Both childhood and cinema invoke an experience of time defined by the momentary and passing, an ephemera that we often long to keep. This course studies childhood and cinema together in an effort to learn more about picturing change, aging, memory, subjectivity, and time. How does film create, affirm, and undermine assumptions about perception and childhood? How does thinking about childhood and cinema open up new ways of picturing the world? Building from Siegfried Kracauer’s claim that film reflects and reveals the world, we consider how cinema makes children of us all, makes us see with delight and discovery, even as film also ramps up our aging and expands our life experience by exposing us to worlds and circumstances beyond our reach. In addition to thinking historically about how cultural narratives about youth and innocence change with time, this course includes theoretical readings about children and film, as we ask how existing spectator-screen theories might change with children in the audience and on the screen. We also think about how every conversation involving childhood and cinema inevitably has its own nostalgic and personal turn; what do we remember about our childhoods as mediated cinematically? How have screens shaped who we become and who we know ourselves to be? How might studying and writing about childhood and cinema become generative and productive in its picturing of the future?

Classical film theorists often celebrate the dynamism and movement at the heart of cinema: film reveals the “flow of life,” according to Siegfried Kracauer, and uniquely “mummifies” change, according to André Bazin. Something about film’s ephemerality, its intangibility, lends itself toward a perpetual losing and finding, a bridging of the moment and its context, that aligns with the births, deaths, and lifespans of sentient creatures. This course considers documentaries that self-reflexively feature filmmaking as central to an autobiographical or biographical process, and this course further broadens “cinematic lives” to include flora and fauna within both fictional and nonfictional films. How might films invite compassion for living creatures pictured therein, and to what extent might films— through scale and time—help us to conceptualize our growing ecological struggle? How might cinema teach or imagine a form of attention more biocentric than anthropocentric? This course considers how reading films can (a) calibrate our perception toward a sensitivity both humanist and naturalist, and (b) give rise to meaningful lives, before and beyond the screen.

How might recent films by American indie filmmakers reveal new possibilities for creative practice? How might a focus on the contemporary—particularly outside of the established Hollywood studio system—shine a light on filmmakers’ capacity to picture the dreams, fears, concerns, and curiosities that define our critical moment? How do artists shape and uphold their vision despite economic, professional, and personal challenges? Through studying features by contemporary filmmakers, this course considers how indie cinema uniquely privileges artists and subjects who challenge the status quo. 

Our inquiry focuses less on the economics and industry than on independent filmmakers’ creative process and the reception of independent films. This class further approaches film experience itself as a practice of attention, which we exercise through considering how our perception individuates and collectives us. Whether you’re familiar with these films or whether you’re experiencing films beyond the multiplex for the first time, this course welcomes your earnest, honest, and thoughtful engagement with these challenging forms. This class about filmmakers—more than film itself—is implicitly a collection of case studies about how to find, make, and share beauty in a world that can be difficult; about how to persevere even when odds seem against you. Indie films require persistence, after all; independent filmmaking is less a job than a dream, and this course focuses on several highly-accomplished independent filmmakers whose work has received international acclaim. This class regards these celebrated figures as humans who struggle, dream, work, make, and flourish.

This course focuses on filmmakers who have released very recent films. Given this contemporaneity, our course combines film reviews, artist interviews, histories (of American independent film and socio-cultural contexts), theories (of authorship, film affect, audience experience, creativity, genre), and formal elements (mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound). This class thus features:

• Close analysis of films (how do these films work, narratively, visually, aurally?)

• Case studies of talented and dreaming humans who realize their vision (how did these filmmakers come to make their art?)

• Reception studies of how critics and audiences respond to these films

• Reflection on your own patterns of attention, as they’re stretched, tested, frustrated, nourished, etc. by this collection of films.

The assignments for this course expect your disciplined and consistent engagement with course material, through weekly short “impressions” of feature films, an essayistic analysis (chosen from among several prompts), a group presentation (introducing your peers to a filmmaker we’ve not studied), and a final project. This course works towards your coming into your own as an independent filmmaker—at a small scale, non-theatrically, do not be daunted! Your final project blends creative and critical work, through foregrounding your own attention relative to our films.

I regard our classroom as a learning community, and our collective experience can be as rewarding and meaningful as we decide to make it. Implicit in this syllabus is a claim that I want to make explicit: I teach toward our classroom becoming a site of inimitable experience, wherein we can have conversations and cultivate ideas otherwise not possible through reading Wikipedia, watching YouTube, or using Chat GPT. What can each of us bring to a dynamic exchange, to our embodied and in-process learning together? What kinds of work can you make that’s yours, that’s unique, sensitive, conscientious, perceptive, and reflective? What kinds of ideas can we develop that are ours as an historic group of students and professor who have never been together in quite this arrangement before? Let all of us learn and teach, work and study, toward helping the singularity of this occasion be noteworthy as a site of discovery and discernment.

