Graduate CIN Courses Available 2011-12
The Cinema Studies Institute has spots available in the following Cinema Studies (CIN and JFF) courses for graduate students from other departments. Students interested in enrolling in these courses may email the Graduate Program Assistant, Tony Pi, at gradcinema.studies@utoronto.ca.
(F=Fall, S=Spring)
Open to All
Spots have been set aside for a wide range of students in these courses.- CIN1002HF: Cinema and Culture
- Angelica Fenner
- Tuesdays 3-5, Wednesdays 4-6
- IN313
- The course begins with an examination of concepts of culture, from Herder to Arnold, forward to Hall et al. It then takes up specific case studies in which cinema has played a significant role in arguments about the formation of cultures and/or subcultures, where the representation of cultural practice has been at issue, or when cinematic practice has had an intentional effect on cultural formation and production. Finally, the course will examine how the discursive production of cinema as a distinct medium in relation to other media has played a role in the production and regulation of cultural hierarchies.
- CIN1002HS: Cinema and Culture
- Nic Sammond
- Wednesdays 12-2, Thursdays 2-4
- IN223
- What is a culture’s relationship to film? To movies? To cinema? What exactly is ‘culture’ in each of those equations? Revisiting some of the foundational texts in the study of culture and its products—such as Kant, Marx, or Freud—this course approaches cinema and culture as mutually constitutive terms. It takes up specific case studies in which cinema has played a significant role in arguments about cultural or subcultural formation, or where the representation of specific cultural practices has been at issue, or when cinematic practice has been imagined to positively or negatively affect a culture. Building on those foundations, we will finally take up the discursive production of ‘cinema’ in relation to other media, considering how its ongoing production as a distinct medium in an era of ‘convergence’ figures in the production and regulation of political, economic, and cultural hierarchies—or, why for some people today the phrase ‘cinematic culture’ is an abomination.
- CIN1005HF L0201: Special Studies in Cinema: Colour and the Moving Image
- Brian Price
- Tuesdays 10-12 & 6-8
- IN313
- Jean-Luc Godard once noted that Coca-Cola and Communism share an affinity for the same saturated red—wondering, thereby, how it could be that this beacon of capitalism could share a mode of identification with a system to which it is entirely opposed. The paradoxical character of red—and the polyvalence of colour more generally—has led, until very recently, film theorists and film historians to ignore it, and for a number of reasons. For one, colour poses serious problems for interpretation. If one colour can mean many things, how will we understand any given instance? To make matters worse, we all perceive colour slightly differently and colour has been known to fade in time. If that is so, I may be inclined to wonder if the blue motif that I am analyzing will appear to others in the same way? How am I to know if what appears now has appeared before? Colour, then, is primarily a problem of interpretation and perception, especially if we believe that interpretations can be right or wrong. Our task in this course, however, is not to enlarge the skepticism about colour and interpretation. Rather, in considering philosophical, scientific, and historical discourses about colour, we will arrive at a variety of ways of analyzing colour style in film and video art. Likewise, as we begin to come to terms with the perceptual instability as a positive phenomenon, we will consider how and why dominant histories of film style have been written, especially as the taming of colour has been central to an ongoing categorical distinction between narrative cinema and the avant-garde, morality and hedonism.
- CIN1005HS L0301: Special Studies in Cinema: Media/Participation
- Meghan Sutherland
- Mondays 12-2 & 6-8
- IN313
- In the age of TiVo, YouTube, and voter-based reality shows such as the global Idols and Got Talent franchises, it is easy to think of the “new” in new media as a short-hand for the revolutionary promise of consumer participation in the construction of both global and national popular culture. However, the phenomenon of participatory media is hardly as “new” as new media technology, nor is it the self-evident bearer of democratic values that many proponents of "social media" technology would like to suggest. In order to make sense of the complex social and political issues that surround contemporary discourses of participatory media—as well as their mobilization by activists and consumers alike—this course will provide a historical survey of “old” media technologies and aesthetics of participation, running from 19th century popular theater to 20th century radio, film, television, and activist video art, but with an extended concentration on the participation-driven television shows of the fifties that set the generic precedent for contemporary television and internet programming. At the same time, it will provide a theoretical and philosophical inquiry into the very notion of participation as it intersects with theories of democratic politics and activism. In short, the course will provide an intensive opportunity to think about the politics of participation and the sociopolitical challenges they present in contemporary media culture.
