Introduction to Film Theory

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

What is cinema? Does film represent the world, or does it create new ones? Does film help us understand how we see and think, or has it changed our very forms of perception? In this course, students contemplate cinema as a technology, an art form, a mass medium, and a mode of perception. We will explore a range of key debates in film theory, from the early twentieth century to the present. We will consider a variety of topics lying at the intersection of formal-aesthetic and socio-ideological approaches to film, including medium specificity, spectatorship, apparatus, realism, and questions relating to film ontology more generally. We will also consider how feminist, postcolonial, and black film criticism have restructured discourses about the image. The course will train students in the vocabulary of film analysis while introducing them to cinema as a central site for thinking about modernity, politics, aesthetics, and global visual culture.