Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS)

CIMS 0021 Study of a Theme in Cinema

This introduction to literary study examines a compelling theme central to a set of cinematic texts. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within varying media technologies, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 0021, ENGL 0021

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0024 Study of a Theme: Monsters in Film and Literature

This course studies literature and film featuring a wide assortment of monsters across a range of genres, cultures, and time periods. It also serves as an introduction to film analysis and readings in cultural studies and literary theory. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 0024

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0041 Study of a Period in Cinematic History

This is an introduction to the study of cinema and culture through a survey of works from a specific historical period. This course is ideal for students wishing to explore a significant era, and it presents a range of films and contexts for understanding the cultural products of a period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 0041, ENGL 0041

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0050 In Dark Times: The Dystopian Imagination in Literature and Film

This CWiC course will offer a guided introduction to the one of the most resilient genres of the human imagination: dystopian and apocalyptic fiction. Like a group of survivors huddled around a campfire, we will turn to literature and cinema to debate some of the big questions about the future of science, technology, religion, and capitalism. This course is designed as a Critical Speaking Seminar, and the majority of class assignments will be devoted to oral presentations: including a Parliamentary-style debate and a video essay. We will begin by reading some of the early, influential works in the dystopian genre by authors like Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley. Next, we will explore the paranoid, schizophrenic world of Cold-War-era dystopias by J.G Ballard, Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler. We will conclude by reading contemporary climate fiction by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Kim Stanley Robinson. Alongside the literary material, we will also track the changing nature of dystopian cinema-- from classics like Metropolis (1927) and La Jetee (1962) to the latest Zombie film. By the end of course, students will have a firm grasp of the history of the genre and will be able to draw on this knowledge to effectively debate issues related to privacy, big business, animal rights, climate change, migration etc.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1521

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0080 Laughter and Tricky Topics

This course takes a comparative approach to studying the philosophy and praxis of laughter in a variety of artistic media — texts, films, performances and memes. We will seek to develop a critical apparatus to answer the following questions: How does laughter unite us? How does it divide us? How does it contribute to identity and community formation? We will focus on humoristic expression produced in contexts considered too serious for lightheartedness, such as death, race and gender-related oppression, and disenfranchisement. Together, we will wonder whether everything can be a laughing matter, if irony is even funny (and what does it mean anyway?), and whether humor has the potential to effect meaningful sociopolitical change. Our theoretical corpus will include works by Bakhtin, Baudelaire, Bergson, and Freud, who conceptualized laughter in wildly different ways—respectively as carnivalesque, satanic, social, and as a coping mechanism. In the 1940s, René Ménil, a Franco-Caribbean philosopher, synthesized these early theories and further developed them into a means of resistance for colonial subjects. To see these concepts in action, we will engage with materials spanning three centuries, from a short story written by Jonathan Swift to contemporary French comedies (subtitled in English). Should laughter occur throughout the semester, its causes will be dutifully analyzed and presented in diverse oral and written assignments.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 0080, FREN 0080

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0088 First-Year Seminar: Italian Histories

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ITAL 0088

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0089 First-Year Seminar: Italian Music

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ITAL 0089, MUSC 0810

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0090 First-Year Seminar: Italian American Studies

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 1299, GSWS 0090, ITAL 0090

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0091 First-Year Seminar: Contemporary Italy

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ITAL 0091

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0092 First-Year Seminar: Italian Film and Media Studies

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 0092, ITAL 0092

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0093 First-Year Seminar: Race and Ethnicity in Italy

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 0093, ITAL 0093

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0094 First-Year Seminar: Italian Gender Studies

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 0094, ITAL 0094

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0095 First-Year Seminar: Italian Fashion

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 0095, ITAL 0095

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0096 First-Year Seminar: Italian Visual Studies

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 0096, ITAL 0096

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0097 First-Year Seminar: Italian Foods and Cultures

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 0097, ITAL 0097

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0098 First-Year Seminar: Italian Literature

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 0098, ITAL 0098

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0099 First-Year Seminar: Italian Innovations

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 0099, ITAL 0099

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0180 Acting for the Camera

This class focuses on teaching students the creative and technical skills needed to excel in on-camera acting. Beginning by exploring theatre techniques to investigate character, relationship and conflict, this class will then focus on identifying the parameters of film & TV scripts of the last five years. Students will learn to identify the primary function of their character within that structure, and to imagine, create, and make playful choices that foster the story being told. By exploring acting techniques that bridge stage and screen, students will gain experience with producing professional self-tapes that reflect current industry standards, understanding the complexity of framing, vocal quality and eyelines in Zoom callbacks, and experimenting with the use of digital media in theatre.

Also Offered As: THAR 0180

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0201 Sci-Fi Cinema

Science Fiction has been a cinematic genre for as long as there has been cinema—at least since Georges Melies’s visionary Trip to the Moon in 1902. However, though science fiction films have long been reliable box office earners and cult phenomena, critical acknowledgement and analysis was slow to develop. Still, few genres reflect the sensibility of their age so transparently—if often unconsciously—or provide so many opportunities for filmmakers to simultaneously address social issues and expand the lexicon with new technologies. Given budgetary considerations and the appetite for franchises, science fiction auteurs face a difficult negotiation between artistic expression and lowest common denominator imperatives, the controversy over Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) being perhaps the most infamous example. Nevertheless, many notable filmmakers have done their most perceptive and influential work in the scifi realm, including Gilliam, Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg, Paul Verhoeven, James Cameron and Alfonso Cuaron. This course will survey the scope of contemporary science fiction cinema, after looking first at seminal works like Metropolis (1927) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) that continue to cast their shadow over the genre. We will then devote considerable time to a pair of more modern films, Scott’s Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), which drew from earlier movements (German expressionism, noir), influenced new ones (cyberpunk) and inspired a rare wave of academic discourse. Over the course of the term we will sample smaller, more independent-minded projects, such as Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) as well as higher profile but much more risky epics from filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan.

Spring

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0240 Introduction to American and British Film and Media

This topic course explores multiple and different aspects of Cinema Studies. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/courses for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0275 Montage and Revolution: Conceptual Cinema of Sergei Eisenstein

The 1917 Russian Revolution was to inaugurate a new epoch in human history. Working with and within this time of political and cultural upheaval, Sergei Eisenstein inaugurated a revolution in montage technique that would usher a new age of cinema, a new practice of art, and a new way of thinking in images. Eisenstein’s cinematic techniques aimed at producing concepts in the language of film. It also sought modes of expression inaccessible to discursive thought. Navigating a tenuous line between art and politics, Eisenstein's works explore the social and political power of affectivity and expressivity, and the cinematic potential for both representing and eliciting emotion in individual viewers and masses alike. In conversation with the tumultuous political and cultural shifts of the Soviet society from the revolutionary 1920s to the age of Stalinism and the World War II, this course will follow Eisenstein’s filmography, from his monumental reconstruction of the revolutionary Petersburg in October to the engagement with representations of history during the Stalinist era in Ivan the Terrible. We will engage with Eisenstein’s theoretical writings, his cartoons and sketches, public speeches, and his lost and unrealized projects, such as his collaboration with Hollywood and a plan to film Marx’s Capital. In this process, we will learn basic tenets of film and aesthetic theory, while practicing the analysis of film with attention to form and content. Following the lead of Eisenstein's artistic and theoretical production, we will engage with questions his work raises: How can cinematography elicit and manipulate the emotions of its viewer? What is expressivity? Can film represent philosophical concepts? What is cinema's relation to propaganda and politics? What is revolutionary about the medium of film, and what is film’s role in the revolution? No prior knowledge of Russian history, culture or society is required, nor is specialized knowledge of film history or film analysis. All readings will be in English and all films will be subtitled in English.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: REES 0275

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0320 Modern Hebrew Literature and Film in Translation

This course is designed to introduce students to the rich art of Modern Hebrew and Israeli literature and film. Poetry, short stories, and novel excerpts are taught in translation. The course studies Israeli cinema alongside literature, examining the various facets of this culture that is made of national aspirations and individual passions. The class is meant for all: no previous knowledge of history or the language is required. The topic changes each time the course is offered. Topics include: giants of Israeli literature; the image of the city; childhood; the marginalized voices of Israel; the Holocaust from an Israeli perspective; and fantasy, dreams & madness.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 0320, JWST 0320, NELC 0320

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0390 Penn-in-Cannes

Penn-in-Cannes is designed for students interested in the film industry and international cinema. Using the Cannes Film Festival as its focal point, the program examines the ways in which international film functions in the context of celebrity, marketing, and festivals. The scope and substance of the festival provide a unique opportunity, not only for students of cinema, but also for liberal arts students studying cultural diversity and international relations. In preparation for fieldwork at the Cannes Film Festival in May, two introductory lectures will be held in late March and April on Penn's campus to enable students to learn about the business and art of film festival, in particularly Cannes Film Festival, and contemporary international cinema.

Summer Term

Also Offered As: ENGL 1939

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0518 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Cinema and Globalization

In this seminar, we will study a number of films (mainly feature films, but also a few documentaries) that deal with the complicated nexus of issues that have come to be discussed under the rubric of “globalization.” See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: COML 0518, ENGL 0518

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0578 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: The Contemporary Graphic Novel

This seminar explores the rise of Comics Studies through a focus on the contemporary graphic novel. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 0578

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0590 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Film Studies

This course explores an aspect of film studies intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3890, COML 0590, ENGL 0590

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0596 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Charles Chaplin’s Films and the Politics of Silence

This BFS seminar focuses on the variety pantomime inherited by twentieth-century film from the Commedia dell’Arte and European Music Hall stages. Emphasis will be placed on how pantomime was used by filmmaker Charles Chaplin between the years 1914–1940. We shall consider important moments in the history of European pantomime that preceded and influenced Chaplin, then concentrate on how the tradition coalesced in his silent films.

Also Offered As: ENGL 0596

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0610 Video I

In this studio based course, students are introduced to video production and postproduction as well as to selected historical and theoretical texts addressing the medium of video. Students will be taught basic camera operation, sound recording and lighting, as well as basic video and sound editing and exporting using various screening and installation formats. In addition to a range of short assignment-based exercises, students will be expected to complete three short projects over the course of the semester. Critiques of these projects are crucial to the course as students are expected to speak at length about the formal, technical, critical and historical dimensions of their works. Weekly readings in philosophy, critical theory, artist statements and literature are assinged. The course will also include weekly screenings of films and videos, introducing students to the history of video art as well as to other contemporary practices.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: FNAR 1010, VLST 2610

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0620 Video II

Video II offers opportunities to further explore the role of cinematic narrative technique, non-narrative forms, digital video cinematography, editing, and screen aesthetics. Through a series of several video projects and a variety of technical exercises, students will refine their ability to articulate technically and conceptually complex creative projects in digital cinema. In addition, one presentation on a contemporary issue related to the application of cinematic storytelling and/or the cultural context of digital video is required.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: FNAR 2020

Prerequisite: FNAR 1010

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0630 Documentary Video

Documentary Video is an intensive production course involving the exploration of concepts, techniques, concerns, and aesthetics of the short form documentary. Building on camera, sound, and editing skills acquired in Video I, students will produce a portfolio of short videos and one longer project over the course of the semester using advanced level camera and sound equipment. One short presentation on a genre, technique, maker, or contemporary concern selected by the student is required.

Fall

Also Offered As: FNAR 2010

Prerequisite: FNAR 1010

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0650 Cinema Production

This course focuses on the practices and theory of producing narrative based cinema. Members of the course will become the film crew and produce a short digital film. Workshops on producing, directing, lighting, camera, sound and editing will build skills necessary for the hands-on production shoots. Visiting lecturers will critically discuss the individual roles of production in the context of the history of film.

Fall

Also Offered As: FNAR 2030

Prerequisite: FNAR 1010

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0700 Iranian Cinema: Gender, Politics and Religion

This seminar explores Iranian culture, society, history and politics through the medium of film. We will examine a variety of cinematic works that represent the social, political, economic and cultural circumstances of contemporary Iran, as well as the diaspora. Along the way, we will discuss issues pertaining to gender, religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and the role of cinema in Iranian society and beyond. Discussions topics will also include the place of the Iranian diaspora in cinema, as well as the transnational production, distribution, and consumption of Iranian cinema. Films will include those by internationally acclaimed filmmakers, such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Asghar Farhadi, Bahman Ghobadi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Dariush Mehrjui, Tahmineh Milani, Jafar Panahi, Marjane Satrapi and others. All films will be subtitled in English. No prior knowledge is required.

Fall

Also Offered As: COML 0700, GSWS 0700, NELC 0700

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0750 Image and Sound Editing

This course presents an in-depth look at the storytelling power of image and sound in both narrative and documentary motion pictures. Students apply a theoretical framework in ongoing workshops, exploring practical approaches to picture editing and sound design. Students edit scenes with a variety of aesthetic approaches, and create story-driven soundtracks with the use of sound FX, dialogue replacement, foleys, music and mixing. Students not only learn critical skills that expand creative possibilities, but also broaden their understanding of the critical relationship between image and sound.

Spring

Also Offered As: FNAR 2050

Prerequisite: FNAR 1010

1 Course Unit

CIMS 0790 The Religion of Anime

Be it shrine maidens, gods of death, and bodhisattvas fighting for justice; apocalypse, the afterlife, and apotheosis... the popular Japanese illustrated media of manga and anime are replete with religious characters and religious ideas. This course uses popular illustrated media as a tool for tracing the long history of how media and religion have been deeply intertwined in Japan.

