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 presents an integrative basis for understanding alterations in the Earth system caused by physical and human factors. Covered topics include: basic Earth system processes and the mechanisms that lead to environmental change; global climate variability and change; biodiversity loss; deforestation; soil degradation; population growth, urban growth – trends and distribution; air and water pollution; green energy transition; post – carbon future.

This course introduces students to foundational theories and methods in the scholarly study of audiovisual and other forms of media, including print media, television, film, video, and digital media. We will explore how different media shape social formations and systems of communication, and influence cultural idea of gender, race, class, and identity, in relation to their historical and political context. One of the key focuses of this course will be on how media inform the very production of subjectivity—our sense of who we are and how we participate in society. This course will take you beyond everyday ways of thinking about media and into the complex territory of 20th and 21st-century intellectual history. Focusing on both form and meaning, we will consider the unique technological, material, formal, and aesthetic characteristics that define different media and their modes of representation.

This course is crafted for aspiring film and media professionals, offering a comprehensive introduction to the diverse career opportunities available in the Bay Area and beyond. Through a series of 10–12 guest lectures from industry experts, students will gain valuable insights into the realities of working in this dynamic field. Our guest speakers come from a variety of professions, including studio and independent film production, screenwriting, documentary filmmaking for both film and television, visual effects and pre-visualization production, film curation, film festival programming, sound design, and emerging distribution platforms. Each guest visit provides students the chance to interact directly with seasoned professionals, delving into specific areas of interest and inquiry. In addition to the guest lectures, the course will focus on essential professional development tools and strategies to help students launch their careers in film and media. To maximize learning opportunities, the guest roster will feature both in-class and remote instruction, allowing us to host experts from outside the Bay Area.

Entertainment business law in the United States lies at the intersection of business and creativity and presents a unique set of challenges for content creators. The competing demands of art and commerce require the balancing of a number of legal disciplines, among them the legal principles of the Constitution, Tort, Contracts, Copyright & Clearances, and Trademarks, as well as a profound understanding of the demands of the entertainment marketplace from a commercial and business perspective. The goal of the course is to equip content creators in film and media with an understanding of the legal, practical, business, production and creative issues from project inception thru completed delivery and exploitation and to arm such creators with the tools to successfully comprehend and navigate their projects in the marketplace.

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 the contemporary cinema of blockbusters, CGI, and media franchising. It has also proven to have an appeal easily translated and exported across national borders, encouraging cross-pollination among film industries and cultural traditions through mobile 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 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 in the fluctuating ways it has represented violence on screen and its different images of masculinity, femininity, and "musculinity."

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 the contemporary cinema of blockbusters, CGI, and media franchising. It has also proven to have an appeal easily translated and exported across national borders, encouraging cross-pollination among film industries and cultural traditions through mobile 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 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 in the fluctuating ways it has represented violence on screen and its different images of masculinity, femininity, and "musculinity."

This course offers a survey of international avant-garde film movements over the last century and the challenges they pose to mainstream cinema. Whereas latter has been accused of complicity with the worst aspects of the 20th century – racial and gender oppression, imperialistic capitalism, and the development of a violent state apparatus – the avant-garde and underground film offers an alternative view of the 20th century. Over the six weeks of our course, we will consider some of the following questions: what makes a film “traditional”, and with what urgency or need is there a call for an avant-garde in opposition to it? How do these films’ experiments with time, space, and sensory perception raise questions about the medium-specific properties of cinema? How might the critique of classical representation be useful to progressive ideological projects, from workers movements to campaigns against discrimination? To answer these questions, we will turn to a set of films, some canonical and some unknown, by Luis Buñuel, Cindy Sherman, Stan Brakhage, Mario Peixoto, Toshio Matsumoto, Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Kenneth Anger, Arthur Jafa, Andy Warhol, Germaine Dulac, Paul Sharits, Antonio Reis, Peter Tscherkassky, and Ken Jacobs – using these and others as resources to understand the variety of ways film can be used as a subversive art. The subtitle to this course, “For Life, Against the War”, refers to the 1967 anthology film of the same name made by a group of filmmakers from the American underground protesting the Vietnam War. This subject will help to focus the second half of the course, which will consider films from the avant-garde made against war by filmmakers including Masao Adachi, Jocelyne Saab, Harun Farocki, Skip Norman, Jean-Luc Godard, Leo Horowitz, Želimir Žilink, Yoko Ono, Marcel Hanoun, Santiago Alvarez, and Peter Watkins.

What is the relationship between documentary and reality? What are the ethical issues raised by documentary filmmaking? What different approaches have been used in producing documentaries and how have they shaped the ways in which film subjects have been portrayed and perceived? How has documentary contributed to social and political movements? What is the role of documentary in contemporary society? This course examines the theory of documentary film, drawing on examples from contemporary documentary film.

This course provides an advanced introduction to the history of the cinema, from the end of the nineteenth century to World War II. We will focus on media history and media archaeology, the development and institutionalization of film aesthetics and industry practices, the emergence of narrative forms, genres and international styles, questions of technological change, and the implementation of various modes of production and forms of spectatorship in Europe, Asia, the United States and beyond.