Film Studies 150 - INTRO TO FILM STUDIES

Fall
2016
01
4.00
Jennifer Malkowski
MW 01:10-02:30; M 07:00-10:00
Smith College
18916-F16
SEELYE 106; SEELYE 201
jmalkows@smith.edu
This course seeks to both capitalize on and challenge the overfamiliarity most of you will have with myriad forms of media. It asks you to use the experience you've accumulated as a media consumer (and perhaps producer) and also to put it aside as you engage with media forms and objects in new scholarly ways. Rather than attempting a comprehensive overview of all media, we instead work through thematic units that pair four distinct approaches to this field of study with four of its most influential media: the aesthetics of film, the history of television, the ideologies of video games, and technologies of internet media. Overall, this course is guided by a set of broad questions: what human desires animate our relationship with media? For what purposes have people invented and evolved these technologies? To what end do makers use them, and what are audiences seeking in them? While we attend to medium-specificity in each of our units, these questions also help us see the fundamental forces that unite film, television, video games and internet media alongside the elements that distinguish them from each other. Satisfies the Introduction to Film Studies requirement for the Five College film and media studies major.
Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.