Fall

Also Offered As: EALC 1550, RELS 0790

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1003 Cinema and Revolution

Can cinema be revolutionary? From Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin to Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, filmmakers have long grappled with political revolution. In this course we'll study films that take moments of revolutionary upheaval as their subject, and cinema made during times of revolution. Can cinematic techniques challenge the status quo? How have filmmakers navigated the complex politics of cinematic production and distribution in moments of censorship and repression? Are art and propaganda always different? Students will give two oral presentations: one will be a detailed analysis of a single scene, and another will consider the politics of a film of their choosing. Open to all, including those with no prior background in cinema studies.

Fall

Also Offered As: COML 1003

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1010 World Film History to 1945

This course surveys the history of world film from cinema's precursors to 1945. We will develop methods for analyzing film while examining the growth of film as an art, an industry, a technology, and a political instrument. Topics include the emergence of film technology and early film audiences, the rise of narrative film and birth of Hollywood, national film industries and movements, African-American independent film, the emergence of the genre film (the western, film noir, and romantic comedies), ethnographic and documentary film, animated films, censorship, the MPPDA and Hays Code, and the introduction of sound. We will conclude with the transformation of several film industries into propaganda tools during World War II (including the Nazi, Soviet, and US film industries). In addition to contemporary theories that investigate the development of cinema and visual culture during the first half of the 20th century, we will read key texts that contributed to the emergence of film theory. There are no prerequisites. Students are required to attend screenings or watch films on their own.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 1080, COML 1011, ENGL 1900

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1020 World Film History 1945-Present

Focusing on movies made after 1945, this course allows students to learn and to sharpen methods, terminologies, and tools needed for the critical analysis of film. Beginning with the cinematic revolution signaled by the Italian Neo-Realism (of Rossellini and De Sica), we will follow the evolution of postwar cinema through the French New Wave (of Godard, Resnais, and Varda), American movies of the 1950s and 1960s (including the New Hollywood cinema of Coppola and Scorsese), and the various other new wave movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (such as the New German Cinema). We will then selectively examine some of the most important films of the last two decades, including those of U.S. independent film movement and movies from Iran, China, and elsewhere in an expanding global cinema culture. There will be precise attention paid to formal and stylistic techniques in editing, mise-en-scene, and sound, as well as to the narrative, non-narrative, and generic organizations of film. At the same time, those formal features will be closely linked to historical and cultural distinctions and changes, ranging from the Paramount Decision of 1948 to the digital convergences that are defining screen culture today. There are no perquisites. Requirements will include readings in film history and film analysis, an analytical essay, a research paper, a final exam, and active participation.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 1090, COML 1022, ENGL 1901

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1027 Sex and Representation

This course explores literature that resists normative categories of gender and sexuality. By focusing on figures writing from the margins, we will explore how radical approaches to narrative form and subject-matter invite us to think in new ways about desire and identity. We will read texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, hybridizing the genres of poetry, drama, and autobiography to produce new forms of expression, such as the graphic novel, auto-fiction, and prose poetry. From Viriginia Woolf's gender-bending epic, Orlando, to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, this course traces how non-normative desire is produced and policed by social and literary contexts - and how those contexts can be re-imagined and transformed.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 1027, GSWS 1027, REES 1481

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1030 Television and New Media

How and when do media become digital? What does digitization afford and what is lost as television and cinema become digitized? As lots of things around us turn digital, have we started telling stories, sharing experiences, and replaying memories differently? What has happened to television and life after New Media ? How have television audiences been transformed by algorithmic cultures of Netflix and Hulu? How have (social) media transformed socialities as ephemeral snaps and swiped intimacies become part of the "new" digital/phone cultures? This is an introductory survey course and we discuss a wide variety of media technologies and phenomena that include: cloud computing, Internet of Things, trolls, distribution platforms, optical fiber cables, surveillance tactics, social media, and race in cyberspace. We also examine emerging mobile phone cultures in the Global South and the environmental impact of digitization. Course activities include Tumblr blog posts and Instagram curations. The final project could take the form of either a critical essay (of 2000 words) or a media project.

Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 1070, COML 1031, ENGL 1950

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1050 Metropolis: Culture of the City

An exploration of modern discourses on and of the city. Topics include: the city as site of avant-garde experimentation; technology and culture; the city as embodiment of social order and disorder; traffic and speed; ways of seeing the city; the crowd; city figures such as the detective, the criminal, the flaneur, the dandy; film as the new medium of the city. Special emphasis on Berlin. Readings by, among others, Dickens, Poe, Baudelaire, Rilke, Doeblin, Marx, Engels, Benjamin, Kracauer. Films include Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GRMN 1050, URBS 1050

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1051 The City in Literature and Film

This course focuses on the central place of the city through the history of cinema. The city in question may change depending on the term this course is being offered. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1951, URBS 1051

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1055 Books on Film: Adapting the Victorians

This course considers how stories are told differently through different media and to different audiences, and how such differences inform the many decisions involved in the translation of works across media and across time. To do so, we will consider key literary works (novels, stories, plays) from Victorian literature as well as their adaptations for film and television. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1055

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1056 Sherlock in the Multiverse

This course will consider the transmedia phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes. We will begin with his detective antecedents, we’ll then dive into Conan Doyle’s Victorian-era Sherlock, and finally explore Sherlock’s contemporary life in new novels, short stories, screenplays, tv series and computer games. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1056

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1070 Fascist Cinemas

Cinema played a crucial role in the cultural life of Nazi Germany and other fascist states. As cinema enthusiasts, Goebbels and Hitler were among the first to realize the important ideological potential of film as a mass medium and saw to it that Germany remained a cinema powerhouse producing more than 1000 films during the Nazi era. In Italy, Mussolini, too, declared cinema "the strongest weapon." This course explores the world of "fascist" cinemas ranging from infamous propaganda pieces such as The Triumph of the Will to popular entertainments such as musicals and melodramas. It examines the strange and mutually defining kinship between fascism more broadly and film. We will consider what elements mobilize and connect the film industries of the Axis Powers: style, genre, the aestheticization of politics, the creation of racialized others. More than seventy years later, fascist cinemas challenge us to grapple with issues of more subtle ideological insinuation than we might think. Weekly screenings with subtitles.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1071, GRMN 1070, ITAL 1930

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1080 German Cinema

An introduction to the momentous history of German film, from its beginnings before World War One to developments following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990. With an eye to film's place in its historical and political context, the course will explore the "Golden Age" of German cinema in the Weimar Republic, when Berlin vied with Hollywood; the complex relationship between Nazi ideology and entertainment during the Third Reich; the fate of German film-makers in exile during the Hitler years; post-war film production in both West and East Germany; the call for an alternative to "Papa's Kino" and the rise of New German Cinema in the 1960s.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1080, GRMN 1080

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1092 Contemporary American Literature

The readings for this course expose students to a wide range of American fiction and poetry since World War II, giving considerable attention to recent work. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 1092, ENGL 1092

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1110 Poetics of Screenplay: The Art of Plotting

This course studies screenwriting in a historical, theoretical and artistic perspective. We discuss the rules of drama and dialogue, character development, stage vs. screen-writing, adaptation of nondramatic works, remaking of plots, auteur vs. genre theory of cinema, storytelling in silent and sound films, the evolvement of a script in the production process, script doctoring, as well as screenwriting techniques and tools.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1018, REES 0470

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1112 Religion and Cinema in India

This seminar examines key themes in the study of religion and Indian cinema. The aim of the seminar is to foreground discussions of performativity, visual culture, representation, and politics in the study of modern South Asian religions. Themes include mythological cinema, gender and sexuality, censorship and the state, and communalism and secularism. The films we will be deploying as case studies will be limited to those produced in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil (the three largest cinema cultures of India). No knowledge of any South Asian language is needed for this course however.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: RELS 1112, SAST 1112

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1130 Water Worlds: Cultural Responses to Sea Level Rise & Catastrophic Flooding

As a result of climate change, the world that will take shape in the course of this century will be decidedly more inundated with water than we're accustomed to. The polar ice caps are melting, glaciers are retreating, ocean levels are rising, polar bear habitat is disappearing, countries are jockeying for control over a new Arctic passage, while low-lying cities and small island nations are confronting the possibility of their own demise. Catastrophic flooding events are increasing in frequency, as are extreme droughts. Hurricane-related storm surges,tsunamis, and raging rivers have devastated regions on a local and global scale. In this seminar we will turn to the narratives and images that the human imagination has produced in response to the experience of overwhelming watery invasion, from Noah to New Orleans. Objects of analysis will include mythology, ancient and early modern diluvialism, literature, art, film, and commemorative practice. The basic question we'll be asking is: What can we learn from the humanities that will be helpful for confronting the problems and challenges caused by climate change and sea level rise?

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1130, ENVS 1040, GRMN 1130

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1146 Queer German Cinema

Taught in English. This course offers an introduction into the history of German-language cinema with an emphasis on depictions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer themes. The course provides a chronological survey of Queer German Cinema from its beginnings in the Weimar Republic to its most recent and current representatives, accompanied throughout by a discussion of the cultural-political history of gay rights in the German-speaking world. Over the course of the semester, students will learn not only cinematic history but how to write about and close-read film. No knowledge of German or previous knowledge required.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GRMN 1146, GSWS 1146

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1160 Screenwriting Workshop

This is a workshop-style course for those who have thought they had a terrific idea for a movie but didn't know where to begin. The class will focus on learning the basic tenets of classical dramatic structure and how this (ideally) will serve as the backbone for the screenplay of the aforementioned terrific idea. Each student should, by the end of the semester, have at least thirty pages of a screenplay completed. Classic and not-so-classic screenplays will be required reading for every class, and students will also become acquainted with how the business of selling and producing one's screenplay actually happens.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3600

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1170 Writing for Television

This is a workshop-style course for those who have an interest in writing for television. The course will consist of two parts: First, students will develop premise lines, beat sheets and outlines for an episode of an existing television show. Second, students will develop their own idea for a television series which will culminate in the writing of the first 30 pages of an original television pilot.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3603

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1180 The Short Film: Writing, Producing and Directing

In this class students will write and prepare a short film for production with the INTENT to direct it. The first half of class is devoted to coming up with an idea and writing a short film with a total run time of around 8-12 minutes. This is the ideal length for a short. The second half of the class is devoted to preparing to shoot the film which will include scheduling, budgeting, casting, crewing up, location scouting and creating a directorial look book for the film. At the end of class each student will have a short film script and all the necessary materials to start production of that film. The below documents are required to pass the class and presented as one all inclusive PDF document at the end of the semester.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3609

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1190 Introduction to Postcolonial Literature

English is a global language with a distinctly imperial history, and this course serves as an essential introduction to literary works produced in or about the former European colonies. The focus will be poetry, film, fiction and non fiction and at least two geographic areas spanning the Americas, South Asia, the Caribbean and Africa as they reflect the impact of colonial rule on the cultural representations of identity, nationalism, race, class and gender. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1190, ENGL 1190

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1230 Masterpieces of French Cinema

This course will introduce students to key films of the French film canon, selected over a period ranging from the origins of French cinema to the present. Students will also be introduced to the key critical concepts (such as the notion of the "auteur" film genre) informing the discussion of films in France. The films will be studied in both a historical and theoretical context, related to their period styles (e.g. "le realisme poetique," "la Nouvelle Vague," etc.), their "auteurs," the nature of the French star system, the role of the other arts, as well to the critical debates they have sparked among critics and historians. Students will acquire the analytical tools in French to discuss films as artistic and as cultural texts. Please note: This course follows a Lecture/Recitation format. The Lecture (FREN 1230-401/CIMS 1230-401) is taught in English. For French credit: please register for both FREN 1230-401 (lecture) and FREN 1230-402 (recitation); the FREN 1230-402 recitation is conducted in French. For Cinema Studies credit: please register for CIMS 1230-401 (lecture) and CIMS 1230-403 (recitation); both are taught in English. Prerequisite: Two 200-level courses taken at Penn or equivalent.

