INTRO TO FILM & MEDIA STUDIES
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.
-
Instructor:
Robert King
CULPA: 7
Info
- 3 points
INTRO-FILM & MEDIA STUDIES-DIS
Co-requisite discussion section for FILM UN 1000 INTRO TO FILM & MEDIA STUDIES.
-
Instructor:
Nazenin Elci
Info -
Instructor:
Shamika Dhar
Info -
Instructor:
Siqin Qu
Info -
Instructor:
Ariadna Fortuny Cardona
Info -
Instructor:
Seyedalireza Sharifi
Info - 0 points
CINEMA HIST I: BEGIN-1930
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
-
Instructor:
Jane Gaines
CULPA: 4 Info - 3 points
CINEMA HIST I:BEGIN-1930-DISC
-
Instructor:
Shan Jiang
Info -
Instructor:
Eun-Sol Kim
Info - 0 points
CINEMA HISTORY IV: AFTER 1990
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
-
Instructor:
Racquel Gates
Info - 3 points
CINEMA HIST IV:AFTER 1990-DISC
-
Instructor:
Sophia S Lim
Info -
Instructor:
Bourlon de Rouvre Bellangiris
Info -
Instructor:
Devyn Chuang
Info - 0 points
THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION
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
-
Instructor:
Nico Baumbach
Info - 3 points
THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION-DISC
-
Instructor:
Daisy E Gadsby
Info -
Instructor:
Zacha del Rosario
Info - 0 points
LABORATORY IN SCREENWRITING
This lab is limited to declared Film and Media Studies majors. Exercises in the writing of film scripts.
-
Instructor:
Ari H Shapiro
Info -
Instructor:
Anne Ning
Info -
Instructor:
Mengyuan Li
Info - 3 points
LAB IN FICTION FILMMAKING
This lab course is limited to declared Film & Media Studies majors. Exercises in the use of video for fiction shorts.
-
Instructor:
Andrew J Howell
Info - 3 points
LAB IN NONFICTION FILMMAKING
Exercises in the use of video for documentary shorts.
-
Instructor:
Jean Chapiro
Info - 3 points
Lab in the Video Essay
This media lab is a hands-on exploration of producing video essays as an essential aspect of scholarly discourse in the digital age. The course challenges students to actively engage with a range of media projects, guided by the tenets of critical media practice. Through a mode of scholarship and research through the creation of media, students will acquire both theoretical understanding of critical media and practical skills such as scriptwriting, video editing, audio narration, and publishing. Drawing on case studies from media and film studies, students are invited to review and deconstruct video essays, podcasts, interactive essays, and digital storytelling.
The course aims to encourage students to think beyond traditional written formats, explore new methods of critical analysis and argument, and to create publishable or presentable video essays. It supports the conception and production of new knowledge through media, constructing critical insights that utilize the expressiveness of our contemporary audiovisual networks.
-
Instructor:
Behrang M Garakani
Info - 3 points
INDEPENDENT STUDY
Independent Projects
-
Instructor:
Robert King
CULPA: 7
Info
-
Instructor:
Bogdan G Apetri
Info -
Instructor:
Lance Weiler
CULPA: 1 Wikipedia Info - 1-4 points
ADVANCED FILM PRODUCTION PRACTICE
Advanced Film Production Practice is an advanced production and lecture course for students who wish to obtain a deeper understanding of the skills involved in screenwriting, directing and producing. Building on the fundamentals established in the Labs for Fiction and Non-Fiction Filmmaking, this seminar further develops each student’s grasp of the concepts involved in filmmaking through advanced analytical and practical work to prepare Thesis film materials.
-
Instructor:
Hector Prats I Castro
Info - 3 points
NARRATIVE STRAT-SCREENWRITING
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.
-
Instructor:
Loren-Paul Caplin
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
Polish Cinema: Seminar in Intl Film
Polish Cinema: Intl Semin
This course explores the richness--formal, political and thematic--of post-World War II Polish cinema, with a focus on the films of Andrzej Wajda ("Ashes and Diamonds"), Krzysztof Kieslowski ("Decalogue"), and Wojciech Has ("The Hourglass Sanatorium").
-
Instructor:
Annette Insdorf
CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info - 3 points
Genre: Blockbuster Cinema
This course examines how globalization and the global success of American blockbuster films have affected Hollywood film production, stardom, distribution, and exhibition. The course will analyze blockbuster aesthetics, including aspects of special effects, 3-D, VR, IMAX, sound, narration, genre, editing, and AI. The course will also explore the effects of new digital technologies on Hollywood and the cross-pollination among Hollywood, art house, and other national cinemas. Finally, the course will examine the effects of 9/11, the “war on terrorism,” climate change, Covid, AI, and other global concerns on marketing, aesthetics, distribution, franchise, and other aspects of this cinema.
