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PhD Courses

PhD Courses Descriptions 2023-2024

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

PhD-Only Courses FALL

FMST 801 Seminar in Film and Moving Image History: The Anticolonial Film Archive - Global Counterculture (1955-1975)

Instructor: Luca Caminati

Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This class investigate solidarity films shot during the decolonization period, roughly 1955-1975. The methodology for this course is based on Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray’s call for a “cinegeography,” which “indicates an interdisciplinary practice of mapping the affinities, proximities and affiliations of ciné-cultures that emerged from and participated in the conflictual and connective militant politics of anticolonial struggle and revolutionary decolonisation in the late twentieth century.” This geographical and political approach aims at connecting individuals, institutions, as well as assessing aesthetics and politics that link them transnationally to other situations of urgent struggle. The films screened in this course were intended to function as art in the service of the Third Worldist project, and therefore rejected more traditional bourgeois structure of exhibition and dissemination. For this reason, they have been mostly forgotten, or overlooked, as the political project that animated them is now dissolved.  Key readings for this class will be Ariella Azoulay, Frantz Fanon, Lisa Lowe, Anne Garland Mahler, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Vijay Prashad, Ann Laura Stoler, and Cynthia A. Young, among others.

FMST 806 Proseminar l: Cinema, Media, and Mobilities

Instructor: Masha Salazkina

Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

Room: EV 3.754

This ProSeminar’s goal is to engage students with contemporary debates on cinema and media in the context of multiple mobilities – such travel and exploration, labor migration, transnational film and media production and modes of circulation, digital platforms, transnational reception, etc. Thematically, the first half of the course will focus in particular on the questions of geography and space in relation to the study of both, historical and contemporary aspects of film and media. There will be three primary threads to the course 1) an introduction to Concordia’s research culture, with concrete focus on faculty-led and graduate-led research presentations aimed at bringing first year PhD students into conversation with the research process; 2) seminar discussions on a selection of topics pertinent to frameworks and research methods within global and transnational film and media scholarship and debates around them, and 3) “practicums” that focus on elements of the PhD program and experience.

Specific topics in the course will be chosen in consultation with the students so as to best reflect their research interests – while also introducing them to broader scholarly paradigms and new potential directions for their work. Written and oral assignments are designed to, among other things, develop research and communication skills and best ways to participate in the research culture.

PhD-Only Courses Winter

FMST 804 Seminar in Film & Moving Image Cultural Theory: Transgender Film and Media

Instructor: Cael Keegan
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course provides an overview of the body of scholarship in transgender e.g. “trans” film and media studies, with an emphasis on developments over the past decade. The course will cover transgender theoretical and methodological approaches to film (popular and experimental), television, new media, music videos (e.g. “emotion pictures”), and video games, investigating the major internal claims of this emergent field as well as interventions it poses to prior feminist and queer film/media analyses. It will also explore transgender re-assessments of a range of media texts and platforms from theoretical perspectives developed by the most recent wave of transgender scholarship and activism. Course content will emphasize intersectional discussions of how race, ability, and class stratify transgender life chances while simultaneously determining who gets to create and interpret media.

FMST 807 Proseminar II: Platform Theories and Cultures

Instructor: Marc Steinberg
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course examines the status of the moving image in the platform era. It also examines the state of platform analysis in light of existing writing on television, film and digital media. This course will offer a deep dive into research on platforms with the aim of helping students articulate their own platform-related research projects (or, alternatively, their own projects in relation to platform studies). It will also situate platform studies within longer histories of media and digital media studies, with particular attention to key works over the past four decades that help situate platform studies within a longer lineage of media analysis. In short, we will see how the platform (and platform studies) is both a window into recent discussions of media and race, geography, nation, sexualities, aesthetics, and economic transformations, as well as an opportunity to revisit previous writings in film and media studies, now newly relevant. Finally, as a proseminar, the course will also serve as an orienting place to the PhD program, offering workshops on how to write conference abstracts, how to think about book and article publication, and how to write comprehensive exams – as well as other topics of interest to students.

Combined MA/PhD Courses Fall

FMST 605/805 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 635/835 Topics in Aesthetics & Cultural Theory: Cinephilia and Gender Cultures

Instructor: Rosanna Maule
Tuesday: 6:00pm-10:00pm

The term cinephilia (literally “love of cinema”) connotes a cinematic culture expressed through idiosyncratic viewing rituals and affective responses to films. This seminar offers a conceptual as well as a historical analysis of cinephilia, focusing on its gender-informed manifestations.
The first part of the course will introduce to the concept of cinephilia and its emergence in different times and contexts of cinematic reception. The second part of the seminar will concentrate on cinephile practices produced and circulated by feminist and LGBTQ film and media collectives, filmmakers, film festivals, and fan communities.  

