This course serves as an introduction to the study of film and related visual media, examining fundamental issues of aesthetics (mise-en-scene, editing, sound), history (interaction of industrial, economic, and technological factors), theory (spectatorship, realism, and indexicality), and criticism (auteurist, feminist, and genre-based approaches). The course also investigates how digital media change has been productive of new frameworks for moving image culture in the present. Discussion section FILM UN1001 is a required corequisite.
Co-requisite discussion section for FILM UN 1000 INTRO TO FILM & MEDIA STUDIES.
This course rethinks the ;birth of cinema; from the vantage of ;when old media was new.; Following standard approaches, it moves from actualities to fiction, from the ;cinema of attractions; to narrative, from the cinematographe to cinema, from cottage industry to studio system. Units in silent film music, early genres, film piracy and copyright, word and moving image, and restoration--the film archivists dilemma in the digital era. FILM W2011
This course brings our survey of the development of the art, technology, and industry of motion images up to the present. During this era, most people no longer watched movies (perhaps the most neutral term) in theaters, and digital technology came to dominate every aspect of production, distribution, and exhibition. Highlighted filmmakers include Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Wong Kar-wei, and Steve McQueen. Topics range from contemporary horror to animation. Requirements: short (2-3 pages) papers on each film shown for the class and a final, take-home exam. FILM W2041
This class offers an introduction to the history of documentary cinema and to the theoretical and philosophical questions opened up by the use of moving images to bear witness, persuade, archive the past, or inspire us to change the future. How are documentaries different than fiction films? What is the role of aesthetics in relation to facts and evidence in different documentary traditions? How do documentaries negotiate appeals to emotions with rational argument? From the origins of cinema to our current “post-truth” digital age, we will look at the history of how cinema has attempted to shape our understanding of reality. FILM W2311
This lab is limited to declared Film and Media Studies majors. Exercises in the writing of film scripts.
This lab course is limited to declared Film & Media Studies majors. Exercises in the use of video for fiction shorts.
Exercises in the use of video for documentary shorts.
Prerequisites: FILM W2420. This workshop is primarily a continuation of Senior Seminar in Screenwriting. Students will either continue developing the scripts they began in Senior Seminar in Screenwriting, or create new ones including a step outline and a minimum of 30 pages. Emphasis will be placed on character work, structure, theme, and employing dramatic devices. Weekly outlining and script writing, concurrent with script/story presentation and class critiques, will ensure that each student will be guided toward the completion of his or her narrative script project.
Some of the most exciting theoretical moving image work in recent years has centered on the problem of the acoustic sign in cinema and especially around the relation between image track and sound “track.” This course rethinks the history and theory of cinema from the point of view of sound: effects, dialogue, music. From cinematic sound recording and play-back technologies through Dolby sound enhancement and contemporary digital audio experiments. Revisiting basic theoretical concepts from the pov of sound: realism (sound perspective, dubbing), anti-realism (contrapuntal and dissonant effects), genre (the leitmotiv), perception (the synaesthetic effect). The silent to sound divide considered relative to the *19th* century Romanticism of the classical Hollywood score associated with the Viennese-trained Max Steiner to the scores of John Williams.
From her first major feature,
Sweetie
(1989) to her most recent,
The Power of the Dog
(2021), Jane Campion has been one of the most significant filmmakers of her generation, not only as a breakthrough woman director but as a stylist who brings a sharp yet graceful aesthetic to wide-ranging, socially resonant work. Her frequent themes of feminism, marriage, social expectations and eroticism have smartly subverted genres including contemporary family drama, period pieces and television miniseries.
The Piano
remains a bold classic of romanticism, even as the film has come under criticism for its depiction of the Maori characters (an important angle to consider). Her period pieces, including the literary adaptation
The Portrait of a Lady
, infuse the 19th century with a contemporary sensibility. And her television work – recently
Top of the Lake
but decades ago
An Angel at My Table,
in 1990 – makes her an excellent director to study at a moment when the lines between cinema and television are blurring.
This course will look at her ongoing career as director and often screenwriter, with particular attention to her visual style in its consistencies and variations. Her aesthetic was established early, including off-kilter camera angles and sumptuous backdrops. But she does not adhere rigidly to a single style. As she continues to work, she remains open to changes in her own approach, using a male perspective and Western genre in
The Power of the Dog,
and embracing the miniseries form in two seasons of the socially relevant mystery
Top of the Lake
(which addresses sexual abuse). That openness and adaptability make her career a timely model for young filmmakers.