Fall

Also Offered As: FREN 1230

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1271 American Musical Theatre

The American musical is an unapologetically popular art form, but many of the works that come from this tradition have advanced and contributed to the canon of theatre as a whole. In this course we will focus on both music and texts to explore ways in which the musical builds on existing theatrical traditions, as well as alters and reshapes them. Finally, it is precisely because the musical is a popular theatrical form that we can discuss changing public tastes, and the financial pressures inherent in mounting a production. Beginning with early roots in operetta, we will survey the works of prominent writers in the American musical theatre, including Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Bernstein, Sondheim and others. Class lecture/discussions will be illustrated with recorded examples.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 1271, THAR 1271

Mutually Exclusive: THAR 0271

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1272 Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Film

This course studies the cinematic representation of civil wars, ethnic conflicts, nationalistic doctrines, and genocidal policies. The focus is on the violent developments that took place in Russia and on the Balkans after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and were conditioned by the new geopolitical dynamics that the fall of communism had already created. We study media broadcasts, documentaries, feature films representing the Eastern, as well as the Western perspective. The films include masterpieces such as "Time of the Gypsies", "Underground", "Prisoner of the Mountains", "Before the Rain", "Behind Enemy Lines", and others.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 1272

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1273 Dark Comedy in Theatre and Film

This course will examine the "troublesome genre" of dark comedy by looking at the ways in which theatre and film use comic and tragic structures and traditions to explore concepts and stories seemingly at odds with those traditions. Although not always organized chronologically in time, we will examine the formal and structural characteristics of tragicomedy by tracing its development, from some of its earliest roots in Roman comedy, to its manifestation in contemporary films and plays. Aside from close readings of plays and analysis of films, we will read selected critical essays and theory to enhance our understanding of how dark comedies subvert categories and expectations. We will look at how dark comedies affect audiences and read sections of plays aloud in class. Issues to be considered include comparing the way the genre translates across theatre and film (adaptation) and examining the unique placement of the genre at the heart of contemporary American culture. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with creating tragicomic effect through performance in their presentations. The class is a seminar, with required participation in discussions. Other assignments include an 8-10 page paper and a presentation. We will read plays by authors as diverse as Plautus, Anton Chekhov, and Lynn Nottage, and filmmakers including Charlie Chaplin, Sofia Coppola, and Bong Joon-ho.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1273, THAR 1273

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1274 The Musical Theatre of Stephen Sondheim

Just days before Stephen Sondheim died in November 2021, he attended a revival of Assassins at Classic Stage Company, as well as a radical rethinking of Company that had transferred from London to New York. A few days later, a public performance of the song “Sunday” was organized in Duffy Square by Lin-Manuel Miranda. A new production of Into the Woods is currently on Broadway, and another of Sweeney Todd is planned for February 2023. Though it’s been nearly 15 years since Sondheim’s final new musical, he is very much part of our theatrical present—through his own works, which continue to be produced internationally, and through his influence on several generations of composers, lyricists, and more. Still today, among theatre critics and a large sector of the public, Sondheim is generally considered the most significant composer and lyricist in the contemporary theatre; he is, in fact, accorded the kind of serious consideration generally reserved for “legitimate” playwrights. In this seminar, we will examine in detail Stephen Sondheim’s writing over six decades. We’ll begin with Sondheim’s earliest work as a lyricist, collaborating with composers Jule Styne (Gypsy), Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story), and later, Richard Rodgers (Do I Hear a Waltz?). Beginning in 1970, Sondheim – now both composer and lyricist – in partnership with director Harold Prince produced a series of musicals (including Company, Follies and Sweeney Todd,) still thought to be among the most innovative and substantial in the history of the genre. We will also focus on Sondheim's musicals after his 1981 break with Prince. These later works, created with writers and directors including James Lapine (Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Passion), Jerry Zaks (Assassins), and John Doyle (Road Show) are often smaller in scale, intensely personal, and incorporate elements of performance art and popular culture. Finally, we will consider revival productions of Sondheim’s work, which often are reconceived from their original form, often with Sondheim’s involvement and occasional rewriting. This course is open to all students interested in theatre and musical theatre. The ability to read music is not required.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2874, THAR 1274

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1275 Broadway Musicals in the 21st Century

Wicked, Spring Awakening, Dear Evan Hansen, Hadestown. And of course, Hamilton. The innovations we see in Broadway musicals since 2000 are particularly fascinating in that they, so to speak, boldly go where no musicals have gone before—while at the same time honoring and building on the long-standing traditions of this beloved form. From the powerfully romantic Light in the Piazza, which nods to roots in European operetta, to the boundary-defying Black queerness of A Strange Loop... and everything in between. In this course, we will go year by through musical theater from the quarter-century, to see where the form has gone recently… and where it’s headed. In addition to the works already mentioned, we’ll look at Caroline or Change, The Color Purple, In the Heights, Fun Home, and more. This course will also consider some recent “revisals,” like director Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma!, and Marianne Elliott’s gender-reassigned Company: reinterpretations of classic American musicals that imagine them in more contemporary light.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1891, THAR 1272

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1300 Advanced Screenwriting

This is a workshop style course for students who have completed a screenwriting class, or have a draft of a screenplay they wish to improve or want to learn everything in one shot and are ready to do a lot of writing, and even more rewriting.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3601

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1301 Topics German Cinema

This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1300, GRMN 1300

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1302 Asian American Cinema Movement: Fighting For Representation

Providing a broad introduction to the history of persons of Asian descent living in the United States, this course will specifically examine the Asian American & Pacific Islander American experience as told through the cinematic lens. Equal parts socio-political history and media studies, this course will comprehensively assess factors contributing to the historical under representation of AAPIs in mainstream American media. By contrast, the media texts that we study will reveal a cinematic history that runs parallel to the mainstream, consisting of independently produced films created by and/or starring AAPIs that feature authentic portrayals of the community they represent. Topics will include economics of film production, broadcast television ratings, film festivals as a mechanism of distribution, negative stereotyping, Hollywood whitewashing, cultural appropriation, and media activism. The course will take place once a week and will consist of a brief discussion of the previous week's readings, followed by a lecture, and ending with a full or partial film screening relating to the current week's topic. Additional out of class assignments will be given that involve attending the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, tentatively scheduled November 8-18, 2018. Students will have the opportunity to engage with and learn from AAPI filmmakers in attendance at the festival, with additional volunteer opportunities available for extra credit.

Fall

Also Offered As: ASAM 1300

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1351 Contemporary Fiction & Film in Japan

This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from 1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan s war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with Japanese classics, confrontation with the state, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality. We will explore these and other questions by analyzing texts of various genres, including film and film scripts, novels, short stories, manga, and academic essays. Class sessions will combine lectures, discussion, audio-visual materials, and creative as well as analytical writing exercises. The course is taught in English, although Japanese materials will be made available upon request. No prior coursework in Japanese literature, culture, or film is required or expected; additional secondary materials will be available for students taking the course at the 600 level. Writers and film directors examined may include: Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, Imamura Shohei, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Beat Takeshi.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1351, EALC 1351, GSWS 1351

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1358 Histories of Egypt

This course will explore Egypt’s impact on the world in several historical eras – the ancient past and its unparalleled legacy; the nineteenth century and nationalism; the twentieth century’s wars, peace and music and the twenty-first centuries lessons in revolution. We will examine European Egyptomania and Orientalism in the 19th century, Afrocentrism’s ambitions for Egypt, and Egypt’s centrality to pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. And we will explore the history as Egypt’s writers, filmmakers, musicians and poets have imagined it from the nineteenth century to the present.

Also Offered As: AFRC 1358, HIST 1358

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1359 Filming the Middle East

This course will take us through the history of the modern Middle East as told by the region's many film-makers. We will explore how cinema developed and grew throughout countries like Egypt, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Unusually for a typical course on the Middle East, we will also pay close attention to North Africa's film industry, with a deep exploration of the cinema of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Sudanese films will be an important part of our study as well. What does it mean to have a national cinema? Many of these countries' film industries grew under European occupation and colonialism. With independence, were more markets available to Middle Eastern films? Where did directors and screenwriters train? Who were the intended audiences for these films? We will watch canonical films from the region, many of which focus on or reflect the political turmoil and aftermath of wars. But we will also examine the lightness of comedies, which were usually much more popular with Middle Eastern audiences, and which reveal every bit as much about the region's histories. And we will watch and discuss a phenomenon not found in Western cinema - the Ramadan soap operas and historical reenactments that are unique to the Middle East.

Also Offered As: HIST 1359, NELC 1970

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1360 Arab/Israeli Conflict in Literature and Film

This course will explore the origins, the history and, most importantly, the literary and cinematic art of the struggle that has endured for a century over the region that some call the Holy Land, some call Eretz Israel and others call Palestine. We will also consider religious motivations and interpretations that have inspired many involved in this conflict as well as the political consequences of world wars that contributed so greatly to the reconfiguration of the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and after the revelations of the Holocaust in Western Europe. While we will rely on a textbook for historical grounding. the most significant material we will use to learn this history will be films, novels, and short stories. Can the arts lead us to a different understanding of the lives lived through what seems like unending crisis?

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 1360, NELC 0675

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1371 New Korean Cinema

In 2019, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won the Palme d'Or at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival. This event marked the apex of South Korean cinematic renaissance, having steadily become a tour de force in the international film festival scene since 1997 onwards. This course explores the major auteurs, styles, themes, and currents of the so-called "New Korean Cinema" that emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s to continue to this day. Drawing from texts on critical film and Korean studies, we will pay particular attention to how the selected works re-present, resist, and interweave the sociopolitical climate they concern and are born out of. Using cinema as a lens with which to see the society, we will touch upon major events of the twentieth century including national division, military dictatorship and democratization movements, IMF economic crisis, youth culture, hallyu (the Korean wave), and more. In so doing, we will closely examine how each cinematic medium addresses the societal power structure and the role of the "Other" it represents in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the construction of contemporary Korean society. No prior experience of Korean studies courses necessary; all films will be screened with English subtitles.

Also Offered As: EALC 1371

Mutually Exclusive: EALC 6371

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1440 Film Music in Post 1950 Italy

An exploration of cinematic sound through the lens of specific composer/director collaborations in post-1950 Italy, examining scores, soundtracks, and the interaction of diegetic and non-diegetic music with larger soundscapes. Composers Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone serve as case studies, in partnership with directors Fellini, Visconti, Leone, Pontecorve, Pasolini, and Coppola. Highlights include several excerpts form the Fellini/Rota collaboration, including The White Sheik, I vitelloni, The Road, Nights of Cabiria, La dolce vita, 8 1/2, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, The Clowns, Roma, Amarcord, Casanova, and Orchestra Rehearsal. Rota's music for Visconti will be examined in Senso, the Leopard, and Rocco and his Brothers, along with his Transatlantic collaboration for The Godfather. Morricone's work with various directors will be discussed in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The Battle of Algiers, and Teorema, as well as for American films such as Malick's Days of Heaven and Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. Weekly screenings required. Open to all: music majors, minors, and non-majors; will count toward requirements for music minor. Knowledge of music and Italian helpful but not required. All readings and lectures in English.

Also Offered As: ITAL 1440, MUSC 1440

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1470 Chekhov: Stage & Screen

What's so funny, Mr. Chekhov? This question is often asked by critics and directors who still are puzzled with Chekhovs definition of his four major plays as comedies. Traditionally, all of them are staged and directed as dramas, melodramas, or tragedies. Should we cry or should we laugh at Chekhovian characters who commit suicide, or are killed, or simply cannot move to a better place of living? Is the laughable synonymous to comedy and the comic? Should any fatal outcome be considered tragic? All these and other questions will be discussed during the course. The course is intended to provide the participants with a concept of dramatic genre that will assist them in approaching Chekhovs plays as comedies. In addition to reading Chekhovs works, Russian and western productions and film adaptations of Chekhovs works will be screened. Among them are, Vanya on 42nd Street with Andre Gregory, and Four Funny Families. Those who are interested will be welcome to perform and/or direct excerpts from Chekhovs works.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 1470

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1520 Forest Worlds: Mapping the Arboreal Imaginary in Literature and Film

The destruction of the world's forests through wild fires, deforestation, and global heating threatens planetary bio-diversity and may even, as a 2020 shows, trigger civilizational collapse. Can the humanities help us think differently about the forest? At the same time that forests of the world are in crisis, the "rights of nature" movement is making progress in forcing courts to acknowledge the legal "personhood" of forests and other ecosystems. The stories that humans have told and continue to tell about forests are a source for the imaginative and cultural content of that claim. At a time when humans seem unable to curb the destructive practices that place themselves, biodiversity, and forests at risk, the humanities give us access to a record of the complex inter-relationship between forests and humanity. Forest Worlds serves as an introduction to the environmental humanities. The environmental humanities offer a perspective on the climate emergency and the human dimension of climate change that are typically not part of the study of climate science or climate policy. Students receive instruction in the methods of the humanities - cultural analysis and interpretation of literature and film - in relation to texts that illuminate patterns of human behavior, thought, and affect with regard to living in and with nature.

Spring

Also Offered As: COML 1054, ENVS 1550, GRMN 1132

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1640 Russian and East European Film from the October Revolution to World War II

The purpose of this course is to present the Russian and East European contribution to world cinema in terms of film theory, experimentation with the cinematic language, and social and political reflex. We discuss major themes and issues such as the invention of montage, the means of revolutionary visual propaganda and the cinematic component to the communist cultural revolutions, party ideology, and practices of social-engineering, cinematic response to the emergence of the totalitarian state in Soviet Russia before World War II.

Also Offered As: REES 1230

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1650 Russian and East European Film after World War II

The purpose of this course is to present the Russian and East European contribution to world cinema in terms of film theory, experimentation with the cinematic language, and social and political reflex. We discuss major themes and issues such as means of visual propaganda and the cinematic component to the communist cultural revolutions, party ideology and practices of social-engineering, cinematic response to the emergence of the totalitarian state in Russia and its subsequent installation in Eastern Europe after World War II.

Also Offered As: REES 1231

Mutually Exclusive: REES 6231

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1800 Film Culture in Residence

This flexible and immersive cinema experience introduces students to a wide range of films to learn about the art form. The list of movies will engage our viewers in such fundamental issues through many different film genres, narratives and cinematic experiences.

Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete

0.5 Course Units

CIMS 1900 Italian History on Screen: How Movies Tell the Story of Italy

How has our image of Italy arrived to us? Where does the story begin and who has recounted, rewritten, and rearranged it over the centuries? In this course, we will study Italy's rich and complex past and present. We will carefully read literary and historical texts and thoughtfully watch films in order to attain an understanding of Italy that is as varied and multifacted as the country itself. Group work, discussions and readings will allow us to examine the problems and trends in the political, cultural and social history from ancient Rome to today. We will focus on: the Roman Empire, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Unification, Turn of the Century, Fascist era, World War II, post-war and contemporary Italy. Lectures and readings are in English.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ITAL 1900

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1901 Topics in Portuguese, African and Brazilian Cultures

This course explores aspects of Luso-Brazilian culture and film in light of its social context and reception. For current course content, please see department's webpage: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/pc.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: LALS 1900, PRTG 1900

1 Course Unit

CIMS 1910 Sicily on Page and Screen

What images come to mind when we hear the words Sicily and Sicilians? Often our thoughts range from scenic vacation spots, delicious seafood and cannoli, and sweet grandmothers dressed in black, to mafia violence, vendettas, and the deep-rooted code of silence, omerta. But, how did these ideas get to us? Is there truth in them? Is there more to this island and its people? Through careful analysis of literary and cinematic representations of this Italian region, and those that do and have inhabited it, we will trace and analyze how Sicilians have represented themselves, how mainland Italians have interpreted Sicilian culture, how outsiders have understood these symbols, how our own perceptions shaped what we thought we knew about this place and, finally, how our own observations will have evolved throughout our studies. We will watch films such as Tornatore's Cinema paradiso and Coppola's The Godfather II, and read texts such as Lampedusa's The Leopard and Maraini's Bagheria. This course aims to increase students' understanding and knowledge of the Sicilian socio-cultural system. It will help students develop their ability to understand and interpret Sicilian culture through close analysis of its history, values, attitudes, and experiences, thereby allowing them to better recognize and examine the values and practices that define their own, as well as others', cultural frameworks.

Summer Term

Also Offered As: ITAL 1910

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2000 Virtual Reality Lab

In this collaboration between Penn and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), students will work with with curators to create virtual reality projects connected to the museum's collections. This course mixes virtual reality theory, history, and practice. We will read a wide range of scholarship, manifestoes, and memoirs that examine virtual reality and other immersive technologies, stretching from the 18th century to today. We will explore virtual reality projects, including narrative and documentary films, commercial applications, and games. We will work with many different virtual reality systems. And we will learn the basics of creating virtual reality, making fully immersive 3-D, 360-degree films with geospatial soundscapes. Finally, we will take what we have learned out of the classroom, working with the Philadelphia Museum of Art curators to create virtual realty experiences based around the museum's objects and exhibits. Students will gain an understanding of the unique approaches needed to appeal to museum visitors in a public setting, so we can make viable experiences for them. No previous knowledge of VR or experience is necessary.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2951

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2001 Modern Science Fiction Cinema

Spring

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2010 Film Festivals

This course is an exploration of multiple forces that explain the growth, global spread and institutionalization of international film festivals. The global boom in film industry has resulted in an incredible proliferation of film festivals taking place all around the world, and festivals have become one of the biggest growth industries. A dizzying convergence site of cinephilia, media spectacle, business agendas and geopolitical purposes, film festivals offer a fruitful ground on which to investigate the contemporary global cinema network. Film festivals will be approached as a site where numerous lines of the world cinema map come together, from culture and commerce, experimentation and entertainment, political interests and global business patterns. To analyze the network of film festivals, we will address a wide range of issues, including historical and geopolitical forces that shape the development of festivals, festivals as an alternative marketplace, festivals as a media event, programming and agenda setting, prizes, cinephilia, and city marketing. Individual case studies of international film festivals—Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Sundance among others—will enable us to address all these diverse issues but also to establish a theoretical framework with which to approach the study of film festival. For students planning to attend the Penn-in-Cannes program, this course provides an excellent foundation that will prepare you for the on-site experience of the King of all festivals.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3910, ENGL 2901

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2011 American Independents

This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3911, ENGL 2911

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2012 Transnational Cinema

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3912, COML 2012, ENGL 2930

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2013 Documentary Cinema

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3913, ENGL 2940

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2014 Contemporary American Cinema

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3914, ENGL 2910

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2015 Contemporary European Cinema

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3915, COML 2920, ENGL 2920

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2016 Bollywood and Beyond

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3916, COML 2932, ENGL 2932

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2020 Historical Films

This topic course explores aspects of Film Practice intensively. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3900, ENGL 2941

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2021 Romantic Comedy

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3901, ENGL 2942

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2022 World Cinema

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3902, COML 2931, ENGL 2931

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2073 Modernist Animals: How to Rethink the Human-Animal Divide

This course explores literary modernism through the lens of Animal Studies. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: COML 2073, ENGL 2073

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2080 20th-Century Literature Seminar

The course explores an aspect of 20th-century literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2080, JWST 2080

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2083 Faking it: Liars, Imitators and Cheats in Literature and Film

Deception and lies are a constant theme and a mechanism of narrative art. For a genre literally synonymous with falsehood, fiction has always been touchy about its relationship to truth: Does the novel neutrally represent reality or does it recreate it? Are characters like living, breathing real people, or are they mere simulations? And if they’re just words on a page (or images on a screen), why are we so moved by their adventures, loves and misfortunes? In this class, we will explore and expand on these questions by focusing on novels and films that deal explicitly and exclusively with fakers, shapeshifters and doppelgangers, lies of necessity and of opportunity, as well as with works that revel in exposing their own manipulative artificiality. We will read psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers, and postcolonial thinkers and ask, What does it mean to be authentic? How malleable are our individual identity, race, gender and sexuality? What forces shape it, and how constant is this shape? Are we the same selves when we have a conversation as when we give a presentation? Do we remain ourselves when we talk to customers at our service jobs, to teachers, to students? When we “pass” as a different race? When we speak in a different accent? How do we reconcile the conflicting demands of “be yourself” and “fake it till you make it”? What is the relation between our presentation of ourselves and our selves? Novels and shorts stories for discussion might include classics like Nella Larsen’s Passing, Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as movies like Gaslight, The Battle of Algiers, The Yes Men, and American Psycho. While much of the weekly work in this class will be reading-and-discussion based, oral presentations – keenly aware of their own artifice – will count toward half of the final grade. A final oral presentation will be based on a creative project in conversation with class materials. The course would satisfy those interested in fulfilling the Advanced Film and Literature and Global Literature and Film requirements. This is a CWiC course, Communication Within the Curriculum.

Spring, even numbered years only

Also Offered As: COML 2083, ENGL 2083

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2145 Failure to Communicate (SNF Paideia Program Course)

This seminar examines “failure to communicate” in a variety of cultural areas, among them literature, romance, politics, theater, law, science, war, and education. Materials will include literary fiction, plays, poetry, film, TV, and assorted nonfiction, journalism and scholarship. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2145

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2155 Gender History and American Film

More than any other medium, the motion pictures fostered new ideals and images of modern womanhood and manhood in the United States. Throughout the twentieth century, gender representations on the screen bore a complex relationship to the social, economic, and political transformations marking the lives and consciousness of American men and women. This course explores the history of American gender through film. It treats the motion pictures as a primary source that, juxtaposed with other kinds of historical evidence, opens a window onto gendered work, leisure, sexuality, family life, and politics. We will view a wide range of Hollywood motion pictures since 1900, as well as films by blacklisted artists, feminists, and independent producers.

Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 2155, HIST 2155

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2270 Contemporary Russia Through Film

This course continues developing students' advanced skills in Russian and offers intensive study of Russian film, arguably the most powerful medium for reflecting changes in modern society. This course will examine Russia's transition to democracy and market economy through the eyes of its most creative and controversial cinematographers. The course will focus on the often agonizing process of changing values and attitudes as the country moves from Soviet to Post-Soviet society. Russian films with English subtitles will be supplemented by readings from contemporary Russian media sources. The course provides an excellent visual introduction to the problems of contemporary Russia society.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 2270

Mutually Exclusive: REES 5296

Prerequisite: RUSS 1200

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2271 Post-Soviet Russia in Film

This course is intended for students who have spoken Russian at home and seek to improve their capabilities in formal and professional uses of the Russian language. Film is arguably the most powerful medium for reflecting changes in modern society. This course will examine Russia's transition to democracy and market economy through the eyes of its most creative and controversial cinematographers. The course will focus on the often agonizing process of changing values and attitudes as the country moves from Soviet to Post-Soviet society. Russian films with English subtitles will be supplemented by readings from contemporary Russian media sources. The course provides an excellent visual introduction to the problems of contemporary Russia society.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 2271

Mutually Exclusive: REES 5271

Prerequisite: RUSS 0401

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2355 Classic Icons, Cinematic Images: Popular Culture in the Middle East

The meaning of culture can sometimes best be understood through a look at its popular traditions and the routines of everyday life. This course will grapple with issues of ethnicity, political conflict, and identity in the Middle East by analyzing the culture produced for and consumed by a wide spectrum of the general public in different countries. Political cartoons, photography, novels, film, music, dance, and other modes of cultural expression will be used to explore the historical roots of the political anxieties and social conventions common to many modern Middle Eastern communities. In this way, we will recast studies of politics through an understanding of identity and culture.

Also Offered As: HIST 2355

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2420 Cultural Studies Seminar

This course explores an aspect of cultural studies intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2930, COML 2420, ENGL 2420

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2430 Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, Film and Culture: Utopia, Revolution and Dissent

This course continues developing students' advanced skills in Russian, and introduces students to major movements and figures of twentieth-century Russian literature and culture. We will read the works of modern Russian writers, and watch and discuss feature films. The course will introduce the first Soviet films and works of the poets of the Silver Age and beginning of the Soviet era as well as the works from later periods up to the Perestroika and Glasnost periods (the late 1980s).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 2430

Prerequisite: RUSS 1200

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2460 Law and Literature Seminar

This course explores an aspect of law and literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2460

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2500 Cultura E Letteratura

Please check the website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ITAL 2500

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2501 Andrei Tarkovsky: Cinema, Spirit and the Art of the Long Take

Andrei Tarkovsky is universally acknowledged to be the greatest Soviet filmmaker of the last half of the twentieth century. Kurosawa claimed that Tarkovsky had "no equal among film directors alive now." Bergman called his work "a miracle." His films are beautiful, intellectually challenging, and spiritually profound. They also represent a prolonged exploration of the potential of the long take - unusually extended, continuous shots. Tarkovsky's works range from "Ivan's Childhood", a study of wartime experience through the eyes of a child; to "Solaris", a philosophical essay in the form of a science-fiction thriller; to "Andrei Rublev," an investigation of the power of art and spirituality. In this course, we will study Tarkovsky's films and life, with attention to his formal and artistic accomplishments, his thought and writings, and the cultural and political contexts of his work. Each student will learn to analyze film form and content and write two short and one longer paper on some longstanding aspect of Tarkovsky's work of the student's choice.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 0280

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2506 Ecocritical Seminar: Remediating the Environment

In this course, we will interrogate the term “remediation” as meaning both environmental restoration and media representation. Students will be introduced to the fields of ecocriticism and ecomedia by examining how a variety of materials—from bestselling books to billboards, documentaries, and websites—have informed the cultural imagination of the environment. Students will also discover how media communications and publications can help to remediate the environment in the face of climate catastrophe. This course can be counted as an elective toward the Environmental Humanities minor and as fulfilling the minor's public engagement component. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2596

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2512 Introduction to Italian Cinema

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 2512, ITAL 2512

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2522 Modern Italian Culture

Please check the website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 2522, ITAL 2522

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2600 Italian Theater

Please check the website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 2600

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2665 Fakes, Forgeries and Forensics in Digital Media

Fake images on social media are just one of the latest examples of fabrications and modifications that have taken media into dubious territory throughout history. This course will analyze the history of fakes and forgeries and consider whether they devalue the original or not, or even have value in themselves. Along the way, students will learn how fakes and forgeries have been created, what tools can be used to counter the onslaught of illicit creations, and the arts and humanities debates that have arisen surrounding them. After evaluating the ways various media have been modified over time, this course will show students how to use photo manipulation tools to modify digital media. It will also show students how to perform various detailed analyses of digital media to determine their legitimacy. A final project will bring these tools together, as groups of students create a fake or forgery, consider its implications and evaluate a tool’s ability to detect it.

