Archived: 2024-2025 Graduate Courses
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- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
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- PROFESSOR: Aubrey Anable
- DESCRIPTION: This graduate seminar will consider the ways that emotion figures in theoretical and historical accounts of film and related audio-visual media. Questions about emotion and “affect” are at the root of contemporary debates about identity, subjectivity, politics, and representation. Yet, the body—its sensual capacities and vulnerabilities—is often figured as that which media technologies and those who study them must overcome or entirely deny. Our primary concern will be tracing this intellectual history and the ways contemporary media culture and recent theoretical shifts reframe the relationship between media and emotion. We will use screenings and readings as materials to think (and feel) with.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA
- Cross-listed with: CLMD 6105F
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- PROFESSOR: Laura Horak
- DESCRIPTION:Course DescriptionThis course will introduce students to the theories and methods of intersectional feminist, Black, Indigenous, queer, and trans digital humanities (Lothian and Phillips 2013; Bailey 2015; Risam 2015; Bailey et al. 2016; Wernimont and Losh 2018). It will bring together the insights of critical race studies, Indigenous studies, feminism, queer, and transgender studies with new digital methods, and explore the ways that scholars are using new digital tools to work collaboratively for social justice. We will investigate the ways that colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, and ableism shape the digital technologies we use our everyday lives (e.g. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.) as well as how Indigenous, Black, queer, and trans scholars and activists are using digital tools to reconnect with ancestors, reveal unseen patterns governing everyday life in the past and the present, and create new forms of community.We will examine a range of digital humanities projects through the lens of intersectional digital humanities, examining how they work in terms of: power (e.g. What kinds of power do team and community members bring to the table? Who is not in the room? How is the project governed?); labor (e.g. Who does what kind of labor? How are they recognized? How fairly and quickly are they compensated? How sustainable are these ways of working?); value (e.g. Who benefits?); credit (e.g. Who get credit for their labor? Who is cited?); privacy (e.g. What kind of things should not get put online? What are the appropriate protocols for sharing things with various people?); and harm (e.g. Does the work leave people vulnerable to harm? Does it gravely misrepresent them?). We will also explore the challenges of capturing the complexities of identity in data structures.Students are not required to purchase textbooks or other learning materials for this course.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION:By the end of this term, students will be able to:
- Apply a critical intersectional lens to digital tools, platforms, and research methodologies
- Provide examples of how Indigenous, Black, queer, and trans scholars and activists are using digital tools for new purposes
- Think creatively and ethically about how to use digital tools and methodologies to conduct research
- READINGS: TBA
- Cross-listed with: CLMD 6104 & DIGH 5902
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- PROFESSOR: Laura Horak
- DESCRIPTION: This course offers a rigorous orientation to the discipline of Film Studies. We will think critically about and practice key methodologies of the discipline, ranging from interpretation and close analysis, to building arguments (both written and audiovisual) conducting archival and online research, and formulating original research project proposals. We will also explore the genealogies of key concepts in Film Studies, including national cinema, genre, and authorship. In the course, students will work on their analytic, writing, research, and communication skills.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Tentative: Leading class discussion (10%), Close analysis essay (15%), Archival object project (30%), Final project (45%)
- READINGS: Online readings
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- PROFESSOR: Kester Dyer
- DESCRIPTION: This course builds on the skills and knowledge acquired in FILM 5010. It introduces and expands on key debates in the field of Film Studies, and places a particular focus on anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial approaches to cinema. It describes the historical trajectory of such debates and addresses more recent developments as they pertain to the discipline. It tackles key thinkers associated with major concepts like Orientalism, subalternity, hybridity and mimicry, representation, refusal, and visual sovereignty, as well as important movements like Third and Fourth Cinema. As part of their assignments, and based on their proposals from FILM 5010, students will either develop a final essay or a literature review for a thesis or major research paper.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: All course readings will be provided free of charge via Brightspace.
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- PROFESSOR: Malini Guha
- DESCRIPTION: This course continues where FILM 5010 left off in offering an advanced orientation to some of the longstanding debates in the discipline of film studies in an Anglophone context while also introducing students to more contemporary methods of analysis. Topics to be studied in this course include: film’s enduring relationship to reality; the question of how we might disrupt the Western-centric nature of the discipline; revisiting and rethinking the gaze; interdisciplinary methods of analysis.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: Readings will be available via Brightspace.
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- PROFESSOR: Aboubakar Sanogo
- DESCRIPTION: The archive has, in recent years, become one of the most exciting and dynamic fields of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Taking this into account, this interdisciplinary seminar will explore theories, histories and practices pertaining to the archival, with the moving image as its point of entry and focus, while in conversation with other relevant media and fields concerned with the archival (museum studies, library and information sciences, philosophy, political science, history, heritage and memory studies, the hard sciences, etc.). It will revisit some of the most important theories of the archival along with lesser-known ones. It will also critically retrace the history of the moving image archival movement from its inception to the present. In addition, it will explore the major debates and issues pertaining to archival practice including safeguarding, preservation, restoration, heritage, collecting, cataloguing, access, curating and programming, policy, the analog vs digital, the status of film-related materials, as well as examine the significance of such identity formations as race, gender, sexuality, the national, etc. for a reimagining and reconfiguration of the archive.
Past contributors to the course have included both Canadian and international archival institutions, organizations and projects: Library and Archives Canada, the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and affiliates, the Media Ecology Project (MEP), the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), as well as filmmakers, academics, curators and critics and film preservationists from around the world. - METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA
- Cross-listed with: FILM 4901
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- PROFESSOR: Aboubakar Sanogo
- DESCRIPTION: Film 5506-4002-Graduate Documentary Seminar-Winter 2025
“All great fiction films tend toward documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction . . . He who opts wholeheartedly for one necessarily finds the other at the end of his journey.” Jean-Luc Godard
“Every time you are getting ready to make a shot in a documentary film, you are asking yourself questions about your cinematographic approach. You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself.” Rithy Panh“I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So, I began looking at documentary films.”- Ken Burns
“Documentary film is the one place that our people can speak for themselves. I feel that the documentaries that I’ve been working on have been very valuable for the people, for our people to look at ourselves, at the situations, really facing it, and through that being able to make changes that really count for the future of our children to come.” Alanis Obomsawin
These quotes very much embody some of the multiple stakes, debates, paradoxes and profoundly inspiring dimensions of the inaugural film form known as the documentary (indeed, the cinema was arguably born twice, first as documentary and then as fiction).
This course will explore the theory, history and aesthetics of the documentary mode of filmmaking. As such it will examine major theoretical debates related to the very nature of documentary, and its relationship to larger debates such as truth, reality, fiction, representation, memory, history, identity, subjectivity, among other things. The history of the documentary form will also be examined through such canonic figures, schools and movements as the Lumiere brothers, Thomas Edison, Robert Flaherty, John Grierson, Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Fernando Solanas, alongside such more recent figures as Dieudo Hamadi, Joshua Oppenheimer, Wu Tsang, Katy Lena Ndiaye, John Akomfrah, Ari Folman, among many others - METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA