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FMST 200B: Introduction to Film and Media Studies

Discussions: Tue/ Thurs, 1.20PM-2.35PM, Little 114
Screening: Mon, 7-10PM, Little 105 (Golden Auditorium)

Instructor: Ani Maitra
Email: amaitra@colgate.edu
Office Hours (by appointment): Wed/ Fri, 11AM-12.30PM, Little 310C

Course description:
Film and mass media can be powerful determinants of ideology, identity, and
historical consciousness. This course is a historical and conceptual survey of
media technologies and environments, combining course readings with a
required weekly film screening. The theoretical concepts introduced in this
course enable students to critically approach the visual culture around them: just
how immersed are we in the virtual, and what are the strategies for engaging with
or disengaging from virtual worlds? Students learn to respond to film and media
as proactive, critical, and articulate viewers. Students also acquire the
vocabulary, conceptual strategies, and interpretive skills necessary to closely
analyze the form and content of film and media, as well as the ability to see their
own relation to the ideologies all representations convey. This course counts
toward the Human Thought and Expression area of inquiry/humanities
distribution requirement.

Course objectives:
To understand some of the major arguments and concepts in film and media
studies.
To develop a critical vocabulary to analyze different media forms.
To learn to write coherently and compellingly about films and readings by
engaging with (using, refining, or critiquing) the concepts and arguments
about media encountered in them.
To produce a final digital vid critique by drawing on the course materials and
the contemporary media landscape.

Course readings:
All readings for this class are available as PDFs on the Moodle website for
this class (FMST200B). You should be able to access the website if you are
registered for this class. Please check the website before/ after each class for
updates.
Readings assigned for any given day must be completed before we meet for
discussion.
You are welcome to bring laptops/ iPads to class if you dont want to print the
readings. However, note that you will be called upon to offer comments on
specific texts and passages. So I encourage you to take notes while you are
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prepping for class and bringing your notes to our discussions. Please dont
use your mobile phone as a reading device in class.

Screenings:
Weekly screenings for this class (Monday, 7-10PM, Little 105) are mandatory.
You will be expected to write weekly posts on the films and readings. So
please take notes during screenings.
All films will be on reserve at the library. You can watch the film(s) in the
library if you have missed a screening. I also strongly encourage you to
review the film(s) that you choose to write about in your response papers.

Course Requirements:
In order to receive a passing grade in this class, you will have to meet the
following requirements. No exceptions will be made:

1. Attendance and participation (10% of final grade): I will expect active
attendance at all screenings and seminars: This means that you will have
watched the film(s) and read the texts at least once before class. Also, please
remember to bring your texts, reading notes, and blog posts to class. You are
expected to refer to your notes to raise questions and participate in
discussion in class. There will be a few quizzes that will count towards the
participation grade.

Please note that I will not be able give you a passing grade for the class if you
have more than three unexcused absences (including screenings). You will
not receive a passing grade for this class if you miss more than four classes
(including screenings).

If you have medical and/or personal reasons for missing more than four
classes and/or not being able to complete assignments, please get in touch
with your academic adviser and administrative adviser. It is imperative that
you officially let your advisers know your reasons for failing to meet the
course requirements while or even before notifying me. I will not be able to
make a special case unless I hear from your adviser 2-3 days before an
assignment is due and at least 7 days before final grades are due.

2. Weekly blog posts (5% of final grade): This class will be divided into
groups A and B. Group A will post for the Tue discussion (by 10 AM on Tue)
and group B will post for the Thurs discussion (by 10 AM on Thurs). Blog
posts are meant to be short and informal and should not be fully formed
arguments. More on blog posts in class. On your non-posting day, you should
read your classmates posts and come prepared to respond to them during
our discussion.

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3. 2 short papers (15% x 2 or 30% of the final grade): Over the course of the
semester, you must complete two 4-5 page analytic papers. For each essay,
you will have the option of choosing from a set of prompts focusing on
materials from a particular unit. Assessment rubrics will be handed out with
each assignment. Please see the syllabus for specific deadlines. Late papers
will be graded down.

4. Mid-term exam (20% of final grade): Your midterm exam will be held in
class on Thurs 10/16. The exam will be a combination of factual and
conceptual questions. Some questions may be based on particular film clips
shown during the exam. More instructions/ model questions to follow.