Fall

Also Offered As: ENGL 2665

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2670 Computer Animation

Through a series of studio projects this course introduces techniques of 2D and 3D computer animation. Emphasis is placed on time-based design and storytelling through animation performance and montage. Students will develop new sensitivities to movement, composition, cinematography, editing, sound, color and lighting.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: FNAR 2100

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2705 Media and Culture in Contemporary Iran

This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the culture and media of modern Iran, with a critical perspective on issues such as identity formation, ethnicity, race, and nation-building. It focuses on how these issues relate to various aspects of modern Iranian culture -- such as religion, gender, sexuality, war, and migration -- through the lens of media, cinema, and literature.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 2705, NELC 2705, RELS 2180

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2740 Facing America

This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 2740, ARTH 2740, LALS 2740

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6740

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2750 Russian History in Film

This course draws on fictional, dramatic and cinematic representations of Russian history based on Russian as well as non-Russian sources and interpretations. The analysis targets major modes of imagining, such as narrating, showing and reenacting historical events, personae and epochs justified by different, historically mutating ideological postulates and forms of national self-consciousness. Common stereotypes of picturing Russia from "foreign" perspectives draw special attention. The discussion involves the following themes and outstanding figures: the mighty autocrats Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great; the tragic ruler Boris Godunov; the brazen rebel and royal impostor Pugachev; the notorious Rasputin, his uncanny powers, sex-appeal, and court machinations; Lenin and the October Revolution; images of war; times of construction and times of collapse of the Soviet Colossus.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 0270

Mutually Exclusive: REES 5270

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2810 Method Acting: From Self to Stage and Screen

What, exactly, is “method acting”? Jeremy Strong became notorious on television’s Succession for “staying in character” while filming, to the great irritation of his castmates. Jared Leto “transformed” himself by gaining sixty pounds for a role in Chapter 27, then losing another thirty for a role in Dallas Buyer’s Club. Are such approaches really “method” acting? Are they healthy and sustainable? And do they produce truly compelling performances? This course aims to demystify “the method” through a combination of historical inquiry and hands-on acting work. We will explore the cultural phenomenon of “the method” by tracing its historical, theatrical roots, from the core theories and practices of Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky through the American Group Theatre experiments of the 1930s, the heyday of New York’s Actors Studio in the 1950s, and its culmination in iconic stage and film performances. (One prime example is Marlon Brando’s famed portrayal of Stanley in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, as directed by Elia Kazan). Our studies will involve reading historical, theoretical, and dramatic texts, viewing selected films, and practicing acting exercises. Course assessment will comprise participation, facilitation, short responses, and a final project that can take the form of a research paper, presentation, or performance.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2882, THAR 2810

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2830 Backstage Drama in Theatre and Film

Inviting audiences into a special relationship with illusion, backstage dramas (whether on film or on stage) and plays-within-plays reach beyond and alongside traditional plot-driven narratives, to reflect on the process of representation itself. Drawing from classical debates about the relationships between reality, illusion, representation, and imitation (mimesis), we will examine a variety of plays and films as we articulate the complex network of responses and underlying assumptions (whether cultural, political, or social), about art and life, that these works engage.

Fall, odd numbered years only

Also Offered As: ENGL 1896, THAR 2830

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2840 Icons in Performance: Actors and Others Who Have Shaped the Arts

Many talented performers bring works to life on a stage or in film. But a select few artists are so distinctive they become icons, defining for audiences-often for many years beyond their careers-the art they serve. Marlon Brando defined a new kind of American acting. Sidney Poitier broke the color barrier for leading man movie stars. Maria Callas showed that opera was equal parts theatre and music. Greta Garbo helped us understand the visual power of a film image. This seminar course will focus on iconic performers, directors and others, and the roles they play in defining their art forms. It is part analysis (interpreting in detail what it is these artists do) and part cultural study (why it matters, and also seeking to understand the larger circumstances at play in forging an icon). In addition to the performers mentioned above, we'll also study Mae West, Fred Astaire, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and more. We will also look at a handful of iconic directors-including Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, and others-whose style makes a definitive mark on American film and theater. And we will also look at how critics (in addition to popular audiences) assess performers through comparisons, and by understanding the evolution and tradition of the art. To support our work, we will use film, audio recordings, scripts, criticism and analytical essays, biography, and more.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2890, THAR 2840

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2850 Art and Business of Film

The course will explore how a screenplay is conceptualized and developed, the role of agency relationships in the film business, and - casting as wide a net as possible - the financing, production, direction, distribution, exhibition and marketing of both independent and studio films. A combination of lectures by instructors and practitioners, case studies, film screenings, and consulting projects with independent and Hollywood creators, packagers, financiers, exhibitors, distributors and publicists will illustrate the relationship between the art of film and the business of film. Guests will include screenwriters, agents, producers, directors, distributors, film festival curators and film critics. In short, we will try to cover all aspects of making a film, and explore that often-tricky intersection of art and commerce.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2890 Mixed Media Animation

Mixed Media Animation is a contemporary survey of stop-motion animation concepts and techniques. Students use digital SLR cameras, scanners and digital compositing software to produce works in hand-drawn animation, puppet and clay animation, sand animation, and multiplane collage animation. Screenings and discussions in the course introduce key historical examples of animation demonstrating how these techniques have been used in meaningful ways. Students then learn how to composite two or more of these methods with matte painting, computer animation or video.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: FNAR 1050

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2900 Post War Japanese Cinema

Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, and Kurosawa Akira are recognized today as three of the most important and influential directors in Japanese cinema. In their films of the late 1940s and 1950s, these directors focused upon issues surrounding the human condition and the perception of truth, history, beauty, death, and other issues of the postwar period. This lecture course places their films in period context, and pays particular attention to the connections to other visual media, and to how "art" and "history" are being defined in the cinematic context. How other directors also took up these issues, and referred to the "big three" is also be discussed.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2900, EALC 1340

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2910 East Asian Cinema

This survey course introduces students to major trends, genres, directors, and issues in the cinemas of East Asian countries/regions, including Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Charting key developments over more than a hundred years from the early twentieth century to the present, this course examines films as aesthetic objects, asking questions about film form, narrative, and style. It also pays attention to the evolution of cinema as an institution (e.g. modes of production, circulation, and exhibition) in different cultural and political contexts. Weekly course materials will include both films (primary sources) and analytical readings (secondary sources). By the end of the course, students are expected to gain broad knowledge of East Asian cinema, develop skills of film analysis, and apply these skills to perform historically informed and culturally sensitive analysis of cinema. Prior knowledge of East Asian languages is NOT required.

Also Offered As: ARTH 2910, EALC 1116

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6910, EALC 5116

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2935 Culture on Trial: Race, Media & Intellectual Property

This course explores the US intellectual property regime’s impact on the production, distribution and consumption of media and art. By the end of the class, students will come away with historical, theoretical, and practical understandings of how media technology changes the law and how the law has subsequently responded to changes in media technology. This course is affiliated with CWIC (Communication Within the Curriculum). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2935, SOCI 2973

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2950 Global Film Theory

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2950, ARTH 2950, COML 2950, ENGL 2900, GSWS 2950

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6950

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2951 Digital and New Media Seminar

This course explores a particular topic in the study of digital and new media in an intensive and in-depth manner. See the English Department's website at: www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2920, COML 2960, ENGL 2950

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2952 Mobile Phone Cultures

Over the years, the cellphone or the mobile phone ceased to be just an extension of the landline telephone as a range of locative, social and networked media converged into it. Even as they have global impact, mobile media technologies influence and are influenced by socio-cultural factors in specific places, and so mobile phone cultures are both global and local at the same time. In this course, we will be studying the revolutions in youth culture, desire, gender norms, and political propaganda that are emerging as new hardware, apps, and internet services are being added to mobile media. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2952

1 Course Unit

CIMS 2953 Digital Infrastructures & Platforms

Platforms ranging from ride-hailing and food delivery apps (Uber and Swiggy) to subscription based audiovisual content providers (Netflix and SonyLIV) mediate multisided transactions (markets) and operate based on algorithmic collection, circulation, and monetization of user data. In this course, we will engage with a variety of readings about multi-situated study of apps, paying attention to both app interfaces as well as their connection to backend systems and infrastructures like content delivery networks and software development kits. In what ways do processes of data storage/distribution, content encryption/decryption and encoding/decoding make “seamless” streaming on Hulu/Prime Video and instantaneous digital payments on Venmo and PayTM possible? We will begin with how infrastructures have been studied in the past, and then in particular focus on media infrastructures such as satellite systems, optical fiber cables, cell antennas, and data centers. The course readings will consider the varied definitions of platforms and examine the socio-political effects of the proliferation of platforms in different regions of the world. In studying superapps and platforms like WeChat (China), LINE (Japan), and Jio (India), we will try to comprehend in what ways have discourses of platformization been shaped by governmental regulation, cultural practices, and socio-politics of regions. We will explore questions like: in what ways are infrastructures and apps related? How do content creators and SVoD audiences navigate algorithmic opacity? Why do BigTech companies float competing discourses about platforms? What are the connections between infrastructural investments and platform capitalism? What does it mean to have digital lives in a platform society? In what ways do digital infrastructures and platforms create the foundations for smart cities and Internet of Things? Course assignments include a final research paper (2000 words) as well as project-based case studies of platform companies and socio-material assessments of infrastructures.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2953

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3010 French Identity in the Twentieth Century

Topics vary. Please see the department's website for a description of the current offerings: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: FREN 3010, GSWS 3010

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3030 Queer Cinema

Queer Cinema, in Theory: This course explores the role of cinema in shaping the history of gender and sexuality, at the same time introducing students to some of the most relevant texts in the field of queer, gender and trans studies. While the last decades have been characterized by increasing acceptance of gays, lesbians and trans people into mainstream society, this process has no doubt reproduced new inequalities and asymmetries – in terms of race, class, and gender presentation. Does “queer” still pose a threat to the mainstream or is it now part of the “normal”? Should one welcome the progressive acceptance or queer lives within the mainstream or should one reject it in the name of an indissoluble difference? How do whiteness and homonormativity participate in the structural marginalization of black and trans people? Some of the topics addressed by this course are the “closet” in classical Hollywood cinema and its critique in 1990s queer films such as Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997); the intersection of sexuality and race in black feminist films such as Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden,1983) and Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996); the treatment of reproductive labor in experimental feminist films such as Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, 1975); the representation of the AIDS crisis in new queer films such as The Living End (Gregg Araki,1992); sex reassignment politics in 2000s Iranian films such as Sex My Life (Bahman Motemedian).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3020, ITAL 3030

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3040 Japanese Cinema

This course is a survey of Japanese cinema from the silent period to the present. Students will learn about different Japanese film genres and histories, including (but not limited to) the benshi tradition, jidaigeki (period films), yakuza films, Pink Film, experimental/arthouse, J-horror, and anime. Although the course will introduce several key Japanese auteurs (Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa, Oshima, Suzuki, etc), it will emphasize lesser known directors and movements in the history of Japanese film, especially in the experimental, arthouse, and documentary productions of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, in addition to providing background knowledge in the history of Japanese cinema, one of the central goals of the course will be to interrogate the concept of "national" cinema, and to place Japanese film history within a international context.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 2933

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3050 Rome in Cinema: Representations of The Eternal City

In this course we will look at the different ways in which Rome’s cityscape has been represented in 20th and 21st century Italian and American cinemas, intersecting with historical events such as the rise of Italian fascism, WWII, the 1960s economic boom, as well as the political impact of the current migratory crisis in the Mediterranean Sea. Why is Rome often referred to as "The Eternal City"? In what ways has the myth of Rome’s eternality been politically exploited throughout Italy’s modern history? Students will acquire technical vocabulary to improve their visual interpretation skills, as well as knowledge of some of the most impactful historical and cultural events of last century. Requirements will include readings in cultural and film history, an analytical essay, a research paper, weekly blog posts, and active participation in class discussion. Films may include Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960), Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961), The Talented Mr, Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999), The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3050

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3100 Cinema and Socialism

Films from socialist countries are often labeled and dismissed as "propaganda" in Western democratic societies. This course complicates this simplistic view, arguing for the value in understanding the ties between socialist governments, the cinematic arts, and everything in between. We will examine films from past and present socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as films made with socialist aspirations. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3100, EALC 2314, ENGL 2934, REES 3770

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3200 The History of American Animation

This course will look at American animation as an art form, a technology and an industry. We will explore the ways in which artistic, technical, historical, and cultural conditions shape the development of animation and in turn, how animation impacts viewers. Topics will include trends in animation and their relation to contemporary popular culture, issues of art versus commerce in the creation of cartoons, the intersection of animation and politics, and shifts in style and technique throughout the years. We will look at the personalities in animation who have shaped the art form and continue to influence it, the rise in animation's popularity, and current-day applications of animated imagery. Case studies will include Pixar, Walt Disney, UPA, television cartoons, stop motion animation, and the movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3870, FNAR 3181

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3201 The History Computer Animation

This course will look at computer animation as an art form, a series of technological innovations and an industry. We will explore the way in which artistic, technical, historical, and cultural conditions have shaped the development of computer animation. Topics will include the impact of early motion graphics experiments in the sixties, the contributions of university- and corporation-funded research, commercial production, and the rise of Pixar. We will consider the companies and personalities in computer animation who have shaped the art form and continue to influence it, the contributions to computer animation from visionaries around the world, and current day applications of animated imagery. Throughout the course, we will screen important works from the canon of computer animation, including the earliest computer-animated shorts, scenes from Beauty and the Beast, the first Pixar shorts, Toy Story, Final Fantasy and works done internationally to forward the art and the industry.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3871, ENGL 0591, FNAR 3182

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3203 The Animation Of Disney

No organization has exerted as much influence on popular culture and the art form of animation as The Walt Disney Company. For decades, Disney films were the standard by which all other animated films were measured. This course will examine the biography and philosophy of founder Walt Disney, as well as The Walt Disney Company’s impact on animation art, storytelling and technology, the entertainment industry, and American popular culture. We will consider Disney's most influential early films, look at the 1960s when Disney’s importance in popular culture began to erode, and analyze the films that led to the Disney renaissance of the late 1980s/early 1990s. We will also assess the subsequent purchase of Pixar Animation Studios and the overall impact Pixar has had on Disney. The class will also look at recent trends and innovations, including live-action remakes and Disney+.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3873, ENGL 0593, FNAR 3184

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3204 History Children's TV

This course will survey the history of children’s television from the invention of television through the present, with an emphasis on series development and production, artistry, and the colorful personalities who built this industry. We’ll consider important figures including Fred Rogers, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Joan Ganz Cooney, Jim Henson and Walt Disney. We will discuss the history of animated cartoons that were made specifically for television, Saturday morning production, the rise of Japanese cartoons from the 1960s through Pokemon, and the growth of children’s cable channels in the 90s, as well as other landmark moments. We’ll also assess the impact of streaming platforms on television and the future of children’s media.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3874, ENGL 0594, FNAR 3185