-
Instructor:
Ronald Gregg
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
Music, Sound and Image Theory
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.
- 3 points
EXPERIMENTAL FILM & MEDIA
This course provides an overview of experimental film and video since the early 20th century European art movements (abstract, Dada, Surrealism), including the emergence of American experimental film in the 1940s, post-World War II underground experimental films, structuralist films and early video art in the 1960s and 70s, post-1960s identitarian experimental work, the emergence of digital video in museums and online in the 1990s to the present. The course surveys and analyses a wide range of experimental work, including the artists Hans Richter, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Martha Rosler, Vito Acconci, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Julie Dash, Isaac Julien, Matthew Barney, Ilana Harris-Babou, and others. The course will study the structural, aesthetic and thematic links between mainstream and avant-garde cinema, theater, and art movements, and will place the films in their economic, social, and political contexts.
-
Instructor:
Ronald Gregg
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
Realisms
The seminar will explore the genealogies, key debates, and transmutations of cinematic realism: the diverse “realisms” on which it draws, and the range of meanings, uses, and abuses of the term. Questions of realism have been carried over from the traditional arts and literature, but have undergone a sea-change with the advent of photography and cinematography. While the concept of realism seemed bracketed by post-modern discourses and digital culture, the realist aspiration still haunts the cinematic imagination and the media at large. The claim to presence; the cultural conventions of mimesis and illusionism; the shifting values of document, witness, testimony; the relation of the material and the referential, of the authentic and the simulated – all ensure the continued fascination with realism in its myriad forms through our time. Traversing fiction and documentaries, mainstream and experimental forms, the seminar will consider both classical cases and challenging examples from diverse cinemas and cultural moments, and examine the political implications of realism and its capacity for transmutation and revival. Screenings will include Wyler’s Best Years of our Lives, Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Kiarostami’s Life and Nothing More, Jia Zhangke’s The World, Leigh’s Meantime, Farocki’s Workers Leaving a Factory, and more.
-
Instructor:
Noa Steimatsky
Info - 3 points
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.
-
Instructor:
Racquel Gates
Info - 3 points
Reality Television Discussion
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.
-
Instructor:
Nicholas K Schoenbrodt
Info -
Instructor:
Alberto M de la Rosa
Info - 0 points
CINEMA HIST IV:AFTER 1990
CINEMA HIST IV: AFTER 1990
-
Instructor:
Racquel Gates
Info - 3 points
SCREENWRITING II
-
Instructor:
Matthew R Fennell
Info -
Instructor:
Rania Attieh
Info -
Instructor:
Wesley Jones
Info -
Instructor:
Galt V Niederhoffer
Info -
Instructor:
Constance Tsang
Info -
Instructor:
Jessie Keyt
Info -
Instructor:
Minhal Baig
Info -
Instructor:
Rafael L Pedreira
Info - 3 points
SCRIPT TO SCREEN
-
Instructor:
Mathilde A Hauducoeur
Info -
Instructor:
Trey Ellis
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Yared Zeleke
Info -
Instructor:
Jordana A Spiro
Info -
Instructor:
Alexander P Cannon
Info -
Instructor:
Myna J Joseph
Info -
Instructor:
Tom Kalin
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
David G Gutnik
Info - 1.5 points
DIRECTING II
-
Instructor:
Bogdan G Apetri
Info -
Instructor:
Ian W Olds
Info -
Instructor:
Hilary Brougher
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Stephen Lee
Info -
Instructor:
Anocha Suwichakornpong
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Carlo Mirabella-Davis
Info -
Instructor:
Anocha Suwichakornpong
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Sean R Dunn
Info - 3 points
DIRECTING ACTORS II
-
Instructor:
Shira-Lee Shalit
Info -
Instructor:
Emil Benjamin
Info -
Instructor:
Jodie Markell
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Abigail Zealey Bess
Info -
Instructor:
Lisa Milinazzo
Info - 3 points
Tech Arts: Post Production II
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.
-
Instructor:
Michael J Cacioppo Belantara
Info - 1.5 points
Media Archeology
“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.
-
Instructor:
Wanda Strauven
Info - 3 points
INTERNSHIP
-
Instructor:
Hanna Seifu
Info -
Instructor:
Maureen A Ryan
Info -
Instructor:
Jack Lechner
Info - 1-3 points
Character Development Lab
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.