5. Digital video critique (25% of final grade): As a final project for this class,
you will team up with a classmate to produce a 5-minute vid critique of a
media object of your choice. In the video, you will be expected to analyze
your object(s) (e.g. film/TV show/ advertisement/ video game/ news coverage
of a particular issue) by drawing on the work of one or two film and/or media
theorists you have encountered this semester. You will work with mentors at
the Digital Media Learning Center (and with each other!) for this project.
Please see the syllabus for workshops and specific deadlines associated with
this assignment. The final exam for the class will be a showing of your own
videos on Mon, Dec 15 (3-5PM). More instructions/ rubrics for this
assignment will be handed out later in the semester.

Final response (10% of final grade): This will be a short (3-4 page) statement
where you will reflect on your group video project. This paper will give you the
opportunity to describe the project in your own words, identify its main argument,
its limitations (if any), etc.

Grade distribution and final grade calculation:
Attendance and participation: 10%
Weekly blog posts: 5%
2 response papers: 30% (15% x2)
Mid-term exam: 20%
Final project (vid critique): 25%
Reflections on vid critique: 10%
Final grades for this class will be calculated using the following 100-point scale:
A denotes the grade 90 100 (Excellent)
B denotes the grade 80 89 (Good)
C denotes the grade 70 79 (Satisfactory)
D denotes the grade 60 69 (Poor)
F denotes the grade below 60 (Failure)

Resources:
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As your instructor, I am aware that a lot of this material will be new to you. Please
note that its ok to have moments of confusion and uncertainty! But those are
also moments when you should turn to resources on campus starting with

Me, your instructor Please note my office hours above. I take my office hours
as an opportunity to get to know your areas of interest in the course, ideas for
your assignments, and/ or questions on material covered in class. I therefore
expect you to come in as often as you want but with an appointment. I encourage
you to come in every week if necessary. I will not be able to respond to queries
about course materials over email.

The Writing and Speaking Center in 208 Lathrop, committed to helping all
Colgate students succeed as clear, effective communicators. Peer writing
consultants can help you refine your writing by reviewing a paper's focus,
development, organization, clarity, grammar, source integration, or other aspects.
Peer speaking consultants can help you prepare or organize the content of an
oral presentation; they can also help you improve your delivery to an audience.
For more information or to make an appointment,
visit http://www.colgate.edu/writingcenter or call (315) 228-6085.

The Library You will be working with the Digital Media Learning Center for your
final project. But you should also get to know the Film and Media Studies
librarian Debbie Krahmer (dkrahmer@colgate.edu). Debbie is a great resource
and can guide you to books, articles, and visual media relevant to our class. I
also encourage you to explore the research tools available through the library
website: http://exlibris.colgate.edu/help/guides/getting-started.html.

Plagiarism:
Plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of someone elses work as ones own in
all forms of academic endeavor (such as essays, theses, examinations, research
data, creative projects, etc.), intentional or unintentional. Plagiarized material
may be derived from a variety of sources, such as books, journals, internet
postings, student or faculty papers, etc. This includes the purchase or
outsourcing of written assignments for a course. A detailed definition of and the
University policy on plagiarism can be found in the Colgate University Academic
Honor Code available here: http://www.colgate.edu/offices-and-
services/deanofthecollege/academichonorcode.

Special Needs and Accommodations:
Colgate is committed to offering services that are responsive to the individual
talents and needs of students who have disabilities. Any student requesting
accommodations must first contact Lynn Waldman, director of Academic Support
and Disability Services. The instructor and the student will together work out the
best possible accommodations. Visit http://www.colgate.edu/centers-and-
institutes/center-for-learning-teaching-and-research/academic-support-and-
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disability-services/how-to-make-your-needs-known and call (315) 228-7375 to
make an appointment with Lynn Waldman.

Discussion Etiquette:
The classroom must be a safe space for all participants. While one of the primary
goals of the course is to foster critical thinking, please be respectful of others
identities and faiths. Your participation is key to a productive discussion sessions
and in-class activities. However, please try to offer comments, insights, and
questions that do not shut the discussion down but propel it forward and
encourage others to join in.
Harassment Prevention and Resources for Help:
Colgate University is committed to the goals of fairness and equity in all aspects
of the educational enterprise, and to a learning and living environment where all
members of the community feel safe and respected. For definitions of and
Colgates policies on discriminatory and bias-related harassment, sexual
harassment, and sexual misconduct, please visit: http://www.colgate.edu/offices-
and-
services/deanofthecollege/biassexualmisconductresources/eonondiscriminationp
olicy. The same page will also give you information about reporting harassment,
confidentiality, and remedial action.







