How do media forms communicate story, meaning, and politics/ideology to audiences? In the first half of the semester, focusing primarily on fictional media forms, we will break down the aesthetic components or building blocks of media. We will examine each element’s function in the production of meaning in a text, and in doing so, generate a shared vocabulary by which we can all write and speak with intelligence, confidence, and specificity about the ways in which a work affects us and comments upon culture. In doing so, we will also deconstruct the very words “cinema” and “film” and underscore the inextricable nature of aesthetics and ideology.
Writing in the first half of the semester will be focused on substantiated formal and cultural analysis of primary film texts to support a clear thesis. Students will also develop skills in close reading of secondary sources of critical scholarship and will gain exposure to a range of critical methodologies for analyzing media and culture including: formal analysis, ideological criticism, and modes of cultural analysis (race/ethnicity studies, gender studies, and queer theory).
The second half of the course will underscore that media aesthetics are not a static and universal language solely generated by Hollywood, but rather are fluid and highly contingent upon cultural, technological, and historical context. Selected transnational, avant-garde, and digital cinema and media movements will be examined for their influences upon the global audiovisual aesthetic lexicon.
Writing in the second half of the semester will be focused on developing comparative arguments about media texts and positioning an original thesis in dialogue with existing scholarship.
Writing in the first half of the semester will be focused on substantiated formal and cultural analysis of primary film texts to support a clear thesis. Students will also develop skills in close reading of secondary sources of critical scholarship and will gain exposure to a range of critical methodologies for analyzing media and culture including: formal analysis, ideological criticism, and modes of cultural analysis (race/ethnicity studies, gender studies, and queer theory).
The second half of the course will underscore that media aesthetics are not a static and universal language solely generated by Hollywood, but rather are fluid and highly contingent upon cultural, technological, and historical context. Selected transnational, avant-garde, and digital cinema and media movements will be examined for their influences upon the global audiovisual aesthetic lexicon.
Writing in the second half of the semester will be focused on developing comparative arguments about media texts and positioning an original thesis in dialogue with existing scholarship.
- Professor: Broderick Fox