinematic space and more.

Lab screening for FTT 40502

Certain films will be viewed for further discussion in class.

Preparation for advanced study of acting. A course of study for the semester is developed between the student and a faculty advisor or advisors (selected on the basis of goals established at the beginning of the course). Students who will be taking this course should consult with the instructor during the spring pre-registration period in order to preliminary discuss future goals.

This course will explore how music and sound have become central to modern multi-media. While our main focus will be on movies (ranging from classical to contemporary cinema, presented in mandatory weekly screenings), we will also explore the role of music and sound more broadly from advertisements to video-games; from music videos to TikTok clips; from ambient sound in retail spaces to personalized playlists. In doing so, readings will cover various topics and issues aesthetic and psychological (such as representation, narration, emotion); social and political (such as race, ethnicity, propaganda); cultural and economic (such as production, technology, dissemination), and music-analytical (such as style, syntax, harmony, topoi, genre). Course work will include discussion posts, position papers, and a capstone research project that may involve creative work.

A writing workshop for those students approved for a senior thesis.

This course examines theories and practices of camp. Camp has been described as a sensibility, an aesthetics, a mode of performance, and a mode of spectatorship and consumption. Camp embraces artifice, exaggeration, theatricality, and irony. Initially described as exclusively a gay male practice, theorists have since analyzed forms of “straight” camp, feminist camp, lesbian camp, Black camp, and more. What is camp? To whom does camp belong, and how do different demographics use it? Does camp have a politics? How has the meaning and import of camp changed over time? Is camp still necessary? This interdisciplinary seminar will read essays and books on camp by Susan Sontag, Jack Babuscio, Richard Dyer, Pamela Robertson, Barbara Brickman, Quinn Miller, AJ Christian, and many others. We will consider camp in literary texts by Oscar Wilde, Christopher Isherwood, and Jacqueline Susann. We will consider camp in painting and photography, including historical styles such as Mannerism, and contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barkley Hendricks, and others. We will consider camp in relation to drag. We will consider camp films by Douglas Sirk and Busby Berkeley, films starring Mae West and Joan Crawford; and certain genres such as the musical and horror; camp TV such as Bewitched; and camp stars such as Lady Gaga and Beyonce. Students from all disciplines are welcome; no prior knowledge of camp is expected.

Only by prior permission of the Program. Application required early in the semester prior to departure for London.

The contemporary theatrical landscape in Great Britain reflects a country questioning its rich yet problematic history that many see as a long overdue opportunity to bring diversity to stages across the nation. This course introduces students to historically marginalised voices in British theatre, including those from countries colonised through the pursuit of empire, from the confines of the class system and from the margins of "normative" culture. Students will engage with people, places and plays that individually and collectively seek to navigate the past, present and future of theatre in the United Kingdom. The course combines readings and in-class discussions with practical explorations of live performances in and around the city. Students will be able to apply different critical lenses to their theatrical experiences not only to analyse the form and content of a given work, but also to reflect on how underrepresented voices locate themselves in the context of art and society in Great Britain.

The module will examine America in the 1980s. It will look at youth culture, post-Vietnam revisionism and the remasculinization of America, yuppie culture, and the impact of AIDS. Core factors of study in this module are the effects of both New Right morality upon the American socio cultural landscape, and Ronald Reagan as postmodern president administrating to a celluloid America of his own fantastic imagining. Overall, the module will offer the chance to analyse the tensions and contradictions of the decade as they were played out in both the content and structure of contemporary American film.

This team-taught course is in two parts. The first half of the semester will introduce the students to the close study of a range of Shakespeare's plays. It aims at achieving a deeper understanding of the nature of the Elizabethan stage, the significance of Shakespeare's use of the genres of history and comedy, the moral, social and political issues within the plays, and the use of language. Whilst the course seeks to place the Shakespearean text in its historical context, it will also explore the question why and how Shakespeare is relevant to us today through the analysis of contemporary performance. Thus, students will also experience plays in the theatre and be encouraged to take an active position vis-à-vis each performance by analysing it and writing reviews. The plays studied are chosen to parallel current productions of Shakespeare's plays in London. Film versions will also be used in a limited number of cases. The second half of the course is based at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and will offer students an opportunity to work practically on Shakespeare text, exploring Shakespeare's language, his use of prose and poetry, rhythm and metre, soliloquies etc. Students will have the opportunity to work on the stage of the new Globe Theatre under a professional director to discover how the plays were influenced by the architecture of the Globe and the actors' relationship with their audience. The course will culminate with a presentation by the participants of scenes on stage at the Globe in front of the whole student body. The course is limited to 14 places, and although open to all students, preference will be given to FTT majors and those with acting experience.

Students who successfully complete at least two of the following courses, FTT 30410, FTT 30462 or FTT 30463, may be eligible for an internship at a television station or network, radio station, video production company, film production company or similar media outlet. Interns must work 10-15 hours per week and compile 150 work hours by the end of the semester (120 hours for the summer session) to obtain three credits. Interns will complete a project, mid-semester progress report and a final evaluation paper. NOTE: This course does not count as an upper level course toward the FTT major.

This course introduces the advanced Acting student to various methods of Acting training. In addition to directed readings, the student serves as the teaching assistant for Acting: Process or Acting: Character under the supervision of the instructor. The student is expected to attend all class meetings and supervise weekly rehearsals outside of class.

This course provides students with an opportunity to explore readings and research as directed by an assigned faculty member in the department. It is offered by arrangement with individual instructors.

This course introduces the advanced theatre student to mentorship opportunities in creative work. The student serves as the teaching assistant for a creative theatre course under the supervision of the instructor. The student is expected to attend all class meetings and supervise weekly rehearsals/readings outside of class.

This course gives students an opportunity to conduct research and is intended for advanced students. Application and permission of the individual instructor is required. Application may be obtained from the departmental website at http://ftt.nd.edu/ or by visiting the FTT departmental office.

Research and/or thesis development for the advanced student.

Second semester thesis completion for writing intensive thesis projects.