SYLLABUS
Week Zero: Overview
Thurs 8/28
Introduction and overview
Week One
Fri 8/29
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In-class screening and discussion: Me@the Zoo (dir. Chris Moukarbel and
Valerie Veatch, 2012)
UNIT ONE: CINEMA AND COUNTER-CINEMA
Week Two: Silent Cinema
Mon 1/9 Screening:
Shorts by the Lumire Brothers, Alice Guy-Blach, and Georges Mlis (30 min)
Sherlock Jr. (dir. Buster Keaton, 1924, 49 min)
Tue Readings:
Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and
the Avant-Garde, Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas
Elsaesser, 56-62.
Robert Knopf, excerpts from The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton,
10-15; 36-52.
Tom Gunning, Early Cinema as Global Cinema: The Encyclopedic
Ambition, in Early Cinema and the National, ed. Giorgio Bertellini et al,
11-16.

Thurs Readings:
Jane Gaines, Of Cabbages and Authors, in A Feminist Reader in Early
Cinema, ed. Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra, 88-118.

[Recommended: Amelie Hastie, Circuits of Memory and History: The
Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blach, in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, 29-59.]

Week Three: The Classical Cinematic Cocoon
Mon 09/08 Screening:
The Purple Rose of Cairo (dir. Woody Allen, 1986, 85 min)
Tue 09/09 Readings:
Hugo Mnsterberg, Why We Go to the Movies, in Critical Visions in Film
Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. ed. Timothy Corrigan et al,
9-17.

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Siegfried Kracauer, The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies, in The Mass
Ornament: Weimar Essays, 291-304.

Discussion: How to write about films--some terms, definitions, and
resources.

[Recommended: Roland Barthes, Leaving the Movie Theater, in The
Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, 345-349.]
Assignment #1 and instructions posted
Thurs 09/11 Readings:
Discussion: How to write about filmssome terms, definitions, and
resources.

Jean-Louis Baudry, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus, Film Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter 1974-1975): 39-47.

[Recommended: Jean-Louis Comolli, Technique and Ideology: Camera
Perspective, Depth of Field, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 421-443.]
Week Four: The Classical Gaze
Mon 9/15 Screening:
King Kong (dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933, 104 min )

Tue 9/16 Readings:
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 198-209.
Laura Mulvey, Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'
inspired by Duel in the Sun, in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance
Penley, 69-79.

Thurs 9/18 Readings:
James Snead, Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: The Guilty
Look, in White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, 1-
27.
Manthia Diawara, Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and
Resistance, Screen, Vol. 29 Issue 4 (Autumn 1988): 66-76.

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Assignment #1 due by 6PM

Week Five: Third Cinema
Mon 9/22 Screening:
The Hour of the Furnaces (dir. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968)
Tue 9/23 Readings:
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema: Notes
and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the
Third World, in New Latin American Cinema Vol 1: Theory, Practices, and
Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin, 33-58.

Julio Garca Espinosa, For an Imperfect Cinema, in New Latin American
Cinema Vol 1, 71-82.

Teshome H. Gabriel, Towards a Critical Theory of Third World
Films, Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, 30-
52.

Thurs 2/25 Readings:
Robert Stam, The Two Avant-Gardes: Solanas and Getinos The Hour of
the Furnaces, in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of
Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette
Slonioski, 254-268.

Toms Gutirrez Alea, The Viewers Dialectic, in New Latin American
Cinema Vol 1, 108-131.

Week Six: Desiring and Documenting Reality
Mon 9/29 Screening:
Nanook of the North (dir. Robert Flaherty, 1922, 79 min)
Nanook Revisited (dir. Claude Massot, 1988, 55 min)
Tue 9/30 Readings
Bill Nichols, The Domain of Documentary from Representing Reality:
Issues and Concepts in Documentary, 3-31.

Elizabeth Cowie, The Spectacle of Actuality, in Collecting Visible
Evidence, 19-45.

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Thurs 10/02 Readings
Fatimah Tobing Rony, Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography: Robert
Flaherty's Nanook of the North, from The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and
Ethnographic Spectacle, 99-126.

[Recommended: Trinh Minh-ha, The Totalizing Quest for Meaning,
from When the Moon Waxes Red, 29-50.]
UNIT TWO: PHOTOGRAPHY, ADVERTISING, AND IDEOLOGY
Week Seven: The Photographic Index
Mon 10/06 Screening:
La jete (dir. Chris Marker, 1962, 28 min)
Lovely Andrea (dir. Hito Steyerl, 2007, 30 min)
Tue 10/07 Readings
Assignment #2 and instructions posted
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Thurs 10/09 Readings
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (contd.)