-
Instructor:
Trey Ellis
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Jamal Joseph
Info - 1.5 points
SCREENWRITING IV
-
Instructor:
Trey Ellis
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Andrew S Bienen
Info -
Instructor:
Christina Lazaridi
Info -
Instructor:
Minhal Baig
Info - 3 points
Story Gym
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.
-
Instructor:
Myna J Joseph
Info -
Instructor:
Jamal Joseph
Info - 1.5 points
Intro to TV Pilot Writing
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.
-
Instructor:
David Klass
Info - 3 points
DIRECTING IV
-
Instructor:
Bette Gordon
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Diana Peralta
Info - 3 points
FEATURE FILM FINANCING
-
Instructor:
Lucas Joaquin
Info -
Instructor:
Mary Jane Skalski
Info - 3 points
WRIT/SCRIPT ANALYSIS-PRODUCERS
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.
-
Instructor:
Jack Lechner
Info - 3 points
PRE-PROD OF A MOTION PICTURE
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.
-
Instructor:
Dana Kuznetzkoff
Info - 3 points
POST SUPERVISING FOR PRODUCERS
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.
-
Instructor:
Luca Borghese
Info - 1.5 points
POST SUPERVISING FOR PRODUCERS
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.
-
Instructor:
Luca Borghese
Info - 1.5 points
Engaging on the Ground: Contemporary Tib
Contemporary Tibetan Cine
This 7-session master class examines the craft of thematic expression and social engagement by filmmakers who are successfully bringing non-dominant voices to the screen and working in regions with people whose stories are rarely heard. Through film screenings, lectures, critical analysis, and Q&A with guest filmmakers, the class aims to raise awareness, foster discussion, and instruct on visual storytelling techniques that integrate themes of social change, cultural heritage, and environmental transformations in Asia today, with a special focus on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in China.
The class opens by surveying the emergence and development of the Tibetan New Wave Cinema movement, represented by filmmakers such as Pema Tseden, Sonthar Gyal, Lhapal Gyal, Dukar Tserang, Khyentse Norbu, Tenzin Seldon, Khashem Gyal, and others. Together, we will examine how Tibetan filmmakers bring lived realities, identity, spiritual traditions, and social tensions to the screen. We will analyze narrative strategies, visual poetics, and the ethical responsibilities of representing communities "on the ground."
This class also explores the intersection of cinema and mindfulness. Through selected films, readings, and reflective practices, students will engage with film not only as a medium of storytelling but also as a space for introspection, contemplation, emotional awareness, and shared experience.
Mindfulness here is not confined to meditation but understood as a broader, integrative approach to being attentive, ethical, and present at every stage of filmmaking. It is a way of honoring the people, places, and processes that make cinema meaningful.
-
Instructor:
Khahsem Gyal
Info - 1.5 points
DOCUMENTARY ACTIVISM:THEORY
This is a course in how to think about documentary but not about “how to” make documentary work. Its premise is that documentary as an approach is still undergoing revision as a definitional problem. Relevant to our times, cameras and sound recorders are called upon to “witness” events. Basic readings on the history and theory of documentary are the heart of the course and practical exercises test theoretical questions. Students conduct low end exercises with their own smart phone cameras. Topics and issues center on the history of the radical documentary—from the Workers Film and Photo League of the 1930s to the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, comparing then new 16 and 35mm film camera capabilities with contemporary internet distribution. Other topics include climate change and documentary work; motion picture film and photography in labor struggles; uses of anti-war and nuclear bomb footage; sexualities and video camera activism.
-
Instructor:
James L Hoberman
Info - 3 points
Waves on Different Shores: France, Japan
In the early 1960s, a number of new film movements in national cinemas around the world. Inevitably called “new waves” or “new cinemas,” these movements, usually made up of young filmmakers, would challenge both the cinematic industrial structures in each of their respective nations, as well propose often radically different approaches to filmmaking and to cinematic storytelling. This course will explore three important examples of this development—the French New Wave, the Japanese New Wave and the Brazilian Cinema Novo—and detail both the commonalities among these movements (aesthetic, social, political) as well those factors which made each unique. A special concern will be the relationship of the “new waves” to simultaneous radical experiments in visual arts, theater, literature and music. The course will begin with a consideration of Roberto Rossellini’s VOYAGE TO ITALY, a watershed work between Neorealism and subsequent cinematic modernism, and will conclude with Andrei Tarkovsky’s MIRROR, described by Andras Balint Kóvacs as “the last modernist film.”
-
Instructor:
Richard A Pena
CULPA: 16
Info
- 3 points