Archived: 2025-2026 Graduate Course Listings

Fall 2025-Winter 2026

FILM 5002F Special Topics: Media and Emotion – Fall Term

• INSTRUCTOR: 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
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: No textbook; readings on ARES reserves
• CROSS-LISTED WITH: CLMD 6105F

FILM 5010F Film Theory, Historiography & Critical Methodologies I – Fall Term

• INSTRUCTOR: 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, 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: Weekly Reading Memos (20%), Close Analysis Essay (20%), Archival Object Project (20%), Final Project (40%)
• READINGS: Online readings

FILM 5020W Film Theory, History, and Critical Methodologies II – Winter Term

• INSTRUCTOR: 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 readings for this course will be made available electronically at no cost to the students via the Library’s ARES Reserves platform through Brightspace.

FILM 5107 F-Topics in Film History: Cine-Archival Theory, History and Practice – Fall Term

• INSTRUCTOR: 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

FILM 5109F Topics in Film and Philosophy: Cinematic Representation and the Problem of Depiction – Fall Term

• INSTRUCTOR: Marc Furstenau
• DESCRIPTION: We live in a world of pictures—of images, visual representations, or depictions—that are increasingly complex in form and function, combining various audio-visual components, distributed through a wide variety of means. In this course students are introduced to the concept of depiction, to the philosophical debates about the nature and effects of pictures, which can be traced back to the very beginnings of Western philosophy. The most basic debate is about the relation between the depiction and what is depicted, between the picture or image and the objects or events being represented—between visual representation and the world, image and reality. We will trace the history of these philosophical debates, considering photographic and cinematic depiction specifically, in relation to older forms such as drawing, painting, and sculpture, but also new ones, such as computer-generated images, virtual reality, and AI.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Choice of various optional assignments: Reading Memos (10%); Reading Reports (20%); or Essay (40%).

READINGS: Various on-line readings — book chapters and essays.

FILM 5203W Making and Re-making the World: Cross-Disciplinary Activations of Geographical Thinking – Winter Term

• INSTRUCTOR: Malini Guha
• DESCRIPTION: This graduate seminar will ask students to engage in “geographical thinking” as it pertains to historical and speculative acts of world-making across a range of case studies, including films. The course will be designed in accordance with the logics of traction and flight; as we will study repeatable structures and forms, such as the property form and its links to the making of settler colonial worlds while also studying scholarly, artistic and critical propositions for new structures, formations and ways of inhabiting the world that are rooted in anticolonial and anti-carceral thinking and aspirations
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA
• CROSS-LISTED WITH: CLDM 6902

FILM 5506W Graduate Documentary Seminar – Winter Term

• INSTRUCTOR: Aboubakar Sanogo
• DESCRIPTION: Film 5506-4002-Graduate Documentary Seminar-
  “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