More Information

Winter Quarter

Dept	Course No and Title	Instructor
FLM&MDA (W18)	145 GAMES AND GENDER	SODERMAN, A.
This class offers a broad introduction to contemporary issues in critical games studies, focusing on historical and theoretical approaches to the study of games based on gender, race and sexuality. This course will not only examine issues orbiting representation within mainstream, indie, and artist-produced video games, but will also analyze how video games have shaped—and have been shaped by—cultural constructions of race, masculinity, femininity and queer subjectivity. Course readings will draw on and feminist game studies, queer game studies, and game studies informed by critical race theory. We will also investigate intersections between these perspectives and seek to cultivate engaged forms of game analysis based on these critical approaches. Among other topics, we will analyze Dating Sims, “toxic game culture” and #gamergate, the feminization of casual games, the rise of the queer games movement, and issues surrounding gendered and racialized violence within video games. Students will have the opportunity to play a variety of games within this class including board games, console games, casual games, VR games, and so on. This course is cross listed with Gender & Sexuality Studies 155 and Informatics 190. Please contact Prof. Soderman at asoderma@uci.edu to request an authorization code for this course.
FLM&MDA (W18)	111 THEORY AND PRACTICE	RONY, F.
This seminar on theory and practice in film takes as its primary focus the issue of realism in film. In addition to reading theory we will use exercises in digital film production and editing to understand film realism. We will look at montage, sound, film movement, directing, and mise en scene in order to understand how ideology works in tandem with style. We will examine films as diverse as early silent film, Soviet montage, classical Hollywood, Third cinema, documentary, and experimental video. Course Requirements: Prompt attendance and participation at all classes and screenings, completion of all readings, messageboard writing assignments due every week at 12pm on the Monday before class, three digital film assignments and three short papers, final digital film project due on the last day of classes, Tuesday, March 13th. The prerequisites for this course are FLM&MDA 85A-B-C, FLM&MDA 120A, and one course from the FLM&MDA 101 series.
FLM&MDA (W18)	160 JAPANESE CINEMA	PROVENCHER, K.
Introduction to the study and analysis of Japanese cinema from historical, theoretical, political, and formal perspectives.
FLM&MDA (W18)	110 FILM & MEDIA THEORY	MIMURA, G.
This seminar will examine the nature and theory of political cinema, with particular emphasis on Third Cinema––an international leftist movement radical in its politics and approach to film, emerging in the 1960s in the wake of decolonial and anti-imperialist movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Third Cinema synthesized Marxist theory and film practice into a cultural-political praxis committed to advancing the interests of the ‘non-aligned’ Third World. By the late 1960s, it had inspired the development of ‘guerilla filmmaking’ among New Left and minoritarian constituencies in the First World. How did Third Cinema––and political cinema generally––reframe intellectual debates over art, politics and entertainment? How did it engage questions of gender, sexuality, and race; of nationalism, diaspora, and identity? We will approach such topics comparatively, and seek to grasp film as a political object and practice as it has been taken up in multiple geopolitical and historical contexts. The prerequisites for this course are FLM&MDA 85A-B-C and one course from the FLM&MDA 101 series.
FLM&MDA (W18)	85A INTRO FILM ANALYSIS	LIU, C.
This course serves as an introduction to film analysis. This class fosters a critical awareness of how the language of film employs image and sound to produce meaning and elicit spectatorial response. Beginning with cinema's debts to series photography, the course concentrates on film form, teaching students to attentively analyze films in relation to mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound, narrative, and meaning. Preparing students, especially film majors, for a deeper study of film, the course equips students with an analytical vocabulary for storyboard and scene analysis, as well as an understanding of key historical and critical concepts regarding film.
FLM&MDA (W18)	139W WRITING ON FILM&MDA	LIU, C.
In this 139W, we will be exploring ideas of the city in East Asian Film, focusing ways that filmmakers have represented fast growing and fast changing Chinese speaking cities in a realist mode. We will be looking at the relationship of the filmmakers’ practices with principles of the New Wave as it was formulated in 1960s France and consider differences and similarities between the principles of filmmaking that have defined the work of Wong Kar Wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke. This class will teach students advanced research and writing methodologies in Film Studies, Urban History and Media Studies and should prepare students to write about film in an effective manner. The prerequisites for this course are [FLM&MDA 85A or FLM&MDA 85B or FLM&MDA 85C] and satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement.
FLM&MDA (W18)	85B BROADCAST MEDIA	JOHNSON, V.
This course is a critical investigation of the history of the US broadcasting from its beginnings in the 19th Century imagination to the present. In each session we will focus on broadcast media as economic interests, as regulated public entities, as venues for cultural and artistic production, address and critical analysis, and as sites of audience attention, criticism and activism. Broadly, the course focuses on the relationship between broadcast media and the larger social, political, and economic context or culture in which they are imagined, develop, and are challenged. We examine US broadcasting in theoretical and historical perspective, as a site of ongoing struggle and dialogue regarding media and cultural identity. As part of the three-quarter 85-sequence in Film and Media Studies, FLM&MDA 85B builds on students understandings of ideological and visual/aural analysis from 85A and applies those skills to the analysis and further interrogation of US broadcast media. The course also points students toward 85C's focus on New Technologies and Visuality, offering a foundation for the historical and theoretical understanding of links between and across audio-visual media, their analysis, and their broader social significance.
FLM&MDA (W18)	130 SEX POLITICS MEDIA	HILDERBRAND, L.