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3328 The Holocaust in Italian Literature and Film

Please check the website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3328

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3400 Italian American Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2299, ITAL 3400

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3401 Contemporary Italy

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3401, ITAL 3401

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3402 Italian Film and Media Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3402, ITAL 3402

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3403 Race and Ethnicity in Italy

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3403, ITAL 3403

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3404 Italian Gender Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3404, ITAL 3404

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3405 Italian Fashion

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3405, ITAL 3405

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3406 Italian Visual Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3406, ITAL 3406

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3407 Italian Foods and Cultures

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3407, ITAL 3407

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3408 Italian Literature

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3408, ITAL 3408

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3409 Italian Innovations

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3409

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3410 Italian Renaissance Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3410, ITAL 3410

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3411 Mediterranean Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3411, ITAL 3411

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3412 Italian Performance Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3412, ITAL 3412

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3413 Italian Science and Philosophy

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 3413, ITAL 3413

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3414 Italian Material Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3414

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3415 Italian Digital Humanities

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3415

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3502 Italian Film and Media Studies

Taught in Italian. Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3502

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3503 Race and Ethnicity in Italy

Taught in Italian. Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3503

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3505 Italian Fashion

Taught in Italian. Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3505

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3506 Italian Visual Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3506

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3512 Duchamp Is My Lawyer

This course examines the impact of copyright law on artists and creative industries. Looking at publishing, music, film, and software, we will ask how the law drives the adoption of new media, and we will consider how regulation influences artistic decisions. A mix of the theoretical with the practical, we will be using UbuWeb (the largest and oldest site dedicated to the free distribution of the avant-garde) as our main case study. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3512

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3600 Studies in Spanish, Latin American and Latinx Cinema

This course explores fundamental aspects of Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx cinema. Course content may vary. Please see the department website for current course offerings: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/undergraduate/hispanic-studies.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SPAN 3600

Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3602 Cyborgs, Robots, Gadgets: Technologies in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema

Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Cinema offer a great reflection on the role that new technologies have in the film industry, and in our lives, in the digital era. Often, we find that technologies are used in an original way to overcome financial shortages in times of crisis, or when resources are limited. In this context, sometimes it is actually thanks to the new technologies that the work of new directors can be produced or distributed. Some recent Latin American and Spanish sci-fi movies find genuine ways to bring about social and political commentary through the use of technological narratives. Reflections on technology are often found in many other film genres too. Our aim in this course will be to explore the use of technology in film in the present and in the past, as well as to study narratives that place technology at the center. We will focus our study on films where technology is a key factor and will reflect on the impact of technologies in our experience as spectators as well.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: LALS 3602, SPAN 3602

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3620 Contemporary Spanish Cinema

A survey of Spanish cinema from the 1940’s to the present. Special attention will be paid to the political, cultural, and social discourses that the films reproduce, adapt or question. This will allow an understanding of the implicit or explicit social dialogues that shaped cinematographic production in Spain from the post-civil war years, through Franco’s dictatorship, the advent of the democratic state in the 1970’s, and the economic and political crisis of the 21st century. At the same time films will be analyzed from the standpoint of their rhetorical construction, examining the specificity of cinematic language and its particular case.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SPAN 3620

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3622 Spanish Non-Fictional Film

This course will explore the flourishing of the genre of documentary and non-fiction film in the last decades in Spain. We will study poetic, experimental, and social documentaries in their socio-historical context. For this we will need to engage not only films and film theory texts, but also historical recounts of contemporary Spain. We will also analyze the limits between non-fiction and fiction film, focusing on some recent works that have critically blurred the distinction between both genres.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SPAN 3622

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3624 Crossing Borders in Spanish Cinema

Through the lens of border crossing, we will explore various current topics in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, such as immigration and emigration narratives in times of globalization and economic crisis, cinematic transgressions, and the emergence of glocal vs. national films. A fluid conceptualization of the border will guide our exploration on how Contemporary Spanish Cinema talks about gender, race, nationalisms, migration, history, and psychology.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SPAN 3624

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3626 The Films of Pedro Almodóvar

One of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the world, Almodóvar is unquestionably the most international of today’s Spanish filmmakers. The aim of the course is to familiarize students with Pedro Almodóvar’s films and to shed some light to the intricacies of its themes, cultural background, and visual style. Together with primary and secondary texts, we will offer an overview of Almodóvar’s career from his early iconoclastic Post Franco films of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s to his most recent work that has gained him a reputation as an international auteur. Some of the topics covered will include questions of national identity, gender, sexuality, as well as Almodóvar’s original use of genre, visual style, and the director’s relationship to the postmodern concepts of performance and parody.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SPAN 3626

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3650 Latin American Cinema

This course aims to familiarize students with the major achievements and cultural moments of Latin American cinematography. We will cover a broad set of themes, nations and time periods employing multiple theoretical positions.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: LALS 3650, SPAN 3650

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3652 Crossing Borders in Latin American Cinema

Through the lens of border crossing this course will explore various current topics in Contemporary Latin American Cinema such as immigration, exile and travel narratives, gender crossing, social and political transgressions, transnationalism, and co-productions. The concept of the border will be fluid and central to the course, and through it we will reflect upon what separates and unites people at an individual, sexual, social, cultural, political, national, and geographical level. This focus will help us explore a wide variety of “movements”, negotiations, and transgressions taking place in the Latin American Cinema of the last three decades.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: LALS 3652, SPAN 3652

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3664 Documentary Ethnography for Museum of Exhibition practices

This course will investigate research modalities that center around documentary storytelling in the museum context. During the semester, we will examine research strategies that collaborate with curatorial experts. e class will utilize cinematic techniues that investigate cultural narratives revolving around cultural heritage sites, rituals and ceremonies, artifacts, materials and living traditions. Students will engage Solomon's process of her creation of the new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe e Metropolitan Museum’s African art galleries. e semester will culminate in students creating their own short lm content that will screen publicly in the gallery at the end of the semester.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 3664, FNAR 3664

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3781 Global TV

This course explores a broad media landscape through new critical and conceptual approaches. It is designated as a Benjamin Franklin Seminar. This course maps the footprints of television at a global scale. Adopting comparative approaches, we will be studying TV's formation of national and global discourses, and thereby recognizing not only television's impact on processes of globalization, but also the ability of television to matter globally. Working through concepts of "broadcasting," "flow," "circulation," and "circumvention," the course examines the movement of (and blocks encountered by) television programs and signals across national borders and cultures. The course particularly focuses on how global television cultures have been transformed due to shifts from broadcasting technologies to (Internet) streaming services? Navigating from United States and Cuba to India and Egypt, the readings in the course illuminate how particular televisual genres, institutions, and reception practices emerged in various countries during specific historical periods. We shall be addressing a range of questions: what kind of global phenomenon is television? Can we study television in countries where we do not know the existing local languages? In what different ways (through what platforms, interfaces, and screens) do people in different continents access televisual content? What explains the growing transnational exports of Turkish and Korean TV dramas? What is the need to historically trace the infrastructural systems like satellites (and optical fiber cables) that made (and continue to make) transmission of television programming possible across the world? How do fans circumvent geo-blocking to watch live sporting events? Assignments include submitting weekly discussion questions and a final paper. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 0595

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3806 Representations of Dictatorship in Latin America

This course explores the phenomenon of Latin American dictatorship through literature, film, graphic novels, and visual and public art, asking how these different media and genres depict and respond to state violence, censorship, and trauma.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 3806, SPAN 3806

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3810 Film Exhibition and Moviegoing

Cinema has always had an audience. From its first appearances in cafes, tea houses, and variety shows to today's fragmented, digital consumption, cinema continues to exist in relation to different ways of looking and experiencing. This course examines how films have been shown and how audiences have watched films in diverse historical and cultural contexts. We will explore how the ways in which film screenings were organized shape both the films being shown and audiences' moviegoing experiences. Based on historical and site-specific investigations, we will also reflect on how our modes of engaging with cinema impact conceptions of what cinema is, what it will be, and what it can be. Unlike most film courses, this course does not focus on analyzing films, but look into the operations of cinema as an institution. There will be field trips to local movie theaters and a final collective project that asks students to curate a special film screening (in-person or online) using innovative formats.

Also Offered As: ARTH 3820

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3820 Horror Cinema

The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction to the history and main themes of the supernatural/horror film from a comparative perspective. Films considered will include: the German expressionists masterworks of the silent era, the Universal classics of the 30's and the low-budget horror films produced by Val Lewton in the 40's for RKO in the US, the 1950's color films of sex and violence by Hammer studios in England, Italian Gothic horror or giallo (Mario Brava) and French lyrical macabre (Georges Franju) in the 60's, and on to contemporary gore. In an effort to better understand how the horror film makes us confront our worst fears and our most secret desires alike, we will look at the genre's main iconic figures (Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, etc.) as well as issues of ethics, gender, sexuality, violence, spectatorship through a variety of critical lenses (psychoanalysis, socio-historial and cultural context, aesthetics...).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: FREN 3820

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3830 French & Italian Modern Horror

This course will consider the horror genre within the specific context of two national cinemas: France and Italy. For France, the focus will be almost exclusively on the contemporary period which has been witnessing an unprecedented revival in horror. For Italy, there will be a marked emphasis on the 1960s-1970s, i.e. the Golden Age of Gothic horror and the giallo craze initiated by the likes of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Various subgenres will be examined: supernatural horror, ghost story, slasher, zombie film, body horror, cannibalism, etc. Issues of ethics, gender, sexuality, violence, spectatorship will be examined through a variety of critical lenses (psychoanalysis, socio-historical and cultural context, aesthetics, politics, gender, etc.).

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 3830, FREN 3830, ITAL 3830

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3860 Paris in Film

Latter-day examples like Christophe Honore's Dans Paris, Cedric Klapisch's Paris or the international omnibus Paris, je t'aime (with each director paying homage to a distinctive "arrondissement" of the capital), not to mention American blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code and Inception or Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, are there to remind us that there is something special -- indeed, a special kind of magic -- about Paris in and on film. Despite the extreme polarization between Paris and provincial France in both cultural and socio-economic terms, cultural historians have argued that Paris is a symbol of France (as a centralized nation), more than Rome is of Italy and much more than Madrid is of Spain or Berlin of Germany, for example. The prevalence of the City of Lights on our screens, Gallic and otherwise, should therefore come as no surprise, be it as a mere backdrop or as a character in its own right. But how exactly are the French capital and its variegated people captured on celluloid? Can we find significant differences between French and non-French approaches, or between films shot on location that have the ring of "authenticity" and studio-bound productions using reconstructed sets? Do these representations vary through time and perhaps reflect specific historical periods or zeitgeists? Do they conform to genre-based formulas and perpetuate age-old stereotypes, or do they provide new, original insights while revisiting cinematic conventions? Do some (sub)urban areas and/or segments of the Parisian population (in terms of gender, race, or class, for example) receive special attention or treatment? These are some of the many questions that we will seek to address...with a view to offering the next best thing to catching the next non-stop flight to Paris! For French credit: Please register for both FREN 3860-401 (lecture) and FREN 3860-402 (recitation). The FREN 3860-402 recitation is conducted in French. For Cinema and Media Studies credit: Please register for CIMS 3860-401 (lecture) and CIMS 3860-403 (recitation). Both lecture and recitation are taught in English.

Spring

Also Offered As: FREN 3860

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3912 Labor in Contemporary Latin American Literature and Film

This course studies different forms of cultural production (film, novel, short story, critical essay) as entry-points into new settings and conditions for work in Latin America, in four sectors that have become especially salient in the region: services, finance, agro-industry and the informal economy (particularly drug trafficking). We will pay particular attention to how cultural production allows us to envision the coordinates of the larger, indeed global, economy into which workers are inserted. We will examine how cultural production allows us to map shifting class structures; we will also track how gender and race shape national and international divisions of labor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 3912, SPAN 3912

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3930 Cinema and Civil Rights

This undergraduate seminar will examine key moments in the history of civil rights through a cinematic lens. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how filmmakers have depicted the lives, aspirations, and strategies of those who have struggled for equal rights; how different struggles have intersected with each other; what aesthetic strategies have been adopted to represent freedom and the denial of it; and how effective cinematic efforts to contribute to increased freedom have been as well as what criteria we use to evaluate success or failure in the first place. Each week, we will watch a film and read a series of texts that will be drawn from a variety of arenas, including histories of civil rights; civil rights pamphlets and speeches; filmmaker interviews; film and media theory; memoirs; and theories of race, gender and sexuality. Course requirements: mutual respect; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; a final project that can be a research paper, film, art project, or community-based initiative.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 3930, ARTH 3930, ENGL 0599, GSWS 3930

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3931 Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present

What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? How would such an approach to filmmaking challenge our understanding of terms like “authorship,” “amateur,” “exhibition,” “distribution,” “venue,” “completion,” “criticism,” “documentary,” “performance,” “narrative,” “community,” and “success”? How might we understand these U.S.-based works within a more expansive set of transnational conversations about the transformational capacities of collective media practices? This course will address these and other questions through a deep engagement with the films that make up the national traveling exhibition curated by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmerman, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, which foregrounds six major themes: Body Publics (public health and sexualities); Collaborative Knowledges (intergenerational dialogue); Environments of Race and Place (immigration, migration, and racial identities unique to specific environments); States of Violence (war and the American criminal justice system); Turf (gentrification, homelessness, housing, and urban space); and Wages of Work (job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment). As part of that engagement, we will study the history of a series of Community Media Centers from around the U.S., including Philadelphia’s own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this course’s co-instructor. This is an undergraduate seminar, but it also available to graduate students in the form of group-guided independent studies. The course requirements include: weekly screenings, readings, and seminar discussions with class members and visiting practitioners, and completing both short assignments and a longer research paper.

Also Offered As: AFRC 3932, ARTH 3931, COML 3931, ENGL 2970, GSWS 3931

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6931

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3940 Chinese and Sinophone Cinemas

This course is a survey of Chinese and Sinophone cinemas from the silent era to the present. The Sinophone refers to Sinitic film cultures both inside and outside the People’s Republic of China that have been in relatively marginalized positions against the Han-Chinese mainstream, such as Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Tibetan, and transpacific cinemas. One major goal of the course is to interrogate the national cinema framework and to show how the meaning of “Chineseness” has been problematized by filmmakers and critics throughout modern history. Students will learn about important film movements and trends such as leftist cinema from the 1930s, socialist cinema, Taiwanese and Hong Kong New Waves, the Fifth and Sixth Generation filmmakers, and contemporary transnational productions. Attention will be paid to both films known for awards and artistic achievements and popular genres including thrillers, horror, and wuxia (martial art).

Also Offered As: ARTH 3940, EALC 1331

1 Course Unit

CIMS 3999 Independent Study

Independent Study provide a way for well-motivated students to pursue a topic of interest that is not listed into our CIMS academic curriculum. In an independent study, students essentially create their own course on a topic of theirs choice, working in concert with our CIMS faculty advisor

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

CIMS 4000 Blacks in American Film and Television

This course is an examination and analysis of the changing images and achievements of African Americans in motion pictures and television. The first half of the course focuses on African-American film images from the early years of D.W. Griffith's "renegade bucks" in The Birth of a Nation (1915); to the comic servants played by Steppin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, and others during the Depression era; to the post-World War II New Negro heroes and heroines of Pinky (1949) and The Defiant Ones (1958); to the rise of the new movement of African American directors such as Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Charles Burnett, (To Sleep With Anger) and John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood). The second half explores television images from the early sitcoms "Amos 'n Andy" and "Beulah" to the "Cosby Show," "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," and "Martin." Foremost this course will examine Black stereotypes in American films and television--and the manner in which those stereotypes have reflected national attitudes and outlooks during various historical periods. The in-class screenings and discussions will include such films as Show Boat (1936), the independently produced "race movies" of the 1930s and 1940s, Cabin in the Sky (1943), The Defiant Ones (1958), Imitation of Life (the 1959 remake) & Super Fly (1972).

Fall

Also Offered As: AFRC 4000

1 Course Unit

CIMS 4516 One Series--Major Film

This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major film regardless of origin. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 4516

1 Course Unit

CIMS 4998 Cinema Studies Honor Thesis

Majors in Cinema & Media Studies have the option to write a Senior Honors Thesis. CIMS 498 is a year-long Independent Study course students have to complete under the supervision of a CIMS Faculty advisor. 1 CU will be awarded upon completion of the year-long CIMS Honors Thesis.

Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete

0.5 Course Units

CIMS 4999 Independent Study

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5000 Food and Film

Are you intrigued by the role food plays in our lives and our world? Have you noticed that the food film has become one of cinema’s most durable subgenres not only in the US but in global cinema as well? Are you willing to test the proposition that the food film is more than entertainment? That the food film, in fact, provides us unique access to a range of fundamental questions about passion and desire, family, survival, art, gender, race, and ethnicity? This seminar explores numerous aspects of the food/film nexus, starting with the classics (Babette’s Feast and Tampopo), and grazing across a menu of Hollywood, independent, and international documentaries and feature films that throw light on food production and global warming; chefs and the restaurant business; the erotics of food and cinema; eating and the self; and moral and religious aspects of consumption. Designed for lovers (or potential lovers) of food and film alike, this course will introduce you to the art of film analysis and the pleasures of cuisine.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5001 Cinema and Globalization

In this course, we will study a number of films (mainly feature films, but also a few documentaries) that deal with a complicated nexus of issues that have come to be discussed under the rubric of "globalization." Among these are the increasingly extensive networks of money and power, the transnational flow of commodities and cultural forms, and the accelerated global movement of people, whether as tourists or migrants. At stake, throughout, will be the ways in which our present geographical, economic, social, and political order can be understood and represented. What new narrative forms have arisen to make sense of contemporary conditions? Films will include: The Year of Living Dangerously, Perfumed Nightmare, Dirty Pretty Things, Monsoon Wedding, Babel, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Maria Full of Grace, In This Word,Darwin's Nightmare, Black Gold, Life and Debt, The Constant Gardener, Syriana, and Children of Men. In addition to studying the assigned films carefully, students will also be expected to read a selection of theoretical works on globalization (including Zygmunt Baumann's Globalization: The Human Consequences) and, where appropriate, the novels on which the assigned films are based. Advance viewing of the films is required. (I find it is best to place films on reserve for students' use, or to ask that students get their own DVDs from Amazon or Netflix, but screenings can certainly be arranged.) Writing requirements: either a mid-term and final paper, or an in-class power point presentation and final paper.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 5001

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5002 Hollywood Film Industry

This is a course on the history of Hollywood. It seeks to unravel Hollywood's complex workings and explains how the business and politics of the film industry translate into the art of film. We will trace the American film industry from Edison to the internet, asking questions such as: What is the relationship between Hollywood and independent film? How has the global spread of Hollywood since the 1920s changed the film industry? How has Hollywood responded to crises in American politics (e.g., world wars, the cold war, terrorism)? And how have new technologies such as synchronized sound, color cinematography, television, home video, computer graphics, and other digital technologies changed film and Hollywood? We will look closely at representative studios(Paramount, Disney, and others), representative filmmakers (MaryPickford, Frank Capra, and George Lucas, among many others), and we will examine the impact of industrial changes on the screen.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 5002

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5003 Copyright and Culture

In this course, we will look at the history of copyright law and explore the ways that copyright has both responded to new media and driven art and entertainment. How, for example, is a new medium (photography, film, the Internet, etc.) defined in relation to existing media? What constitutes originality in collage painting, hip hop music, or computer software? What are the limits of fair use? And how have artists, engineers and creative industries responded to various changes in copyright law? A major focus of the course will be the lessons of history for the current copyright debates over such issues as file sharing, online video, and remix culture. In this course, we will look at the history of copyright law and explore the ways that copyright has both responded to new media and driven art and entertainment. How, for example, is a new medium (photography, film, the Internet, etc.) defined in relation to existing media? What constitutes originality in collage painting, hip hop music, or computer software? What are the limits of fair use? And how have artists, engineers and creative industries responded to various changes in copyright law? A major focus of the course will be the lessons of history for the current copyright debates over such issues as file sharing, online video, and remix culture.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 5003

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5004 Horror Cinema

The course will explore European Horror Cinema from the 1970s to the present time, focusing on a number of cult films that have helped rejuvenate and redefine the genre in a radically modern sense by pushing the envelope in terms of subversive representation of gore, violence and sex. We will look at various national cinemas (primarily Western Europe – Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands – with the occasional foray into Eastern Europe and Scandinavia) and at a range of subgenres (giallo, mondo, slasher, survival, snuff, …) or iconic figures (ghosts, vampires, cannibals, serial killers, …). Issues of ethics, ideology, gender, sexuality, violence, spectatorship will be discussed through a variety of critical lenses (psychoanalysis, socio-historical and cultural context, aesthetics, politics…). The class will be conducted entirely in English. Be prepared for provocative, graphic, transgressive film viewing experiences. Not for the faint of heart!

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 5004

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5005 Sex/Love/Desire In Art Cinema

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 5005

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5030 Transnational TV

How are television and nation historically related, and how has television been part of new kinds of nationalization and globalization projects? Television content like telenovelas or BBC news have often transnationally moved and television infrastructures like satellites and optical fiber cables have had a global footprint. We will discuss both the local situatedness of televisual production and reception cultures as well as their ability to impact global issues and discourses. The course is interested in how television schedules historically have been part of everyday lives of people and how more recently, on-demand TV content shapes and is shaped by quotidian rhythms of people’s lives in different countries with specific socio-cultural contexts. The course particularly focuses on how global television cultures have been transformed due to shifts from broadcasting technologies to (Internet) streaming services: In what ways has the television landscape changed and remained the same with the emergence of global subscription TV platforms like Netflix and Prime Video as they commission and develop content in collaboration with local and national artists and practitioners? How are regional streamers competing with and resisting the expansion of Netflix? What explains the growing transnational exports of Turkish dizi and Korean TV dramas? We will attend to both emerging genres of content and trace the new distribution circuits of transnational television.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 5030

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5050 Religion & Cinema

This course looks at religion in film. As we will see, this is not just a question of how religion is represented onscreen, but how cinematic objects make religious subjects. We'll explore the ways films are crafted through technique, performance, and distribution, then consider how these components shape religious bodies and religious traditions in turn.

Spring

Also Offered As: RELS 5050

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5051 Digital Humanities Studies

This course is designed to introduce advanced undergraduate and graduate students to the range of new opportunities for literary research afforded by Digital Humanities and recent technological innovation. Digital Humanities: you've heard of it. Maybe you're excited about it, maybe you're skeptical. Regardless of your primary area of study, this course will give you the critical vocabularies and hands-on experience necessary to understand the changing landscape of the humanities today. Topics will include quantitative analysis, digital editing and bibliography, network visualization, public humanities, and the future of scholarly publishing. Although we will spend a good portion of our time together working directly with new tools and methods, our goal will not be technological proficiency so much as critical competence and facility with digital theories and concepts. We will engage deeply with media archaeology, feminist technology studies, critical algorithm studies, and the history of material texts; and we will attend carefully to the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in the field. Students will have the opportunity to pursue their own scalable digital project. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 5050, ENGL 5050

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5110 Topics in Cinema Studies

Please see the department's website for current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: FREN 5110

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5120 Film Noir

Topics vary. Please see the department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5120, FREN 5120

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5250 Queer Francophone Cinema

Taught in English. This course will survey queer cinema in French from around the world, examining cult classics beside established masterpieces and avant-garde aesthetics alongside more mainstream productions in order to probe how film participates in both the representation and the formation of LBGT epistemologies and identities. Tracing the lineage of queer French cinema from Jean Genet's and Jean Cocteau's A Song of Love (Un Chant d'amour, 1950) to Christophe Honore's Love Songs (Les Chansons d'mour, 2007), the course will cover a variety of films from France (by Francois Ozon, for example), Belgium (Chantal Akerman), Morocco (Abdellah Taia), Quebec (Xavier Dolan and Lea Pool) and elsewhere. Theoretical and critical perspectives will be provided by Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jose Esteban Munoz, Jack Halberstam and others. No previous knowledge of cinema studies, queer studies or Francophone cultures is assumed. The course will meet for two and a half hours weekly by Zoom, complemented by asynchronous discussion of assigned film excerpts, which students will annotate online.

Also Offered As: GSWS 5150

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5272 Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Film

This course studies political violence, terrorism, civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and genocidal policies as represented in the social media, cable news, documentaries, feature films. We discuss various techniques and strategies of the propaganda wars, post-truth media environment, etc. The regions of interest are Former Soviet Union, Russia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, US homegrown political violence, and the Middle East. The students are expected to develop and demonstrate a critical approach to different aspects of the cinematic, news, and social media representation of ethnic conflict. We focus on the violent developments that took place in Russia and the Balkans after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, conditioned by the geopolitical dynamics that the fall of communism had created. We study media broadcasts, documentaries, feature films representing both, the Eastern and the Western perspective.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 5272

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5296 Contemporary Russia Through Film

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: REES 5296

Mutually Exclusive: REES 2270

Prerequisite: RUSS 1200

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5390 Penn-in-Kenya

Undergrads produced documentary and virtual-reality films with residents of the Kakuma Refugee Camp.

Summer Term

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5550 Terrorism

This course studies the emergence of organized terrorism in nineteenth-century Russia and its impact on public life in the West, the Balkans, and America. We investigate the political and cultural origins of terrorism, its conspiratorial routine, structures, methods, manuals, and manifestoes. Historical and cultural approaches converge in the discussion of intellectual movements that forged the formula of terrorism and influenced the professionalization of the underground, such as nihilism, anarchism, and populism. We discuss the stern terrorist personality, self-denial, revolutionary martyrdom, and conspiratorial militancy. The theatricals of terrorism are of particular interest, its bombastic acts, mystification, and techniques of spreading disorganizing fear in the global media environment. We trace the creation of counterterrorism police in late imperial Russia and its methods to infiltrate, demoralize, and dismantle the terrorist networks, and reengineer their social base. First Red Scare and the formation of the FBI constitutes a unique case of managing rampant political violence and countering the asymmetrical threat of terrorism.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: REES 5550

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5730 Topics in Criticism & Theory: Object Theory

Topics vary annually

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5730, COML 5730, ENGL 5730, GRMN 5730, REES 6683

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5750 Russian History in Film

The course draws on the cinematic/fictional representation of the Russian/Soviet history based on Russian as well as non-Russian sources. The analysis targets major modes of imagining, staging and reenacting history, construction of images that satisfy dominant political, cultural and ideological stereotypes, and help create national identities. Bias, eye-witness accounts, propaganda uses and abuses of history, forgeries and the production of alt-facts become topics of particular interest. The discussions involve nation builders, iconic heroes and charismatic antiheroes, great commanders and revolutionaries such as Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs, Lenin and the October Revolution, Stalin and the construction of the Soviet Colossus, the Storming of the Winter Palace, the Civil War, the Great Purge, the Red Scare in the US, etc.