- CIN6156HF: Dark Passages: Film and the Geometry of Racial Imagination
- Nic Sammond
- Wednesdays 12-2, Thursdays 2-4
- IN223
- In Blackface White Noise, Michael Rogin makes the claim that the three most significant changes in American cinema history, the development of analytical editing and classical narrative (Birth of a Nation), the introduction of sound (The Jazz Singer), and the introduction of Technicolor (Gone With the Wind) were all constructed around the racial oppression of African Americans. While the overall accuracy of Rogin’s film history is debateable, it does remain true that these films are considered landmarks in the development of the cinema, and that consideration of them has often overlooked their racial formations. This course will focus on race in film, but will shift from an emphasis on the body, to a focus on the metaphysics of spatial relations in the cinematic and their relationship to notions of racialized geometries and geographies. Over the course of the semester, we will explore such issues in discrete units, such as: animation, minstrelsy, and the screen as boundary between real and ideal; the black western and the regulation of national space; the musical, rhythm, the ludic imaginary; and race and the transnational.
Limited Space Available
Fewer spots may be available in these courses. Some of these are cross-listed in another department as well.- CIN1005HF L0101: Special Studies in Cinema: Textuality of the Cinematic Body
(Also ENG6813HF) - Corinn Columpar
- Tuesdays 10-12, Thursdays 10-12
- IN223
- In this course we will examine the various ways in which the body is constructed, circulated, and read as text in cinema, where the superficial bears the burden of signification. More specifically, we will consider the role of the body in a variety of cinematic genres, including musicals, pornography, horror, and melodrama, in order to explore a wide array of inscriptive practices that serve to map the body as a whole or privilege certain constituent parts, as well as the hermeneutical acts such practices encourage. While our primary object of study will be a set of filmic texts and film-related scholarship (be it theoretical, historical, and/or critical in nature), we will also be reading material from philosophy, psychology, and literary studies on a wide array of topics, from the histrionics of hysteria to the spectacle of race, from the kinetics of dance to the paroxysms of pain. As a result, we will gain insight into not only the relationship between corporeality and cinema, but also, more generally, the ways that concepts such as surface and depth, materiality and meaning, appearance and essence, affect and intellect are defined both against and through each other within visual culture at large.
- CIN1539HS: Film Comedy and Popular Culture
(Also HIS1539HS) - Rob King
- Mondays 4-6, Tuesdays 5-7
- IN223
- This course will explore the history of American film comedy from the origins of cinema to the end of the studio era in the early 1960s. In its various forms, comedy has always been a staple of American film production. But it has also always been a site of heterogeneity and nonconformity in the development of American cinema, with neither its form nor content fitting existing models of classical film practice. This course accounts for that nonconformity by exploring comedy's close and essential links to “popular” cultural sources (in particular, vaudeville and variety); it considers how different comic filmmakers have responded to and reshaped those sources; and it examines the relation between comedy and social formation (class and ethnicity in particular). Rather than engage the entire spectrum of comic styles (romantic comedy, genre parody, screwball, etc.), this course focuses on a single tradition bridging the silent and sound eras: the performance-centered, “comedian comedy” format associated with performers as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and Bob Hope. The methodology will be interdisciplinary throughout, examining the history of screen comedy as a history of the changing social patterns that produce and permit laughter.
- JFF1100HS: Surrealism & French Cinema
- James Cahill
Tuesdays 5-9 - IN313
- This seminar studies the often unexpected, strange, and strained encounters between Surrealism and the cinema, and the aesthetic, political, and theoretical debates produced by their conjuncture. The course will pursue three trajectories with regards to its topic. The first traces out a precise history of surrealist-engagements with cinema as it emerged in interwar Paris, including the work of key dissident surrealists (Ivan Goll, Jean Painlevé, Antonin Artaud, and Georges Bataille). The second trajectory examines the manner in which cinematic surrealism exceeds this narrow context and has circulated more globally. The third trajectory approaches surrealism as a sensibility that informs modes of reception and criticism informed by—but not constrained by—geographical and historical limits. In other words, we will examine surrealism as a possible method for critical and theoretical studies of cinema and other media. Seminar in English. Readings will be available in French and in English translation.
Spots have been reserved for students in the French department.