The Music Video: From Popular Music to Film, Video and Digital Media

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Looking particularly at experimental, avant-garde film, and video traditions and how they inform music videos, this course will encourage students to analyze media phenomena in a manner that is theoretically grounded, context-specific, and historically-situated, as articulated objects constituted in and through communication. By the end of the course students will be able to engage a variety of critical methodologies for the analysis of music videos and their often conflicting images, sounds, and messages. They will also explore the ways in which the production and reception dynamics of the media process shape meaning. Through readings, discussion, written assignments, and screenings students will learn to utilize a number of analytical approaches to the form's visual and auditory materials and will apply these analytical skills to a wide variety of music influenced media.