This course will engage and explore robotic and virtual servants and assistants in film, television, and commercial advertisements from the 20th and 21st centuries. 

This course will engage and explore robotic and virtual servants and assistants in film, television, and commercial advertisements from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Play video games for credit this summer! In this course, you'll learn the history of video games by playing retro game systems in class. You'll discuss the academic approaches to studying games, as well as the role of race, gender, and sexuality in gaming culture. You'll learn how game technology works, and complete an activity in which the class collectively builds its own video game controller. You will also learn to make your own simple video games using Scratch, Twine, and other software--no experience required!

Introduction to authorship in the cinema. The work of a major director or directors.

Approaches film and related media as socially and politically engaged practice, with focus on screen media produced or received in "opposition" to dominant cultural and entertainment industry norms. Topics vary.

This course will provide an introduction to classical Hollywood cinema through the work of several key filmmakers, beginning with the golden age of the studio system in the 1930s and 1940s and extending up to the New Hollywood of the 1960s. We will consider the role of directors in a mature studio system marked by an industrialized and collaborative approach to filmmaking. At once ruthlessly efficient and innovative, both liberating and stifling, the studios were responsible for some of the most ambitious and influential works of American culture in the twentieth century.

Varying topics relating to film in social contexts. Offered by resident or visiting faculty.

Introduction to the history and significance of genre in film and/or television. May examine one or a selection of several genres, drawn from a list including, but not limited to, the western, melodrama, musical, thriller, sitcom, film noir, and documentary. Topics include form, ideology, authority, history, innovation, and parody.

Introduction to film form, style, and techniques. Examples from silent film and from contemporary film.