Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

The faculty of the Department of Film & Media stands in support of our DACA (Dreamer) students and their families. Our department remains a welcoming place for all students. We are dismayed by the President's recent announcement that would end the DACA program in six months and support UC President Napolitano's call for a permanent solution that provides a secure path to citizenship. We will do all we can to support students in our classes and our program who are affected by the potential termination of the DACA program.

Congratulations to our graduates in the class of 2017!

Join us Wednesday, May 17th, 2017 at 2:00 pm in Zellerbach Hall for the commencement ceremony. Students, please make sure you have pre-purchased your guest tickets in the Film department office. 

Go Bears!

Damon Young, assistant professor in French and Film & Media, is teaching a graduate course in the French department this Fall 2017! This course will also count for Film graduate student credit – for details, please contact Prof. Young or Marcus Norman directly. 

French 265A: I Confess: Self-Narration and Self-Representation from the Novel to New Media

Is the “self” of Rousseau’s Confessions the same as the self of the 21st century digital selfie? To what extent is subjectivity bound up in the means of its technical mediation? This course stages an encounter between histories of autobiography, theories of the subject/subjectivation, and recent developments in media theory. We will ask how the “private self” of an earlier colonial modernity was given form in the novel and the autobiography, then explore how the invention of photography and film refashioned the subject as “ideally visible,” before considering how digital media cultures generate forms of subjectivity for which the defining imperative would no longer be confession but rather circulation. We will spend some time with Foucault’s discussions of the confessional imperative that situates sexuality at the opaque foundation of the modern subject, reading them in relation to critical commentaries on the production of the “I” in literature and philosophy (works by Butler, Paige, Lucey, De Man). We will explore the interrelation of medium, subjectivity, and apparatus in theoretical works by authors that might include Althusser, Deleuze, Debord, Derrida, Baudrillard, Stiegler, and/or Preciado. Throughout, we will draw on specific examples of autobiography and/or self-portraiture in various media forms. Taught in English, with texts available in French or English translation.

Check out our exciting course offerings for Summer 2017! Included are courses required for the major, upper-division film electives, a production course, and even a course for nonmajors.

Enrollment begins February 1st, 2017 through CalCentral for all UC Berkeley students.

Session A ||| May 22 – June 30

Film R1A: The Craft of Writing – Recording the Un-recorded: Folklore, Movie Monstrosities, and Global Community
Katherine Guerra

Film 20 – Film and Media Cultures
Alex Bush

Film 25A – History of Film: Silent Era
Emily Carpenter
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Session D ||| July 3 – August 11

Film 50 – Film for Nonmajors
Emily Carpenter

Film 108: Film Genre – Game of Thrones
Justin Vaccaro (caricatured above)

Film 129 – History of Avant-Garde Film
Eileen Jones

Film 187: Special Topics in Film Production – Intro to 16mm
David Borengasser and Colin Brant

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