We will also look at responses to her work and the ever-growing body of scholarship, which includes important reevaluations. In addition to new perspectives on
The Piano
, for example, her thriller
In the Cut
has been reclaimed from its initial dismissal as a failure and reconsidered as a major work dealing with female perspective and desire.
Students will be encouraged to arrive at their own assessments of Campion's work, through class discussion, in-class reports, and two substantial papers incorporating research and original analysis.
This course examines a wide range of radical film and media practices from around the globe. Looking at fiction, nonfiction, and experimental works, we will examine key concepts used to define the political purposes of cinema from historical and theoretical perspectives. What do we mean when we talk about “guerrilla,” “militant,” or “third cinema” film and media practices? How have these concepts been mobilized at different historical periods and for which purpose? What is their relationship to the anticolonial struggles and other social movements?
Documentary cinema has been traditionally more welcoming to women directors than more commercialized, and thus more heavily policed, fiction film. Women, in turn, were able to create more freely within this cinematic mode, bringing underrepresented perspectives to the fore and advocating for those even more disempowered than themselves. This course focuses on the contributions directors self-identifying as women were able to make to the domain of documentary around the world. It is divided into two modules and follows a loosely chronological structure. Module I, which begins with the birth of documentary cinema in the mid-1920s, reconceptualizes the history of this mode by demonstrating how women directors have been key to its development. In this module, we examine the work of directors such as Esfir Shub, Ruby Grierson, Leni Riefenstahl, Sara Gomèz, Joyce Chopra, Agnès Varda, and Margot Benacerraf. Module II then takes us into the contemporary moment — the first decades of the 2000s, when digital technology prompted a previously unseen expansion of the documentary film mode. We will explore lesser known, yet no less remarkable, works by women documentarians from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. During both modules, we will actively engage with the rhetorical and aesthetic strategies these filmmakers used to engage with topics of gender, sexuality, family, childbirth, and the objectification of the female body. A framing question for our discussions will be: How were women documentary filmmakers able to either work with, or push back against, gender ideologies to assert their own creativity and unique visions?
The documentary (or non-fiction) film dates back to the dawn of cinema. Indeed, it could be argued that the first motion pictures, known as actualités, were documentaries. Like dramatic films, documentaries developed their own genres and tendencies: newsreels, city symphonies, compilation films, ethnographic films, essay films, cinema verité, and imbedded cinema as well as less reputable forms including fake documentaries, advertisements and other forms of propaganda. More recently we have seen documentaries made from surveillance cameras, by cell phones, and on desktop computers. This seminar will explore the development and implications of several particular modes. Screenings, readings, written reports are required, with the option of producing short DV films as a term project.
This course focuses on the origins, form, and social relevance of reality television. Specifically, the course will examine the industrial, economic, and ideological underpinnings of reality television to gesture toward larger themes about the evolution of television from the 1950s through the present, and the relationship between television and American culture and society. To this end, the class lectures, screenings, and discussions will emphasize (but are not limited to) topic of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
Disucssion section for Film GU4953 Reality Television: This course focuses on the origins, form, and social relevance of reality television. Specifically, the course will examine the industrial, economic, and ideological underpinnings of reality television to gesture toward larger themes about the evolution of television from the 1950s through the present, and the relationship between television and American culture and society. To this end, the class lectures, screenings, and discussions will emphasize (but are not limited to) topic of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
This online class explores the creative and narrative principals of editing through the editing of students' 8-12 minute films and / or other footage. Instructors are professional editors who will provide lecture and individual based instruction.
Tech Arts: Post Production II continues teaching the core techniques for picture and sound editing and the post production workflow process for Columbia Film MFA students. We will cover preparing for a long-form edit, digital script integration, color management and continuity, advanced trimming, and advanced finishing. The hands-on lessons and exercises will be conducted using the industry-standard Non-Linear Editing Systems, Avid Media Composer, and Davinci Resolve. Each week’s class will consist of hands-on demonstrations and self-paced practice using content created by the students and provided by the program.
This course focuses on the necessary and often undiscussed role of ethics and inclusivity in storytelling and story creation. This course will provide space, as requested by the students, faculty and staff, for facilitated discussion around narrative ownership, comedy, history of on-screen portrayals, intersectionality, the business of inclusion and other related topics so that students walk away with a personal inclusive storytelling plan and a greater level of cultural competency as they continue their creative journeys. The instructors are professionals in the entertainment space with deep knowledge and practical Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) experience.