This course will examine recent political and media debates, scandals, and activism related to gender and/or sexuality. Although such cultural/media events are often reduced to binary logics, this course will strive to interrogate the range of investments for stakeholders in such representations and critiques, as well as strategize how to recognize false equivalencies. In addition, we will seek to recognize how generational divides operate, even within supposedly unified identity or political groups. The topical case studies will include trigger warnings, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Bros, “fragile” and “toxic” masculinities, questions of who gets to represent trans-of-color lives, the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment and rape charges, industry practices of diversity and inclusion (or lack thereof), and the work of memes, among others. This course is cross-listed with Gender& Sexuality Studies 139.
FLM&MDA (W18)	145 AMERICN POP CULTURE	HATCH, K.
This course will consider film and radio of the early twentieth century in relation to other popular entertainments of the period—theater (particularly vaudeville and Broadway), music (particularly jazz and pop music), public amusements (amusement parks, circuses, and world fairs), and other mass market entertainments (pulp novels, mass market magazines)—in order to understand how cultural forms that developed in relation to local tastes and regional audiences were adapted by the newly emerging mass media. We will consider the changing social conditions that invited increasingly diverse audiences into the public sphere of popular amusements, explore the degree to which these commercial amusements forestalled or fostered political resistance and social change, and examine the role that mass culture has played in shaping American identities and desires. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 85A.
FLM&MDA (W18)	101A SILENT ERA	HATCH, K.
This course introduces the prehistory and invention of cinema and the major technological, aesthetic, and industrial developments leading into the narrative feature film and the sound film. Through readings in film history and theory, we will consider the social and cultural significance of film spectatorship, the rise of the Hollywood studio system, and the proliferation of genres such as the melodrama, the historical film, the documentary, and the avant-garde film as paradigmatic of broad tendencies in the emergence of modern societies. Films by D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Flaherty, and F.W. Murnau will be approached as instances of mise-en-scene, montage, and cinematography of decisive importance in the evolution of the film language still in evidence today. Course requirements include prompt attendance and participation, assignments, midterm exam, final exam. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 85A.
FLM&MDA (W18)	139W WRITING ON FILM&MDA	HAGGINS, B.
The situation comedy, or as it is more commonly known, the sitcom, is the most derided genre in television history. Although the declared “dead” countless times on multiple fronts (industrial, critical and scholarly), this genre endures: it is the cockroach of television genres. Yet, the study of the sitcom as a cultural artifact, an industrial product and aesthetic/creative endeavor tells significant stories, the ways in that representations of class, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, race and sexual orientation have (and have not) evolved, and how the television comedy’s construction of the “funny” speaks to the socio-historical moment of a show’s production. The goal of the course is to examine how, throughout the long history of the sitcom, the genre simultaneously reflects and refracts American culture and (overtly and/or covertly) forwards the notions of consumerism, conformity and containment imbedded in television, which is, first and foremost, a commercial medium. The prerequisites for this course are [FLM&MDA 85A or FLM&MDA 85B or FLM&MDA 85C] and satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement.
FLM&MDA (W18)	120B INTERMED PRODUCTION	DAUCHAN, D.
In this second part of the production series, students will expand their filmmaking skills and develop their vision as a director. Class covers a variety of approaches such as documentary, experimental and mockumentary, as well as traditional narrative filmmaking. This course is also designed to improve your ability to collaborate as a filmmaker. Class is organized as a workshop: there will be lectures, in-class exercises, outside projects, screenings, and discussions. Students enrolled in this class may use University owned equipment and are financially responsible for the University equipment on loan to them. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 120A.
FLM&MDA (W18)	118B WRITING TV II	DAUCHAN, D.
An intermediate level screenwriting class, in which the one hour TV drama format will be used to explore character, storytelling, and scene development. Students return to write and workshop their own original one-hour drama pilot script. We will analyze the creative decisions, approaches and techniques of the individual writer in the workshop. This course continues to expand concepts introduced in Writing Television 1 and culminates with students completing a first draft of that original pilot. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 118A.
FLM&MDA (W18)	117A INTRO SCREENWRITING	CARTIER, M.
Students learn about "the world of the screenwriter" by reading and studying screenplays, and writing parts of them-including the beat outline, treatment and character biography. Assignments include reading, viewing and analyzing selected films; and writing papers that explore facets of the screenplay such as structure, character and theme. The final grade is based on participation/attendance, writing the set-up for an actual feature film and storyboarding a traditional 3-act screenplay. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 85A.
FLM&MDA (W18)	120A BASIC PRODUCTION	CANE, E.
This course introduces the fundamentals of film production using digital video. It is designed for students who have little or no production experience. Assignments provide hands-on learning of the basic elements of production. From cinematography, lighting, and sound, to writing a short script and editing with Final Cut Pro, this class takes students through the production process, culminating in the completion of a 2 to 5 minute short digital film. Students enrolled in this class may use University owned equipment and are financially responsible for the University equipment on loan to them. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 85A.
FLM&MDA (W18)	120B INTERMED PRODUCTION	CANE, E.
In this second part of the production series, students will expand their filmmaking skills and develop their vision as a director. Class covers a variety of approaches such as documentary, experimental and mockumentary, as well as traditional narrative filmmaking. This course is also designed to improve your ability to collaborate as a filmmaker. Class is organized as a workshop: there will be lectures, in-class exercises, outside projects, screenings, and discussions. Students enrolled in this class may use University owned equipment and are financially responsible for the University equipment on loan to them. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 120A.