Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

The following courses have been approved to count for upper-division elective credit in the Film Studies major for Spring 2017. Please visit their respective department websites for course descriptions and further information. 

AFRICAM 142AC – Race in American Film

ARMENI 126 – Armenian Culture and Film

EALANG 105 – Dynamics of Romantic Core Values in East Asian Premodern Literature and Contemporary Film

ETHSTD 122AC – Ethnicity and Race in Contemporary American Films

FRENCH 140D: An Introduction to the Films of the French New Wave

FRENCH 178B – Studies in French Film

GERMAN 182 – German Cinema in Exile

ITALIAN 170 – The Italian Cinema: History, Genres, Authors

JAPAN 188 – Japanese Visual Culture: Introduction to Anime

KOREAN 187 – History and Memory in Korean Cinema

NESTUD 165 – Film and Fiction of Iran

RHETOR 131T – Genre in Film and Literature

RHETOR 135T – Selected Topics in Film (Color Theory)

RHETOR 189.3 – Special Topics in Rhetoric (Television Storytelling: The Poetics of Complex TV Narratives)

SLAVIC 138 – Topics in Russian and Soviet Film

If you would like to petition for another course to be added to this list, please submit your requests to undergraduate major advisor Blaine Jones at blainejones@berkeley.edu. You MUST include the following: course description, course syllabus, and the number of units. Courses under 4 units will not be approved for upper-division electives. 

Save the date!

The Spring 2017 Rhetoric and Film commencement will be held Wednesday, May 17th, 2017 at 2:00 pm in the Zellerbach Auditorium. Details to follow in the coming weeks and months! 

Film & Media Graduate Student Conference, University of California, Berkeley

Conference Date: September 23–24th 2016

Location: University of California, Berkeley

Paper proposals due June 30th, 2016.

With the publication of his classic collection of essays in 1958, André Bazin posed the deceptively simple question, “What is cinema?” A similar inquiry has begun to circle around the concept of “media” as film organizations, cinema departments, and conferences across the country have made efforts in the last decade to include the label “Media” in their titles. Often an add­on to cinema and television, media seems to be a catch­all for everything else. Is “& Media,” then, an afterthought—an effort to stay relevant as film becomes less dominant? Operating from the principle that the simplest questions are usually the most difficult to answer, this conference invites papers addressing the conceptualization of “media.” 

Increasingly, “& Media” is becoming the center of scholarly inquiry within cinema studies. This recentering of the discipline has opened up new interdisciplinary approaches from science and technology studies, mass communications, geography, and across the humanities and social sciences. While some scholars insist on a micro­level investment in media materiality, others favor an expansion to definitions as broad as nature itself. Such conceptual oppositions invite a broad range of questions about the object(s) at hand. Is the medium the message? Are media best understood as infrastructure? Are they mediating environments, or are they events, technologies, or universal storage carriers? What new insights emerge when we consider film as part of a media ecology? What does media look like when it is theorized from Lagos or La Paz? What benefits do we get from returning to a medium­specific methodology? What is included or excluded from the term “media”? In this expanding field, why does “film” persist? And how do we account for media that were once considered new, such as television and radio?

This conference will explore how we understand media/mediums and how that understanding shapes and is shaped by overlapping conceptual frameworks, including (but not limited to) history, memory, place, and politics. We encourage both theoretical and historical projects that deal with media and their (lack of) specificity, research that addresses media comparatively, as well as papers that theorize the concept of media/the medium from the global south.

Potential topics for papers might include:

­ Theories of mediums/media

­ Media theory from the global south

­ Questions around media specificity

­ Comparative media

­ Media temporalities

­ Media as infrastructure

­ Adaptations across media

­ Intermediality

­ Media as technology

­ Appropriated media

­ The materiality of media

­ Media and the environment

We welcome papers from all disciplinary backgrounds and encourage scholarship grounded in area studies. Although this is a graduate student conference, we invite lecturers, adjuncts, and other non­tenure­track faculty to apply. To submit, please send an abstract of 200–300 words along with a brief biographical statement to Jennifer Blaylock, Alex Bush, and Lisa Jacobson at andmedia.berkeleyconference@gmail.com​ by July 7th, 2016.​

Students! Looking to connect with the UC Berkeley Department of Film & Media over the summer? Check out these events!