“It could have been otherwise.” -Noël Burch
With this brief yet generative statement from a foundational film theorist we are introduced to a major theme of this course, a graduate level seminar concerning the still-in-formation field of media archeology. Pursuing the material traces left by false starts, wrong moves, misbegotten speculation, and dead formats, this course will dig into the historical past in order to better understand our current media ecology, prepare for the computational future, and imagine how things could be otherwise. Archeology in this sense refers to the study of a technical object through investigating its origins (its arché), as a means of breaking down traditional linear accounts of history and reconstructing them along new, more lacunary, less teleological lines. This will be our goal. We will be introduced to media archeology as both a method and an aesthetics. Our approach will look for the old in the new and the new in the old, while locating recurring topoi, ruptures, and discontinuities. Marking a departure from more hermeneutical, text-based film and media studies models, we will instead focus on questions of hardware, materiality, and physical inscription—technological research that sticks close to the signal of mediatic events, close to the metal, close to the silicon. We will perform close reading and thick description, as in established humanities disciplines like literary studies and anthropology, but with radically different, non-phenomenological, non-discursive object formations. Topics we will consider include, for example, analog waveforms and digital pulses, mathematical versus narrative modes of epistemology, and what Thomas Elsaesser calls a “poetics of obsolescence.” Our readings will draw from the corpus of media archeology studies as well as consonant fields such as material culture studies, computer engineering, and the history of science.
Minstrelsy is one of America’s original forms of popular entertainment, and its formal, thematic, and narrative elements continue to reverberate throughout popular culture to this day. Indeed, given the close relationship between stage performance and the development of screen cultures, it should come as little surprise that many of the tropes and representational strategies that film and media adopted to portray blackness bore, and continue to bear, close relation to minstrelsy and blackface. This seminar will examine the ways that minstrelsy has played a crucial role in the evolution of American popular culture, especially in film and media. The course will focus on the complex function and legacy of minstrelsy, whether from the perspective of Jewish artists trying to establish their racial identities in early Hollywood, or African American artists attempting to subvert dominant representational modes.
In this seven-week class, open to Writing for Film and Television and Screenwriting & Directing concentrates we will do the deep work of creating at least two unforgettable and irreplaceable characters for a future screen or teleplay. In weekly group meetings, students will be assigned a slot to discuss first a main character and then in response to that character, their main antagonist/foil, working through specific exercises until their two characters are sufficiently rich and nuanced that the writer is now able to build a story around them.
This seven-week elective is taught online. It is open to 2nd year Screen/TV Writers and Directors, will serve as an incubator for story ideas not currently being developed in any full-semester core classes.
This new class will provide Writing for Film & Television students with a foundational experience in TV Writing in the second semester of their first year at Columbia. They will have studied feature writing in their first semester, and this class will explore how TV is different from the feature form, the unique structure of TV when compared to features, plays, and novels, the key elements of a good TV show and pilot, the different worlds of network and streaming and the current marketplace, how to structure a TV pilot, and how to write and begin revising the pilot episode for an original TV show.
This is a specialized course designed to provide prospective producers with a nuanced framework for understanding the screenwriting process. The course will explore all the ways a producer might interact with screenwriters and screenplays, including coverage, script analysis, notes, treatments, and rewrites. Each student will complete a series of writing and rewriting assignments over the course of the semester. Required for all second-year Creative Producing students and only open to students in that concentration.
Pre-Production of the Motion Picture teaches Creative Producing students how to breakdown, schedule and prep all aspects of a low budget independent feature film. Using one shooting script as a case study, the class will learn to think critically and master each step of the pre-production process. Students will prepare script breakdowns, production strip boards, call sheets and a full production binder. Topics will include state tax incentives, payroll services, union contracts, deal memos/hiring paperwork, casting, labor laws, hiring BTL crew, legal, insurance and deliverables. Additionally, students will become proficient in Movie Magic Scheduling. Required for all second-year Creative Producing students and only open to students in that concentration.
This class is an intensive introduction to Post Production, with a specific focus on the role of the producer and post-production supervisor. We will examine the different components of Post-Production (Editing, Sound Design/Mixing, Music, Picture finishing, VFX, Titles) from Pre-Production through Delivery. Throughout the course, post department heads will come in as guests, and we will attend site visits to local post facilities. Required for all second-year Creative Producing students and only open to students in that concentration.
