Pre-Approved Extra-Departmental Undergraduate Film Elective Courses for Spring 2018
Oct 23, 2017
The following courses have been approved to count for upper-division elective credit in the Film Studies major for Spring 2018.
Please visit their respective department websites for course descriptions and further information.
French 170 – CN:39629 (25 seats)
French Films: Introduction to French Cinema
French 141 – CN:39616 (40 seats)
French Studies in an International Context
France, Europe and the Refugee "Crisis": Explorations in Fiction and Film
Slavic 138 – CN:32173 (30 seats)
Topics in Russian and Soviet Film; Sergei Eisenstein
Rhetoric 131T – CN:29870 (17 seats)
Genre in Film & Literature: Western Noir
Rhetoric 132T – CN:40955 (17 seats)
Auteur in Film: The Films of the Coen Brothers
English 173 – CN:38962 (40 seats)
The Language and Literature of Films (Post)colonial Film
GWS 126 – CN:39436 (50 seats)
Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde
AfricAmSt 142AC – CN:21951 (138 seats)
Race and American Film
Anthro 138B – CN:39639 (12 seats)
Field Production of Ethnographic Film
EthnicSt 122AC – CN:24203 (90 seats)
Ethnicity and Race in Contemporary American Films
Italian 170 – CN:32137 (35 seats)
The Italian Cinema: History, Genres, Authors
Korean 186 – CN:39292 (30 seats)
Introduction to Korean Cinema
Art 141 – CN: 323082 (17 opens seats)
Temporal Structures: Video and Performance Art
Art 174 – CN:41461 (17 open seats)
Advanced Digital Video
Film & Media Departmental Statement on the DACA Decision
Sep 6, 2017
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.
Commencement 2017
May 11, 2017
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!
Pre-Approved Extra-Departmental Undergraduate Film Elective Courses for Fall 2017
Apr 25, 2017
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French 265A: I Confess: Self-Narration and Self-Representation from the Novel to New Media
Apr 24, 2017
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.
Summer 2017 Courses – Enroll Today!
Feb 13, 2017
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
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
Approved Extra-Departmental Film Elective Courses – Spring 2017
Jan 3, 2017
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: Commencement 2017
Sep 26, 2016
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!
Call for Papers: & Media
Jul 1, 2016
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.
Summer Activities with Film & Media
May 3, 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.