Summer 2016 Classes – Avant-Garde, documentary, horror, Game of Thrones and more! 

BAMPFA Film Series – Visit their new location and boost your cinematic education!

Film & Media Facebook page – Stay up-to-date on events, reach out with your projects, and share your thoughts!

Film & Media Twitter page – 140 characters or less to communicate about the wonderful world of media.

Call for images – If you have original photos of student projects, classes, or department events, send them to us! You could be featured on the homepage. Email Emily Cardoza at emilygcardoza@berkeley.edu with photos, questions or comments. 

Friday, March 4, 2016

5:00 pm

142 Dwinelle Hall

In the wake of the #oscarssowhite movement, the panel will discuss the erasure of POC talent at the oscars as a symptom of the larger issue of lack of diversity in hollywood and the media, and the effects of misrepresentation on the public. The panel will also tackle questions of intersectionality regarding gender, sexuality and ability.

Panelists:
Ephraim Walker – Consultant Producer, Fruitvale Station
Cecil Brown – UC Berkeley African American Studies, Author
Kim Nunley – Screenwriter
Andrew Barlow – UC Berkeley Sociology
Da Carla – Director, Actor, Performance Artist
Kristine Stolakis – Documentary Filmmaker 

Interested in acting professionally? Don’t know where to begin? Come to Delta Kappa Alpha’s "Intro to the Acting Industry" workshop! We’ll be discussing everything related to the acting industry, from getting an agent to headshots and resumes to landing roles in big shows. Our hosts have been on major TV shows such as Scandal, Bones, Two and a Half Men, Jimmy Kimmel, Code Black and many more.

WHERE: VLSB Room 2060

WHEN: Wednesday, February 24th from 8:00pm to 9:00pm

This event is sponsored by Delta Kappa Alpha, UC Berkeley’s premiere cinematic fraternity. To learn more about who we are and what we do please visit our website and follow us on social media:
http://www.caldka.org/
Instagram: @dkaberkeley

This year’s commencement ceremony will be held on Wednesday, May 18th, 2016 from 2:00 – 4:00 pm at Zellerbach Hall, with a reception immediately following the event from 4:00 – 5:00 pm. 

Students do not need to purchase tickets for themselves, and each graduating student will be provided with three complimentary tickets. Extra tickets will cost $5 each. 

Students, make sure to register with Lisa Fox by March 11th, and be checking your email for updates. 

We hope to see you there!

M 2-5 262 Dwinelle – CCN: 17359 – Miryam Sas

How do media shape the way we see, hear, feel, read, and think about ourselves and the world? How do works of art teach us how to think about media? Does the “media turn” in the humanities cause us to rethink our methods of study? Drawing examples primarily from modern and contemporary East Asia, we will open new frames of reference for understanding literature, film, visual art, and digital media. How does the “media lens” give us a new window on works that we may have studied for other reasons, or on questions that have been important—such as gender, nation and transnational relations, urban space and environment, race and ethnicity?

The Grizzly Bay Film and Arts Festival, an upcoming event run by UC Berkeley students at the Eta chapter of Delta Kappa Alpha, a national cinema fraternity, and with sponsorship in part by another Cal club, GiANT Filmmakers,

is aiming to showcase the works of Cal student filmmakers and artists. They are accepting submissions for both film and art, and awards and prizes will be handed out after a judging process from an esteemed panel!

Date of festival: 12/11/15
Deadline for entries: 11/22/15
Website: facebook.com/grizzlybayfaf
Email: gbfilmfest@gmail.com

 Congratulations to Patrick Ellis and Chris Goetz, honorees of the 2014-15 Outstanding GSI Award!

The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award honors over 200 UC Berkeley GSIs each year for their outstanding work in the teaching of undergraduates. These OGSI recipients are nominated from within their teaching department. The GSI Teaching & Resource Center gives the award recipients certificates of distinction and a celebratory ceremony in the spring. To find out more about this award, go to gsi.berkeley.edu. 

Summer 2015 Courses taught by our honorees: 

Film 25B: History of Sound Film with Patrick Ellis – required for the major!

New Media R1B: Nostalgia and the Future of New Media with Chris Goetz