Fall 2026
FMST 2152 Film History/Theory 2
David Pettersen, Tuesdays, 1:00pm to 4:50pm
This seminar will focus on the history and theory of cinema from 1960 to the present with an
eye towards understanding how the films, filmmakers, theories, and theorists of the past are
helping scholars today come to grips with the many screens and screen cultures of the present
and future. While we will discuss individual theorists and historians, we also will pay special
attention to historical and theoretical debates within film studies. We will explore these debates
through major film journals, theorists, filmmakers, and film movements. We will examine the
connections among film theory, film analysis, historical context, technology, sound, image,
perception, and ideology. We will also consider the ways in which films and film theory have
intervened in debates of broad interest in the humanities, including nation, race, gender,
sexuality, affect, and the environment. Students will sharpen their ability to analyze and
contextualize cinema through historical writings, and they will identify and execute strategies to
use film theory in their own scholarly writing.
RUSS 2639 Cinema in the Age of Stalin
Anna Kovalova, Wednesdays, 2:30pm to 4:55pm
This course examines Soviet cinema during the Stalinist period, from the late 1920s to the early
1950s. While we will address the impact of censorship and state propaganda on filmmaking
during these decades, the course also explores how cinema remained a site of avantgarde
experiment and popular entertainment despite political constraints. Alongside the celebrated
masterpieces of Sergei Eisenstein and other canonical directors, we will examine a wide range
of films rarely discussed in surveys of Soviet cinema, including early Soviet spy films, thrillers,
animated films, and children’s cinema produced during the Stalin era. The course situates
cinema within the broader cultural landscape of the time, engaging with developments in
architecture, literature, music, and fashion. Through discussions of works by artists such as
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Vera Mukhina, students will explore how film
both reflected and shaped the cultural dynamics of Stalinist society.
Creative Scholarship: The Film Essay
Robert Clift, Thursdays, 1:00pm to 4:50pm
This seminar explores the film and video essay as a form of both creative expression and
critical inquiry. Through a series of short video projects, students will develop foundational
production skills while experimenting with diverse audiovisual styles, strategies, and
modes of address. The course invites students to approach their scholarship and research
in ways that are more expansive and imaginative than traditional written work, encouraging
them to explore diverse modes for expressing ideas and engaging theoretical questions.
The course engages a wide range of practices, drawing on the work of filmmakers such as
Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, John Akomfrah, Arthur Jafa,
and Larissa Sansour, as well as more recent critics and scholars who use the audiovisual to
expand/challenge text-based scholarship.
Previously Taught Graduate Seminars
Spring 2024
CHIN 2059 Adapted for the Screen: Chinese Literature and Film
Kun Qian, 358 Cathedral of Learning, Mondays. 1:00pm to 4:50pm
Adaptation is a common practice in Chinese cinema. A number of well-known films such as Farewell My Concubine and Raise the Red Lantern are adapted from fiction. In these cases, fiction lends itself to cinematic imagination and recreation on the screen, and film provides special perspectives to look at fiction. Sometimes, cinematic techniques also inspire the creative style of fiction. The difference in medium of expression, channel of circulation, targeted audience, and historical contexts in which they were produced create a cross-media “super-text” with complex implications. This course offers a chance to examine some canonical novels and novellas together with the films adapted from them in order to explore verbal and visual representations in modern China. In particular, we will focus on issues of history, romance, gender, sexuality, and body politics, and how they are represented in both fiction and film. We will also explore adaptation from a broader sense of transmediality, examining how the change of medium/media helps shape spectatorship and modes of engaging with the world.
ENGFLM 2491/FMST 2440 Film Sound: History, Theory, Aesthetics
Neepa Majumdar, 407 Cathedral of Learning, Mondays 6:00pm to 9:50pm
Although much of this course's emphasis will be on the history, theory, and aesthetics of cinematic sound, the approach will be through debates in the field of sound studies. Considering film sound as a particular case in the wider context of soundscapes and acoustic ecologies, sonic cultures and practices of listening, sound and the other senses, and the industrialization of sound will provide students with a historically grounded model on which they might base their own research on cinematic or non-cinematic sound practices. Topics to be discussed will include the relation of sound and image, voice and body, aural and visual pleasures, the ontological status of recorded sound, the relation of sound technologies and modernity, and questions of sound and space ranging from the space of the film to culturally specific theories of sound. While the course will provide a historical overview of film sound, there will be two moments of emphasis: the transition from the sonic practices of silent to sound cinema, and the transition from analog to digital sound.