Current Undergraduate Course Listings

Note: This page is currently being updated.

2026-27 course descriptions will be added as they become available.

PLEASE NOTE:

Times and locations of courses are published in the Public Class Schedule.
Official Calendar Course Descriptions are available in the Undergraduate and Graduate Calendars.
Official Course Outlines will be distributed at the first class of the term.

1. Fall 2026-Winter 2027

1.1 First Year

1.2 Second Year

1.3 Third Year

1.4 Fourth Year

2. Previous years:

Fall 2026-Winter 2027

First Year

FILM 1120A Seminar in Film Studies – Fall Term

INSTRUCTOR: Gunnar Iversen
DESCRIPTION: This seminar course is an introduction to Film Studies. We will look at film as a popular entertainment form, an art and a social phenomenon. In the course we will discuss different ways of interpreting and analyzing films, and the course will also introduce students to important concepts, ideas, issues and the vocabulary in Film Studies. This course is recommended for Film majors.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Essays and seminar papers
READINGS: Textbook: Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience – An Introduction, Sixth Edition (Macmillan).

FILM 1130B Seminar in Film Studies II – Winter Term

INSTRUCTOR: Gunnar Iversen
DESCRIPTION: This seminar course builds on the knowledge and skills acquired in FILM1120A. It introduces and expands on important concepts, ideas, issues, theories and methodologies in the field of Film Studies, and places a particular focus on arguing, using sources and writing skills.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Essays and seminar papers.
READINGS: Textbook: Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience – An Introduction, Sixth Edition (Macmillan).

Second Year

FILM 2601A Film Genres: Science Fiction – Fall Term

INSTRUCTOR: Gunnar Iversen
DESCRIPTION: The course offers an introduction to science fiction cinema. We will explore the definitions of the genre and central themes and issues, such as representations of technology, surveillance, biopolitics, race and gender. We will also discuss the history of science fiction cinema as a genre from the silent period to today.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Essays and seminar papers.
READINGS: Readings will be posted on Brightspace when course starts.

FILM ####A – Term

INSTRUCTOR: …
DESCRIPTION: …
METHOD OF EVALUATION: …
READINGS: …

Third Year

FILM 3901B FILM3901 Special Topics in Film Studies: “Small Screens, Big Spectacles: Film Studies through Television and Transmediality” – Winter Term

INSTRUCTOR: Maki Salmon
DESCRIPTION: This course explores cinema as both a formal object and cultural practice by asking how film changes as it moves through modern screen culture. Students use adaptation, seriality, and convergence as relational tools for analyzing how meaning forms across movement, recurrence, and circulation: cinematic material changes when it enters another medium, gains depth through return and variation, and becomes recognizable through the institutions, technologies, audiences, and judgments that assign value to it. In television, the course finds its central hinge, for how the medium reworks cinema’s relation to spectacle and screen experience, alters distribution patterns, and attends to how its domestic context, serial form and other characteristics alter perception, memory, and cultural recognition. Through weekly screenings, lectures, discussions, collective analysis, and assignments, students acquire a vocabulary and critical tools for examining image, narrative, performance, genre, and reception as parts of the conditions that make screen forms persuasive, meaningful and powerful for individual and cultural perception alike.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Flexible Weighting Model and Various Assignment Styles
READINGS: Online Readings through Brightspace

Fourth Year

FILM 4301A 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: Book chapters and articles.
CROSS-LISTED AS: FILM 5901F

FILM 4901B Capitalism and Critique in Film and Fiction – Winter Term

INSTRUCTOR: Philip Kaisary
DESCRIPTION: Debates over contemporary capitalism abound: in mass-market books, on television and radio, in the pages of such publications as The Financial Times and The Economist, in the reports of global management consultancies, and throughout social media and the blogosphere, discussion of contemporary capitalism’s stagnation, failures, manifold crises, and whether or not it can be fixed has become commonplace. As part of this broad debate, cultural forms – including, but not limited to, film, fiction, painting, and photography – have for long constituted a valuable resource for better understanding and articulating critiques of capitalism. An awareness of this deep history undergirds this course in which we will watch and discuss a corpus of fiction films, art films, and documentary films, produced between the 1990s and the present, that address the inequality, unevenness, and sacrifices that are part and parcel of world-wide or global capitalism. Key concepts and categories that will inform our endeavour will include the idea of ‘savage’ capitalism, techno-capitalism, petro-capitalism, capitalism and class stratified society, and capitalism and the contemporary global migrant crisis. In small groups, we will also read a sample of recent speculative fiction addressed to the concept of “techno-capitalism.” These readings will deepen our understanding and develop our project of critique. Reflecting capitalism’s global reach, our corpus of primary materials are drawn from locations including Argentina, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States. To enrich our viewing of the films and our reading of the fiction, we will draw on various works of critical social and political theory.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Attendance and participation: 20%; Audio (podcast) assignment: 30%; Presentation: 20%; 2-hour, open-book exam: 30%
READINGS: TBA
CROSS-LISTED AS: FILM 5002/ENGL 5901