Also Offered As: REES 5270

Mutually Exclusive: REES 0270

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5792 Biography and Art History

Beginning with the ancient Greeks, people have created specific biographical structures as a way to understand and explain the artistic process. Artists have often been labeled as natural prodigies possessing creative powers on par with the divine. This seminar will examine the role that biography plays in the assessment of visual art and the creative process over time and across European and American culture. During the semester we will read art historical texts, watch biographical films, and debate the historical and post-structuralist critical theory that has helped to shape the current cultural construction of the artist. Throughout the seminar we will discuss the underlying debates around these various approaches to biography. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 5792, ARTH 5792, GSWS 5792, LALS 5792

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5793 Fake!

This seminar explores issues of fakery, forgery, reproduction, magic, and authenticity in history, art, literature, and film. Students will gain an understanding of these issues within both a historical and contemporary context by reading works of criticism, non-fiction, and fiction; watching both avant grade and popular film; and examining works of art and visual culture. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5793

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5820 Topics: Literature and Film

Please see department website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/graduate/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5821, ITAL 5820

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5821 Fantastic Literature 19th/20th Centuries

This course will explore fantasy and the fantastic in short tales of 19th- and 20th-century French literature. A variety of approaches -- thematic, psychoanalytic, cultural, narratological -- will be used in an attempt to test their viability and define the subversive force of a literary mode that contributes to shedding light on the dark side of the human psyche by interrogating the "real," making visible the unseen and articulating the unsaid. Such broad categories as distortions of space and time, reason and madness, order and disorder, sexual transgressions, self and other will be considered. Readings will include "recits fantastiques" by Merimee, Gautier, Nerval, Maupassant, Breton, Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jean Ray and others.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5840, FREN 5820

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5830 Art, Sex and the Sixties

With a distinct emphasis on performance, film, installation art, video and painting, this course explores the explosion of body-based, nude and erotic work from the 1950 to the 1970s, with particular focus on the 1960s. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but within Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous international emergence of the erotic as a political force in the art world. Reading a range of key voices from Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to performance artists Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade, we will examine how and why sexuality became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different contexts across the globe. We will pay particular attention to how and why an art about sex became a camouflaged form of political dissidence in the confines of repressive political dictatorships, as were then rising in Brazil, Argentina. and ultimately Chile. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, Latin American Studies, social revolution, performance studies, post war art and Frankfurt School thought should find the course particularly appealing, but it assumes no background in any of these fields.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 5830, GSWS 5200, LALS 5830

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5840 20th-Century Italian Fiction and Film

Please see department website for current description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/graduate/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 5840

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5850 Italian Thought

What is Italian philosophy? Does Italian philosophy have a peculiar character? Can we speak of "Italian philosophy" if Italy became a unified country only recently, and its history is complex and fragmented? Yet “Italian Thought” and its genealogy are central to today’s theoretical debates on concepts such as biopolitics, reproductive labor and “empire” among others. This course will offer a diachronic review of the most important Italian thinkers, highlighting the political vocation of Italian philosophy, and its engagement with history and science, while discussing the modern supporters and opponents of the “Italian Thought” category. Readings might include Dante, Machiavelli, Bruno, Vico, Beccaria, Gramsci, Cavarero and Agamben among others.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 5850, ITAL 5850

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5910 Cinema and the Museum

Cinema and the museum are both important modern cultural institutions that have global relevance. How do cinema and the museum interact with each other conceptually, artistically, and spatially? In this graduate seminar, we will cross the disciplinary boundaries between film and media studies, museum studies, visual studies, and art history. A wide range of phenomena at the intersection of cinema and the museum will be considered, including the museum in films, the museum as an institution of cinema, video arts and moving images in museums, museum exhibitions that interrogate the cinematic medium, and film museums. Examples will be drawn from diverse historical periods and cultural contexts. This course is supported by Spiegel-Wilks funding and will include at least one class field trip.

Also Offered As: ARTH 5910

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5930 Classical Film Theory

At a moment when contemporary film and media theory has become increasingly interested in how earlier film theories can help us understand our moment of transition, this course will give students the opportunity to read closely some of those key early texts that are preoccupied with questions and problems that include: the ontology of film, the psychology of perception, the transition to sound, the politics of mass culture, realism, and ethnography. Course requirements: ; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; 20-25 page paper.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5930, COML 5930, ENGL 5930, GSWS 5930

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5931 Contemporary Film Theory

In this course, we will dig in to a variety of contemporary film theory debates in the context of earlier texts with which they engage or against which they define themselves. We will also watch films weekly and consider the relationship between theory and practice.Course requirements: ; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; 20-25 page paper.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5931, ENGL 5931, GSWS 5931

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5932 The Place of Film and Media Theory

Taking its title from a recent special issue in the journal Framework, this seminar will engage the where of film and media theory. At a moment when this discourse, often presumed to have roots in Anglo and Western European traditions, is purportedly undergoing a global turn, we will consider how some of film and media theory's key terms and preoccupations including realism, documentary, genre, identity, sound, spectatorship, nation, auteur, and screens are being inflected by expanded geographic, linguistic, aesthetic and cultural frames. We will grapple with some of the logistical challenges, motivations, resistances, and questions that scholars encounter as they attempt to shift film and media theory's borders; compare contemporary efforts to broaden the discourse's geographic horizon with earlier efforts to do the same; and consider what happens to the viewer's sense of space and place in different media environments. Course requirements: full participation in readings, screenings, discussion, and class presentations; 20-25 page research paper + annotated bibliography.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5932, ENGL 5932, GSWS 5932

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5933 Cinema and Media Studies Methods

This proseminar will introduce a range of methodological approaches (and some debates about them) informing the somewhat sprawling interdisciplinary field of Cinema and Media Studies. It aims to equip students with a diverse—though not comprehensive—toolbox with which to begin conducting research in this field; an historical framework for understanding current methods in context; and a space for reflecting on both how to develop rigorous methodologies for emerging questions and how methods interact with disciplines, ideologies, and theories. Students in this class will also engage scholars participating in the Cinema and Media Studies colloquium series in practical discussions about their methodological choices. The course’s assignments will provide students with opportunities to explore a particular methodology in some depth through a variety of lenses that might include pedagogy, the conference presentation, grant applications, the written essay, or an essay in an alternative format, such as the graphic or video essay. Throughout, we will be trying to develop practical skills for the academic profession. Although our readings engage a variety of cinema and media objects, this course will be textually based. No prior experience needed. The course is open to upper-level undergraduates with relevant coursework in the field by permission of instructor only. Course Requirements: Complete assigned readings and actively participate in class discussion: 20%; Reading responses: 10%; Annotated bibliography or course syllabus on a particular methodology: 20%; SCMS methodology-focused conference paper proposal according to SCMS format: 10%; Research paper, grant proposal, or essay in an alternative format using the methodology explored in the syllabus or bibliography: 40%.

Fall

Also Offered As: ARTH 5933, COML 5940, ENGL 5933, GSWS 5933

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5940 Media, Platform, Experience

This graduate seminar explores processes and sites of production, distribution, and consumption of audio-visual contents in the contemporary media environment with a focus on both platform logics and user interaction experiences. While “new” media, such as social media, cellphone apps, streaming platforms, video games, and drones increasingly dominate everyday life, “old” media including film, television, and books do not disappear but continue to be consumed and transformed in a new media ecology. Crossing the old/new divide, this course seeks to delineate a fuller picture of the choices, constraints, and experiences available for contemporary media users situated in both the Global North and South. We will attend to both the infrastructures and platforms shaping the circulatory dynamics of the current global media landscape as well as the phenomenological dimensions of media consumption by combining broad discussions of interface, algorithms, temporality, screen, and post-cinema, etc., with case studies that examine specific platforms (e.g. Netflix, Bilibili) and media forms (e.g. GIFs, reaction videos, etc.).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5940, ENGL 5991

1 Course Unit

CIMS 5999 Independent Study

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

CIMS 6371 New Korean Cinema

In 2019, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won the Palme d'Or at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival. This event marked the apex of South Korean cinematic renaissance, having steadily become a tour de force in the international film festival scene since 1997 onwards. This course explores the major auteurs, styles, themes, and currents of the so-called "New Korean Cinema" that emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s to continue to this day. Drawing from texts on critical film and Korean studies, we will pay particular attention to how the selected works re-present, resist, and interweave the sociopolitical climate they concern and are born out of. Using cinema as a lens with which to see the society, we will touch upon major events of the twentieth century including national division, military dictatorship and democratization movements, IMF economic crisis, youth culture, hallyu (the Korean wave), and damunhwa (multiculturalism initiative). In so doing, we will closely examine how each cinematic medium addresses the societal power structure and the role of the "Other" it represents in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the construction of contemporary Korean society. We will also briefly survey the history of South Korean cinema that has evolved hand-in-hand with the history of modern Korea itself, walking through its five different phases (1945-Korean War era;1955-1972 "Golden Age"; 1973-1979 censorship era; 1980-1996 democratization era; and 1997 onwards). No prior experience of Korean studies courses necessary; all films will be screened with English subtitles.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: EALC 6371

Mutually Exclusive: EALC 1371

1 Course Unit

CIMS 6664 Documentary Ethnography for Museum of Exhibition practices

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 6664, FNAR 6664

Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3664

1 Course Unit

CIMS 6942 Impossible Innocence: the Films of Luis Buñuel

This seminar provides an overview and introduction to the cinema of Luis Buñuel with a particular focus on the Spanish filmmaker’s engagement with Surrealism. Drawing on the expertise of Professors Ignacio Javier López and Michael Solomon, each seminar session will unfold in two parts: first, Solomon will offer a general introductory lecture and discussion covering various aspects of Buñuel’s filmography including technical and formal analyses that touch on cinematic form, montage, and adaptation, and a contextualization of Buñuel’s cinema within the Spanish, Mexican, Latin American, and European (inter) national cinemas and cinematic movements; second, López will offer a close examination of individual films focusing on Buñuel’s longstanding ties with (the ideas of) Surrealism from the movement’s initial moment of scandal and provocation—understood by its participants as a new philosophy, a new way of seeing in an endless process of discovery—to a second moment in which Surrealism admits its failure to enact its revolutionary goals. Films covered in the seminar include Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), L’Age d’or (1930) Menjant garotes, Las Hurdes/Terre sans pain (1933/36) Los Olvidados (1950) Susana (1951) Ensayo de un crimen (1955), Death in the Garden (1956), Nazarín (1959), Viridiana (1961) The Exterminating Angel (1962), Belle de jour (1967), Tristana (1970), and Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Students will start working early on a final project (seminar paper), reworking the draft several times during the semester.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 6942, SPAN 6942

1 Course Unit

CIMS 7920 Reading Against Racism

This course takes as its starting point Audre Lorde’s 1981 Keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." Lorde, critiquing white feminists, states, "I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness." Eschewing defensiveness, ignorance, and innocence, and opening to meaningful change by engaging the writings of anti-racist and anti-imperialist thinkers, including those focused on the transformation of higher education, this course examines the responsibilities scholars take on when we affirm that "Black Lives Matter," and acknowledges that higher education, including the humanities, is actively implicated in the structures and operations of white privilige Eschewing defensiveness, ignorance, and innocence, and opening to meaningful change by engaging the writings of anti-racist and anti-imperialist thinkers, including those focused on the transformation of higher education, this course examines the responsibilities scholars take on when we affirm that "Black Lives Matter," and acknowledges that higher education, including the humanities, is actively implicated in the structures and operations of white privilege and anti-black racism as well as in other intersectional modes of exclusion, including all forms of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national original, ability, class, sexuality, gender, and beliefs. The course aims to approach these urgent but longstanding issues in ways that help us to understand some of the complexities, practicalities, and temporalities of the work of change; to grapple with what Rosalyn Deutsche in Hiroshima After Iraq (2011) describes as "the inseparability of the social and the psychic"; and to seek out effective alternatives to the tendency of politicized academic writing in time of conflict to regress to what Deutsche calls "heroic masculinism." "Reading Against Racism" is imagined as a way of catalyzing active, collective, and long-term anti-racist, anti-imperialist intellectual work. It seeks to participate in the development of more just and inclusive academic modes and spaces by fostering time and structure for thought and self-reflection, by generating ideas for implementation, and by learning from our readings as well as from each other. All students, white and BIPOC, are welcome to participate, but we will begin this course by working together to establish a community agreement that takes account of the different ways in which such a course is likely to be experienced by white and BIPOC people. For example, recognizing that discussions about race and racism require immense emotional labor from BIPOC people in particular, BIPOC students should not be asked to use their personal experiences to frame questions under discussion or to represent any group. We will establish together other guidelines to create as safe and supportive a space (or spaces) for reading, thinking, and acting against racism as we can muster, including deciding how we would like to include in our process tools like trigger warnings, opt-out mechanisms, smaller subgroups, etc. Requirements: Weekly reading; weekly journal for self-reflection (required, but not for submission); participation in discussion; design a syllabus for an introductory course in your field. Thanks to all the students who have generously participated in developing this course and to the scholars who have written the materials we will read.

Also Offered As: ARTH 7920

1 Course Unit

CIMS 8999 Independent Study

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS)

Print Options