FMST 645/845 Topics in Film Genres: Global Melodrama

Instructor: Katie Russell
Wednesday: 1:15pm-5:15pm

Melodrama is at once an “umbrella genre” for studio-era film production, and it is a genre unto itself. Melodrama is international in scope, although it has significantly different histories in different regions. We will examine melodrama from a variety of perspectives, including narratology and aesthetics, its relationship to histories of disempowerment and social justice, and its role as a critical methodology. Films from the US, Europe, South America and Asia will be screened, and we will read a variety of writing on melodrama by critics and scholars from various global perspectives, examining the ways in which melodrama helps to negotiate social contradictions in different social formations. We will also inquire into the relations between melodrama as a film genre and writing on affect theory (Berlant) and the “Cultural politics of Emotions” (Ahmed). Students will be expected to give class presentations and write final research papers.

FMST 665/865 Topics in Film & Moving Image Studies: Narrative Theory

Instructor: Martin Lefebvre
Thursday: 1:15pm-5:15pm

The aim of this seminar is for students to acquire advanced knowledge of narrative theory, as it pertains especially — though not exclusively — to filmic narratives. Students will read work in the various traditions of narratology (from studies in narrative grammar to narrative poetics ; from Russian Formalism to French structuralism) and will have the opportunity to apply narratological concepts in studies of films and excerpts of films. Narrative will be examined as a form of discourse and a way to mediate and communicate human experience. Although prior knowledge of narrative theory isn't a prerequisite, the seminar will likely be most enjoyed by students who are attracted to theory (as opposed to film history or film criticism).

Combined MA/PhD Courses WINTER

FMST 620/820 AA Topics in Non-European Cinemas: Media, Migrations, Borders

Instructor: Farah Atoui
Tuesday 6pm-10pm

Migration struggles are a global struggle against capital and empire. The logics of border formation and structures of displacement traverse seemingly disparate geographies to expel, immobilize, exploit, and criminalize historically marginalized communities including migrants, refugees, the undocumented, Indigenous and Black people, and People of Color. While bordering practices take different forms—such as fabricated migration crises in Europe, anti-Black carcerality in the US, colonial infrastructures in Palestine, export processing zones in Mexico, and urban gentrification in Canada—they all are, to quote writer and activist Harsha Walia, “the scaffolding for ordering regimes that simultaneously manufacture and discipline surplus populations while parasitically extracting land, labor, and life itself.”

The course engages with this global perspective on bordering practices as violent mediators of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism through the lens of film and moving image studies, anchoring the analysis of border struggles within film and art practices as well as processes of mediation. Rather than focusing on border spectacles emerging from Western sites of media and knowledge production, we will begin from the get-go with counter-visual media interventions that expose the logics, formation, and function of borders, and present counter-narratives, counter-images and counter-histories that oppose the ones produced by contemporary media regimes to shape public imaginaries.

We focus on media-based interventions for the following reason: we want to learn about border struggles as well as about the politics of image-making and representation from media makers as thinkers themselves. Each weekly session is centered on one or more artistic interventions that critically brings to light a particular aspect of borders and displacement. While many of the interventions we engage with are from or about the Arab World, they are put into conversation with works by filmmakers and artists from Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color communities to emphasize common struggles around borders and displacement, and to highlight the role of media in energizing transnational solidarity.  

FMST 630/830 A Topics in Film Theory: Structuralist Movement & Metz

Instructor: Martin Lefebvre
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

The heyday of structuralism in film studies lasted roughly from 1964 to 1980. However, its influence continues to this day. Indeed, it corresponded to important and lasting changes in the study of cinema. Though it was not the sole factor involved, structuralism played a key role in the academic specialization of film studies. This course aims to provide students with an understanding of what structuralism meant in the history of film studies through reading and discussion of a number of key structuralist texts. There will be an emphasis on the work on Christian Metz.

FMST 635/835 A Topics in Aesthetic and Cultural Theory: Transnational Approaches to Film and Media

Instructor: Masha Salazkina
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

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 665/865 B Topics in Film and Moving Image Studies: Film Style: Welles and Hitchcock

Instructor: John Locke
Friday 1:15pm-5:15pm

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.

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