This class is an intensive introduction to Post Production, with a specific focus on the role of the producer and post-production supervisor. We will examine the different components of Post-Production (Editing, Sound Design/Mixing, Music, Picture finishing, VFX, Titles) from Pre-Production through Delivery. Throughout the course, post department heads will come in as guests, and we will attend site visits to local post facilities. Required for all second-year Creative Producing students and only open to students in that concentration.
With the pilot as a focal point, this course explores the opportunities and challenges of telling and sustaining a serialized story over a protracted period of time with an emphasis on the creation, borne out of character, of the quintessential premise and the ongoing conflict, be it thematic or literal, behind a successful series.
Early in the semester, students may be required to present/pitch their series idea. During the subsequent weeks, students will learn the process of pitching, outlining, and writing a television pilot, that may include story breaking, beat-sheets or story outline, full outlines, and the execution of either a thirty-minute or hour-long teleplay. This seminar may include reading pages and giving notes based on the instructor but may also solely focus on the individual process of the writer.
Students may only enroll in one TV Writing workshop per semester.
The course seeks to bridge two intimately related studies that currently exist within the Film Program: 1. intensive academic analysis of filmmaking practices/principles and, 2. the practitioner’s creative/pragmatic application of those practices/principles in their own work. Students will study, through screenings, lectures and personal research, an overview of various directing forms/methodologies (conventional coverage, expressive directing, comedy directing, subjective directing, objective directing, multiple-protagonist narrative, etc.) with a primary focus on the Western classic narrative tradition. The visual grammar, axiomatic principles, structural necessities of a variety of directing forms/genres will be analyzed and compared with works of art from other disciplines (poetry, painting, sculpture, etc.) and cultures. The ultimate goal is student implementation of these principles in their own work, exposure to and examination of some works of the established canon, as well as a greater understanding of the context in which creation occurs.
This course explores the portrayal of the Vietnam War in American and Vietnamese cinema. Students will analyze and compare films from both countries, examining themes such as patriotism, disillusionment, national identity, resistance and the human cost of war. The course also investigates how each country portrayed the other through its cinema, and the impact of cinema on public opinion and historical understanding of the conflict in both countries. We will also examine differences in cinematic and storytelling techniques used in each country, unpacking cinema as art, commercialism and propaganda. This course combines film screenings (in and out of class), discussions and critical analysis to provide a deeper understanding of how cinema in America and Vietnam were used to portray the same war.
Explores the different types of television and the ways in which producing is defined differently from theatrical narratives. Covers series television (both scripted and unscripted), made-for-TV movies, mini-series and other forms of television; the roles of the writer/producer, the show runner, and the director in different forms of television; how television is developed; and the implications of changing business models. Open to all SoA students.
What happens when we reject the classic hero’s journey in favor of new myths? From folktales to franchises, this course from the Digital Storytelling Lab will explore transportive worlds and the methods used to create them. Collectively, we will deconstruct the idea that World-Building is a private practice and instead, uplift the notion that it is a creative tool to strengthen stories and expand ideas. As Author and activist Clarice Lispector writes: “Creating isn't imagination, it's taking the great risk of grasping reality,” but what happens when we use World-Building to shift the systems that govern our reality?
Leveraging storytelling techniques of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and Role Playing Games (RPGs), we will collectively build a world that transcends the classroom and moves into the outside world, ultimately bringing participants together to tackle complex issues and redefine solo authorship as a collaborative space. This course culminates in the collective experience of each other’s worlds and the Alternate Reality experiences therein. There are no prerequisites for this course.
Tech Arts: Advanced Post Production covers advanced techniques for picture and sound editing and the post production workflow process. The goal of the course is to give you the capabilities to excel in the field of post production. We will focus extra attention to concepts and workflows related to long-form projects that can contain a team of technical artists across the post production pipeline. We will cover preparing for a long-form edit, digital script integration, color management and continuity, advanced trimming, and advanced finishing. The hands-on lessons and exercises will be conducted using the industry-standard Non-Linear Editing Systems, Avid Media Composer, and Davinci Resolve.
Each week’s class will consist of hands-on demonstrations and self-paced practice using content created by the students and provided by the program.
Screenwriting concentrates who are focusing on Screenwriting MUST take Screenwriting Thesis Workshop with their advisor at least once during Research Arts matriculation in order to graduate. Students may take this class with their advisor whenever it is offered. They should consult with their advisor if they are considering taking Thesis Workshop at the same time as Script Revision or TV Revision.