Tom Gunning, What's the Point of an Index? Or, Faking
Photographs, Nordicom Review 2 (2004): 39-49.

Week Eight: Mid-Term Exam
Mon 10/13: No screening (Mid-term recess)
Tue 10/14: No class (Mid-term recess)
Thurs 10/16: Mid-term exam
Week Nine: The Rhetoric Of Advertisements
Mon 10/20 Screening:
An episode of Mad Men--TBA (60 min)
Assignment #2 due by 6PM
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Final project instructions and groups posted
Tue 10/21 Readings:
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 109-159; and choose any four sections
from: 26-28; 34-35; 41-43; 50-52; 84-87; 94-96; 100-102.

Thurs 10/23 Readings:
Review notes from Barthes, Mythologies.

Raymond Williams, Advertising: The Magic System in Problems in
Materialism and Culture, 170-195.

John Berger, Chapter Seven from Ways of Seeing, 129-155.
UNIT THREE: LOGICS OF TELEVISION
Week Ten: Flow And Liveness
Monday 10/27 Screening:
Sample block programming of an older TV show: Roseanne (Jan 1996)
Sample current block programming (October 2014)
Preliminary final project proposals due by 6PM
Tues 10/28 Readings:
Raymond Williams, Programming: Distribution and Flow,
from Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 78-118.

William Uricchio, Televisions Next Generation: Technology/Interface
Culture/Flow, in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition,
163-182.

Jane Feuer, The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology
in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches, 12-22.

Thurs 10/30
DMLC Workshopdetails TBA
Week Eleven: Catastrophe, Publicity, And Ownership
Mon 11/03 Screening:
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Shadows of Liberty (dir. Jean-Philippe Tremblay, 2012, 93 min)
Tue 11/04 Readings:
Mary Ann Doane, Information, Crisis, Catastrophe in Logics of
Television, 222-239.
Thomas Keenan, Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)
in PMLA 117: 1 (January 2002): 104-116.
Thurs 11/06
DMLC Workshopdetails TBA
Week Twelve: Reality TV
Mon 11/10: No screening
Tue 11/11:
In-class screening of reality TV showTBA
Thurs 11/13 Readings:
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Introduction and Makeover TV: Labors
of Reinvention from Better Living Through Reality TV, 1-31, 99-113.
Anna McCarthy, Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of
Suffering, Social Text Winter 25 (2007): 17-42.
Fri 11/14 Screening:
Sleep Dealer (dir. Alex Rivera, 2008, 90 min)
UNIT FOUR: NEW MEDIA/ OLD MEDIA
Week Thirteen: Networks And Convergence I
Mon 11/17: No screening
Tue 11/18 Readings:
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, 43-74.

Tara McPherson, Reload: Liveness, Mobility and the Web in The Visual
Culture Reader, 458-469.

[Recommended: William Uricchio, The Future of a Medium Once Known as
Television, in The YouTube Reader, 24-39.]
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Thurs 11/20 Readings:
Tom O'Reilly, what is web 2.0? in The Digital Divide, 215-229.

Stephen Graham, The End of Geography or the Explosion of Place:
Conceptualizing Space, Place and Information Technology, in The New
Media and Cybercultures Anthology, 90-108.
Upload "draft" or "rough cut" of your group project to Google Drive for
peer review.





Week Fourteen: Networks And Convergence II
Mon 12/01 Screening:
The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010)
Peer reviews due by 6PM
Tue 12/02 Readings:
Tiziana Terranova, Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital
Economy Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33-58.
danah boyd, White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class
Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook,
in Race After the Internet, 203-222.

Thurs 12/04
Final session with your DMLC Mentors to finish/ revise your vid critiques.
Week Fifteen: Obsolescence And Reproducibility In The Digital Age
Mon 12/08 Screening:
Partners in Crime (dir. Paromita Vohra, 2011, 105 min)
Thanksgiving Break!
Mon 11/24: No screening
Tue 11/25: No class
Thurs 11/27: No class
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Tue 12/09 Readings:
Jonathan Sterne, Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,
in Residual Media, 16-31.

Jonathan Sterne, Is Music a Thing from MP3: The Meaning of a Format,
184-226.

[Recommended: Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, e-flux,
November 2009.]
Thurs 12/11: FINAL REVIEW
Your final vid critiques and final reflections are due by 6PM on Friday
12/12.
Mon 12/15 (3PM-5PM):
FINAL GROUP PRESENTATIONS!