In a recent Guardian interview, legendary director Jane Campion (the only woman ever to win the prestigious Cannes Palme d’Or) states the following: “Film-making is not about whether you're a man or a woman; it's about sensitivity and hard work and really loving what you do. But women are going to tell different stories – there would be many more stories in the world if women were making more films.”

This course looks closely at contemporary female-authored films in an effort to honor and attend to these "different stories" that often pass under the radar of popular audiences and critical recognition; this course further explores, through feminist film history and theory, the contexts that have given rise to these films and the socio-political and emotional resonance of these films over time.

While women have been making films since the beginning of cinema, their contributions have been less historically legible and visible than those of their male counterparts, an invisibility that, in turn, further curbs women’s access to the budgetary and human resources (to say nothing of the time) required of filmmaking. Unsurprisingly and in keeping with histories of art objects more generally, film canons thus privilege stories and worlds created by white men with capital and power. Women often figure prominently within these worlds, as they occupy the role of objectified spectacle (i.e. young, beautiful, white women who connote, in Laura Mulvey's terms, "to-be-looked-at-ness") and muse, but women have less so often been visible as the makers of such cinematic worlds. Female film directors often contest a tradition of the patriarchal gaze (cinematic conventions that rely on woman-as-spectacle), which means that female-directed films often try to restructure how we look at other characters and the world, through style and story.

Even as film history increasingly acknowledges and includes women's work--and even as the formal study of film grows up inextricably alongside feminist film theory--female artists remain marginalized in the film industry (in 2015, only 7% of Hollywood films were female-directed). As Jane Campion suggests, women filmmakers have the potential to tell different stories, to transform our existing set of imagistic possibilities, in ways that expand our spectatorial imagination and even change our political reality. And thus, as a means of revising and expanding the canon of film history, this course focuses on recent (21st century) global films made by women.

At the heart of this Contemporary Women Filmmakers class is my own vulnerable experimentation with a new form of pedagogy: videographic criticism, an emergent form within film and media studies that combines scholarly writing with image-making. Such risk and challenge feel appropriate, given how we as a class overtly discuss the political and personal implications of form. This privileging of lyric essays and audiovisual projects ideally befits a course that overtly engages concerns of authorial context and intention.

In spring 2012, The Guardian—in one of numerous similar accounts—described the 84th Academy Awards as a “golden festival of nostalgia, honouring films that pay tribute to the early days of cinema” by celebrating Hugo and The Artist—two films that, according to New York Times critic A.O. Scott, prominently feature “backward-looking movie love” and the “glories of the silent era.” In the subsequent years of public acclaim for self-reflexive celebrations (or eulogies) for cinema, critics have opined passionately over the life and death of cinema, all the while entrenching their arguments within cinema’s “youth” in ways that mythologize and romanticize history within contours appropriate to cinematic spectacle. Though scholars have studied (and audiences have screened) film for well over a century, something about our present moment suggests a fascination with the origins of this very medium, itself defined by change and movement. This course highlights multiple technological, aesthetic, and socio-political changes as they give rise to the long 20th century (and early 21st century) of moving images. A symptom and virtue of our changing media, we now have more possibilities to stream and share more of the films/media that turn-of-the-century audiences would have encountered as their “new” media; moreover, our contemporary media allows us to put images and films in immediate comparison with one another, in ways that earlier film students and scholars couldn't have imagined.

Instead of strictly a star study, studio history, or formalist analysis, this course explores multiple ways of conceiving history and considers the social, political, ideological, and phenomenological implications of crafting cause-and-effect linearity to create a history of film itself. To craft any history involves making generalizations—privileging one film, image, person or event at the cost of excluding another. In this course, we are mindful of these exclusions, as we collect, review, evaluate, and share our research and reflections. This Early Cinema seminar allows us to be both spectators and scholars—both students and audience members—as we balance the pressure to be critical and amazed, moved and thoughtful.

Depending on the scholarly collection, film festival, or course, “Early Cinema” can include films from 1895-1917, films of the silent era, cinema ruled by attraction, turn-of-the-century spectacle, and more. As Jennifer Bean claims in her Introduction to A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, this term “broadly signifies not only a historical period but also, importantly, a critical category” that “emphatically underscores the medium’s intimate ties to the practices of exhibition as well as its dependency on media intertexts and shared cultural mores.” Similar to Bean’s Introduction, this course connects formalist analysis of early films with scholarship regarding audiences, production, artistry, and modernity. As with any history, this course includes more gaps than it fills; even the selected texts and films merely exacerbate these gaps, glaringly pointing to stars, films, national cinemas, directors, and scholars whose work might likewise be here featured. Yet this course aspires toward a rigorous understanding of cinema’s first two decades. To facilitate comparative studies within this narrow temporal scope, this course privileges American cinema, though our conversations and readings will be mindful of cinematic events and historiography within an international context.

