What can we learn from analyzing cinematic techniques and devices? In this class, students will practice crafting arguments and using evidence by looking at ubiquitous, though curiously under-analyzed cinematic techniques: special effects. Can special effects be used artistically, or are they just cheap spectacle? Do they express ideas, or are they merely background, part of plot or setting? Do special effects raise cinema to the status of a “high art” on par with literature, or do they show that cinema is merely entertainment? Students will debate these ideas and more, in writing and discussion, while researching the history and technology of special effects. Students will also dive deep into film history, as we discuss examples from the heyday of German silent cinema (Metropolis, Nosferatu, The Student of Prague) to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters (Jurassic Park, Avatar, Everything Everywhere All at Once).

Writing. Orality. Printing. Photography. Pre-cinematic optical devices. Gramophones. Telephony. Radio. Film. Television. Drones. Social media. Artificial intelligence. This course explores theoretical writings on technology and media from the 19th to 21st century, while focusing on pivotal trends since the 1980s from the German-speaking world. We will examine the foundational work of Friedrich Kittler, the emergence of Media Archaeology and Cultural Techniques, as well as critical reflections on gender, race, and politics.

This course examines the distinct but ill-defined San Francisco Bay Area. Our approach will be neither to simply learn about the individual places that compose the Bay Area nor to study a succession of detached periods of development. Instead, we will think critically about the creations, contestations, and transformations of Bay Area spaces—landscapes, communities, neighborhoods, cities, suburbs, and the metropolitan region. Topics include indigenous geographies, colonialism, industrialization and economic geography, cities and suburbs, gentrification and displacement, regional racial formation and place-based identities, and resistance and rebellion.

California had been called "the great exception" and "America, only more so." Yet few of us pay attention to its distinctive traits and to its effects beyond our borders. California may be "a state of mind," but it is also the most dynamic place in the most powerful country in the world, and would be the 8th largest economy if it were a country. Its wealth has been built on mining, agriculture, industry, trade, and finance. Natural abundance and geographic advantage have played their parts, but the state's greatest resource has been its wealth and diversity of people, who have made it a center of technological and cultural innovation from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. Yet California has a dark side of exploitation and racialization.

How do human populations organize and alter natural resources and ecosystems to produce food? The role of agriculture in the world economy, national development, and environmental degradation in the Global North and the Global South. The origins of scarcity and abundance, population growth, hunger and obesity, and poverty.

This course introduces students to the field of television studies and focuses on developing skills in three areas: ideology critique, genre study, and formal analysis. First, we’ll focus on texts that describe and model these three areas of concern. Next, we’ll explore scholarship that brings them together in order to examine how television of the mid to late 20th century participated in the elaboration of discourses of family, identity, and economy. As we will see, much early television programming was concerned with habituating audiences to emerging ideas about American national identity and domestic life that were shaped by post-war consumer imperatives. For this reason, much of the scholarship we will follow asks how television participated in formulating, challenging, and refining notions of the American family in the decades that followed – paying special attention to how that family is shaped by discourses of racial formation, class, gender, and sexuality. Students will pursue their own interests in designing a final research project focused on the construction of family in a series from the 1980s to today. Students will work with me to design a research program in which to ground an original reading of a series of their choice. By the end of the semester, students should a) understand the major historical and theoretical concerns of television studies in the Department of Film & Media; b) be able to perform formal analysis of a television text, using the vocabulary of cinematography/videography, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound (including dialogue); c) be able to perform ideological analysis of a television text that demonstrates how it may be both enacting resistance to “mainstream” ideals and containing that resistance.

This course is intended to introduce undergraduates to the study of a range of media, including photography, film, television, video, and print and digital media. The course will focus on questions of medium "specificity" or the key technological/material, formal and aesthetic features of different media and modes of address and representation that define them. Also considered is the relationship of individual media to time and space, how individual media construct their audiences or spectators, and the kinds of looking or viewing they enable or encourage. The course will discuss the ideological effects of various media, particularly around questions of racial and sexual difference, national identity, capitalism, and power.

This course is designed to give those interested in film and media careers an introduction to the wide range of professional possibilities that exist in the Bay Area and beyond. Centered around a series of 10–12 guest lectures from working professionals, the course will give students valuable insight into the opportunities and challenges of working in the field. Guests will come from a variety of professions including: studio and independent film production, screenwriting, documentary production for film and television, visual effects and pre-vis production, film curation, film festival programming, sound design, and emerging distribution platforms. With each guest visit, students will have the chance to interact directly with speakers to explore specific areas of inquiry. The course will also focus on a variety of professional development tools and strategies for getting started in film and media professions.

The practice of entertainment law in the United States lies at the intersection of a number of legal disciplines, among them Constitutional law, tort law, copyright law, and trademark law, and applies those disciplines to the world of entertainment. This course will introduce you to basic principles of those disciplines and their use in entertainment law. The goal of the course is to equip practitioners in film and media with an understanding of entertainment law sufficient to recognize legal issues that may arise in their practice so as to either avoid problems or find their solutions.

While the label “action film” did not become common until the 1970s, movies that emphasize bodies in motion, dangerous stunts, and spectacular violence and destruction have enjoyed consistent popularity—and derision—since the medium's invention. The action genre continues to hold a dominant place in contemporary cinema of blockbusters, CGI, and media franchising. It has also proven to be one of the genres most exportable and translatable across national borders, encouraging cross-pollination among film industries and cultural traditions through mobile film performers and artists. This course traces the longevity and diversity of action cinema and its many generic antecedents across historical periods and national contexts, with a particular focus on American and East Asian cinema. It explores its basic promise and appeal to viewers: action! What is cinematic action, how is it conveyed in cinematic form, and how does it relate to modes of spectatorship? How have action films managed the conflicting objectives of spectacle and storytelling? To what extent have contemporary action films become like rollercoasters: all action, no plot? The course also explores the genre's significance as a form of culture and its ideological and ethical implications, including the fluctuating ways it has represented violence on screen and different images of masculinity, femininity, and "musculinity."