MA courses

MA Course Descriptions 2023-2024

Note: 600-level indicates MA, 800-level indicates PhD. Several courses are offered to both MA and PhD students.

FALL

FMST 601 Methods in Film and Moving Image Studies I

Instructor: Luca Caminati
Monday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This is a mandatory course in the Film Studies MA Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions by examining notable issues in the field. Course materials examine the ways that film history, criticism, and textual analysis have been and can be written, encompassing a range of ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding cinema and the moving image.

FMST 605 Topics in Canadian Cinema: “New” Canadian Documentary

Instructor: May Chew
Wednesday 8:45am-12:45pm

This seminar explores the social, political, historical, and cultural forces behind contemporary nonfiction production and reception in Canada. We will examine key modes of the genre, including cinema vérité, ethnographic, autoethnographic, reflexive, essayistic, activist, participatory, and experimental approaches, while broadening our ambit of nonfiction media to include installation, interactive documentary, and other emergent platforms. Importantly, we will consider how documentary functions as aesthetic and technological practice as well as epistemology and discourse. Using the 1960s as a departure point, the course will critically assess the role of documentary—and the legacy of John Grierson, social realism, and the National Film Board—in constructing national identity. By examining the lineage of documentary as ‘national genre,’ we will also explore how ‘new’ directions for nonfiction media production and engagement continue to adopt and adapt enduring understandings of citizenship and participation.

Our approach to the category of “Canada” will be a critical and anti-colonial one. Canadian documentary media is a contact zone wherein forces of liberalism/consensus as well as resistance frequently collide. It is often such collisions that allow the nation to momentarily coalesce as something stable and inherent. Accordingly, one of our main areas of focus will be media by Indigenous, feminist, queer, Black and diasporic filmmakers whose works advance conceptual, aesthetic, and political tools (decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, queer and racialized subjectivities, transnational imaginaries, counter-archival approaches, etc.) that can help us reconceptualize nation, cultural production, and power.

FMST 635 Topics in Aesthetics & Cultural Theory: Cinephilia

Instructor: Rosanna Maule

Tuesday: 6:00pm-10:00pm

FMST 645 Topics in Film Genres: Global Melodrama

Instructor: Katie Russell

Wednesday: 1:15pm-5:15pm

FMST 665 Topics in Film & Moving Image Studies: Narrative Theory

Instructor: Martin Lefebvre

Thursday: 1:15pm-5:15pm

FMST 602 Methods in Film and Moving Image Studies II

Instructor: Ishita Tiwary
Monday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This is a mandatory course in the Film Studies MA Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions by examining notable issues in the field. Course materials examine the ways that film history, criticism, and textual analysis have been and can be written, encompassing a range of ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding cinema and the moving image.

FMST 630 AA Film Theory: Critical Theory - Worlding Film and Media

Instructor: Masha Salazkina
Tuesday 6pm-10pm

This course will introduce students to the critical debates of the past 40 years on the relationship between geography, politics, and cultural production, focusing on some of the key conceptual categories that have shaped them (globalization, transculturation, cultural hybridity, critical and minor transnationalisms, decolonial option, Third World, Global South, etc).  The seminar will then turn to the theoretical and historiographic developments in the discipline of film and media studies which emerged as responses to these questions: from post-colonialist critiques and Third Cinema, to the “spacial turn” and World Cinema, and the more recent shifts towards transnational approaches to production, circulation, and reception of film and media.

FMST 630 A Film Theory: Metz & Structural Movement

Instructor: Martin LeFebvre

Thursday 1:15-5:15pm

FMST 665 A Topics in Film and Moving Image Studies: Animation Ecologies

Instructor: Marc Steinberg

Wednesday 1:15-5:15pm

This course treats animation within its expanded field of practices, applications, and milieus. It takes stock of recent scholarship on animation as performance, animation as industry, and animation as the focal point for an ecology of media practices. It examines animation as metaphor (the bringing-to-life of something inanimate) from which to interrogate planetary ecologies; animation as oppositional moving image practice (animated documentary and experimental animation); animation as object of theoretical investigation (animation theory); animation as a set of labour practices pioneering global outsourcing (television animation and special effects); animation as a site of moving image geographies and fandoms (anime); animation as an intellectual property engine and empire (Disney). We will read new strains of critical theory that place the moving image in relation to planetary ecologies; we will also read theories of ecology and view animated films that question the extractive regimes that characterize human behaviour today. Through it all, we will pay particular attention to the political nature of animation as a contested set of visual regimes, labour practices, industrial organizations, built architectures, and medial and terrestrial ecologies.

FMST 665 B Topics in Film and Moving Image Studies: Style in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles

Instructor: John Locke

Friday: 1:15-5:15

Room: FB-250

This seminar examines the work of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Each week a film by Welles or Hitchcock is screened and then discussed using detailed analysis of video segments. The seminar is about the use of formal analysis to understand film style.

An additional aim of the close analysis of these films is to question familiar critical views about them. These films have been discussed so frequently in the literature that an effort needs to be made to break with the conventional views and look again at the films themselves.

The principal written work required is an essay about a particular Welles or Hitchcock film selected by the student at the beginning of the term. The student concentrates on this one film during the entire term. Students prepare an annotated bibliography related to their selected film and make brief presentations to the seminar.