In “How Should One Read a Book?,” Virginia Woolf affirms that writing is both irresistible and impossible, necessary and daunting. Like a dream, when we “attempt to reconstruct [a distinct impression] in words...it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions.” As with all efforts at expression, writing shapes that which it tries to say. As with any attempt at measurement, writing changes that which is measured. Writing can be a superpower, a mode by which to know, learn, teach, feel, dream, empathize, care, persuade, discover, express concern, offer compassion, and pay attention. Writing exercises hope, in that we might be read and understood. Writing exercises vulnerability, in that we trust a reader to be kind. Writing gives us time, slowing down the speed of dialogue and opening up the chance to revise for the right word or better phrase that yields a truer claim. This class whittles myriad ways of writing into a particular shape: writing about film.

An art defined by movement (movies move, after all), film lends movement to writing. An art inherently ephemeral, film finds form and materiality in writing about it. While film classes generally aim to teach some aspect of film (genre, history, theory, concept) through writing and reading about films, this class uniquely aims to privilege the writing and reading itself. This class involves the reading and making of writing that honors a) films themselves; b) our personal histories, memories, and emotions relative to film; c) the ways that film shapes and reflects the world beyond the screen; and c) the writing as its own art. What makes for good film writing? Who makes it, and how might we? How does the movement at the heart of the moving image media thwart and yield written expression? How does film relate to experience, and how can writing render and synthesize both? This course studies the formal possibilities of film criticism, reviews, lyric essays, public writing, and videographic criticism—pieces that fit within but also stretch the disciplinary bounds of film and media studies. We will read intensively and extensively, as we craft, modulate, workshop, and revise our own writing. The texts of this class engage film as an art and writing about film as its own art, something beyond academia and squarely within the public sphere. This class works toward the preparation of one perfect piece of writing, yours, that you will have revised, workshopped, and polished, such that you will make something truly yours, about which you can feel proud.

How can an immaterial screen of light and shadow make us laugh? Which films compel our laughter, and why? (Why) do we take pleasure in sharing what we find humorous? This course hopes to demystify film comedy in ways that heighten (instead of exhaust) our sensitivity to and appreciation of humor. Classical texts define comedy in opposition to tragedy, insofar as comedy ends with the creation of a better world, which desirably orders chaos. Yet we might also describe comedy as resolutely anti-narrative, insofar as laughter bursts through an otherwise organized world (think of Meg Ryan’s orgasmic diner performance in When Harry Met Sally), thereby rupturing causal chains. Through the centuries, this upbeat narrative turn has gradually become aligned with whatever implicitly promises to elicit our laughter. The fact that we can familiarly designate a group of films as "comedy" hints at a universality of meaning-making that yields a laughing response. Laughter can allow us to feel like part of a group (we laugh together) or to feel alienated (by what we do or do not find funny).

Through historically-significant film comedies and theories of comedy, this course aspires toward a framework for reading humour (and its absence) in the world beyond the film screen. Our general routes of inquiry include the following:

• What tensions and balances, what styles and stories, work in tandem to elicit both an individual and a public explosion of laughter?

• What kinds of humor can withstand the test of time, and what jokes are particular to their social, historical, and aesthetic context? Why do some comedy films age better than others?

• To what extent does a film's ability to make us laugh compare with films that make us cry, feel sad, or wax nostalgic?

• What's the affective significance of laughter, and how can cinematic style create a laughing spectator? What can we learn from the singularity or plurality of this audience?

• What loss is inherent in comedy and laughter?

• How does the ephemerality of film convey the fleetingness or endurance of a joke, or of happiness more generally?

• How can we write about and discuss film comedy with intelligence and rigour without draining our conversations of the requisite spiritedness of the subject?

Drawing from classical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and aesthetic theories of laughter, comedy, and film style, we will study the pleasurable sensation, rhetorical weight, and social affect that comedic form can yield. Studying both the gravity and levity of film comedy will ideally sharpen our senses of humor.

How do we write, read, and talk about films we love? This intimate and rigorous senior seminar studies the work of canonical film critics alongside contemporary modes of film criticism (e.g., print/online journalism, video essays, podcasts, Letterboxd reviews, and social media posts). Students will create original work, mindful of the following questions:

• How might we reconcile our unique experiences of films—the memories, dreams, desires, hopes, and fears that they conjure—with those of a mass audience?

• How might film criticism help us appreciate both the audiovisual richness of cinema and the expressive capacity of language?

• Who gets to be a critic, and how?

• Whose voices aren’t we hearing, and why?

• How does the history of film criticism—in tandem with the history of film —reveal societal trends and power dynamics?

Within a supportive workshop environment that emphasizes craft, practice, and revision, students will have the opportunity to write and edit film criticism for the international undergraduate film journal, Film Matters.

This class considers what we can do with our cinephilia, how an impassioned love of film might live beyond the classroom and theater.

All musicals share one surefire value: that singing and dancing are good (especially when song conveys sincerity), that they afford pleasant and pleasing if not useful and productive ways of being. Musicals are often about finding one’s voice or discovering something new, whether the desire to be expressive, the possibility of romance and friendship, a more vibrant and active community—and, generally, a better world. Drawing upon both film theory and history, this course explores the changing appeal, the vibrant spectacle, the demystifying self-reflexivity, the socio-political resonance, the structured wish-fulfillment, the attractive memorability, and the narrative resonance of the Hollywood film musical. As part of our inquiry, we will explore what it means to write scholarship that’s fueled by love, intelligence, responsibility, emotions, and substance; how might our film writing balance attention to history, theory, and subjective experience?

What can film do and make? How does film reveal or create the world? How can this intangible and ephemeral form, built of light and shadow, inspire our embodied and emotional engagement? How does a film change when experienced theatrically, as part of a mass audience, or individually, in a home theater (or on a phone or laptop)? More broadly, how does a theoretical framework for approaching a film determine what we see? Through combining the outward appearance of moving images with an inward reflection on how and why we’re moved to experience such sensuous contact, studying film theory involves studying perception in relation to personal time, cultural memory, and socio-political history. We will study theories of form, realism, and structure; and we will further amplify the voices that emerge in response to these structures, perspectives that redress oversights of earlier theories of film and open possibilities for more inclusive art and audiences. At its heart, this course works to demystify “film theory” from a position of far-away academic remove and to celebrate theory’s power, use, force, and vitality. Our course explicitly addresses the transformative capacity of theory to lend shape to how we understand, make, and change the world. These questions about film theory readily map onto ways of reading texts—cinematic, televisual, literary, photographic—more broadly.

From a darling of indie film to the highest grossing female filmmaker in history, Greta Gerwig shines. Her name has become become shorthand for vibrant authorship, feminist worldbuilding, and youthful cinematic exuberance. Her films pose difficult questions about class and gendered inequity, invite critique about racial privilege, and challenge while perpetuating popular conceptions of youth and beauty. Foregrounding formalist, historical, ecocritical, feminist, and phenomenological frameworks, this class studies Gerwig’s meteoric rise, her early acting and writing career (i.e., Frances Ha, Mistress America), her influences, and her creative process, with sustained attention to the form and reception of Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019), and Barbie (2023).

This course studies the feature films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, with particular focus on My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, and The Boy and the Heron. Course texts include Susan Napier’s Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art, Miyazaki’s Starting Point and Turning Point (collections of his essays and interviews), and theories/histories of animation, environment, childhood, technology, capitalism, spirituality, and Japanese culture and tradition.

How might literature and film recalibrate our attention to the natural world? How might natural and elemental movement, change, duration, and scale inspire aesthetic forms and autobiographical ways of knowing? Framed by recent lyrical nature-infused memoirs and theories of attention, this course cultivates a naturalistic attention as a way of ecocritically reading literary and cinematic adaptation. How can the new worlds built by literature and film inspire curiosity toward or model a way of writing natural history? How does a novelistic description of blossoming trees, for example, compare with a film’s photographic attention to blossoms? How do naturalistic episodes anchor, complement, and challenge narrative movement? How does seasonal change itself carry a story, one that shapes films, novels, and our experience as readers and spectators? To what end can literature and film build a natural history, one ever precious within a changing climate? This course studies how reading can transform our perception toward a naturalist sensitivity to the longer duration (seasons, trees, aging, etc.) that undoes human’s starring role in the natural world.

How do stories change forms? How does a script become a film? How do stories become a script? Through case studies of screenplays, films, music, and televisual series, this course focuses on transformation and adaptation: how does form determine what we see, hear, remember, love, desire, fear, and dream?

Possible artists include Wes Anderson, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Nora Ephron, Greta Gerwig, Rebecca Hall, Todd Haynes, Barry Jenkins, Charlie Kaufman, Callie Khouri, Kasi Lemmons, Phyllis Ngai, Jon Raymond, Dee Rees, Kelly Reichardt, Shonda Rimes, Celine Song, Taylor Swift, Phoebe Waller-Bridges, Lulu Wang, Billy Wilder, and Chloé Zhao.