Courses / Graduate

Spring 2023

  • Film History & Form

    10 001 | CCN: 20158

    Instructor: Dolores McElroy

    Location: Dwinelle 188

    Date and Time: M, W 11:00am - 12:29pm

    This course will focus on the development of film art, technology, and industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ... More
  • Documentary Forms

    125 001 | CCN: 33060

    Instructor: Natalia Brizuela

    Location: Dwinelle 142

    Date and Time: TU, TH 12:30pm - 1:59pm

    This course will focus on topics in documentary cinema, television, video, photography, and/or new media. ... More
  • Experimental and Alternative Media Art

    135 001 | CCN: 30124

    Instructor: Rizvana G Bradley

    Location: Dwinelle 142

    Date and Time: M 11:00am - 1:59pm

    This course will explore experimental film and media at the intersection of contemporary art movements and avant-garde performance. We will begin by studying canonical works of the avant-garde, and then shift to examine feminist, Black, queer, and... More
  • Global Media: Danish Film & Television in a Global Context

    145 001 | CCN: 27002

    Instructor: Tim Tangherlini

    Location: Mulford 240

    Date and Time: TU, TH 2:00pm - 3:29pm

    The goal of the course is to understand recent Danish production in the context of global cultural flows, and understand how production from the edges—the challenging positionality of a small national cinema/television—has certain affordances that allow for... More
  • Auteur Theory – The Showrunner as Auteur: Women, Nonbinary, Queer, and BIPOC Television Auteurs

    172 001 | CCN: 25464

    Instructor: Emily West

    Location: Dwinelle 188

    Date and Time: M, W 2:00pm - 3:29pm

    This course will interrogate the discursive formation of the showrunner-auteur in contemporary British and American television. More specifically, it will focus on the work of women, nonbinary, queer, and BIPOC showrunner-auteurs. Scholarship will address the discursive construction... More
  • Auteur Theory – The Cinema of Tennessee Williams: The Writer as Auteur

    172 002 | CCN: 30529

    Instructor: Dolores McElroy

    Location: Dwinelle 142

    Date and Time: M, W 2:00pm - 3:29pm

    “Forgive me if I disappoint you in saying that the face of Greta Garbo, silver and white and black in the dark, had a greater effect on me and my desire to tell stories than all the... More
  • Screenwriting

    181 001 | CCN: 30531

    Instructor: J Mira Kopell

    Location: Dwinelle 226

    Date and Time: TU 1:00pm - 3:59pm

    Film 181 is designed for the writer with screenwriting experience. Students will develop and write a portion of a feature length, narrative screenplay or the bible and pilot for an original TV show. Emphasis is on rewriting and... More
  • Intermediate Moving Image Production

    185 001 | CCN: 27008

    Instructor: Juan Nicolas Pereda Rodriguez

    Location: Berkeley Art Museum LL14

    Date and Time: M 9:00am - 11:59am

    This intermediate film production course explores the process of making alternative fiction, non-fiction, hybrid and experimental works that defy categorization. Students direct four group exercises and two individual exercises. Short alternative films and clips from longer works from... More
  • Advanced Moving Image Production

    186 001 | CCN: 24522

    Instructor: J Mira Kopell

    Location: Dwinelle 135

    Date and Time: TU, TH 9:00am - 11:59am

    This advanced digital video production course explores the process of making narrative shorts. Over the semester, each student will write, pre-visualize, direct and edit one project, approximately 10 – 12 minutes in length. Each student will also... More
  • Advanced Moving Image Production

    186 002 | CCN: 27009

    Instructor: Juan Nicolas Pereda Rodriguez

    Location: Berkeley Art Museum LL14

    Date and Time: TU 9:00am - 11:59am

    In this advanced film production course students produce a 10 to 20 minute short film and work as cinematographer, sound designer, production designer, editor or producer in a classmate’s film. Student works can be fiction, non-fiction, hybrid... More
  • Senior Seminar – Horror and the Cinematic Unconscious

    190 001 | CCN: 25467

    Instructor: Rizvana G Bradley

    Location: Dwinelle 226

    Date and Time: W 2:00pm - 4:59pm

    The philosopher and media theorist Eugene Thacker has argued that “horror is about the paradoxical thought of the unthinkable.” But how might such a conception of horror be complicated, enriched, or problematized if we were to approach... More
  • Intermediate Film Writing

    193 001 | CCN: 27275

    Instructor: Emily West, Alex Creighton

    Location: Dwinelle 188

    Date and Time: M, W 3:30pm - 4:59pm

    Moving-image media are compelling sites of cultural work. Writing about motion pictures poses peculiar challenges – and offers distinct pleasures – for students in disciplines across the university. Yet it is unusual for a course that analyzes... More
  • Film and Media Theory

    20 001 | CCN: 20867

    Instructor: Emily West

    Location: Dwinelle 188

    Date and Time: M, W 12:30pm - 1:59pm

    “Theorizing, as a form of experimenting, is about being in touch. What keeps theories alive and lively is being responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmurings. Doing theory requires being open to the world’s aliveness... More
  • Graduate Film Theory Seminar

    200 001 | CCN: 24575

    Instructor: Anne Nesbet

    Location: Dwinelle 226

    Date and Time: TU 9:00am - 11:59am

    This seminar will examine both traditional and recent critical approaches to a systematic and historical study of film. Although we will emphasize contemporary structuralist-semiotic, psychoanalytical, and socio-critical methods, we will also study the classical debates in film... More
  • Graduate Topics in Film – What is Sex?

    240 001 | CCN: 26999

    Instructor: Damon R Young

    Location: Dwinelle 226

    Date and Time: F 1:00pm - 3:59pm

    Depending on the context, “sex” might name a set of acts (defined between institutions of medicine and the law); a genre of relationality; or an idea and ideology of the biological division of the species. Sex is... More
  • Graduate Topics in Film – Cinema of Crisis

    240 002 | CCN: 27000

    Instructor: Anton J Kaes

    Location: Dwinelle 226

    Date and Time: M 1:00pm - 3:59pm

    The seminar looks at German cinema between 1929 and 1934 through the lens of philosophical writings about crisis — economic, political, and cultural. We will analyze selected films from the pivotal years before and after the... More
  • Digital Media Studies

    35 001 | CCN: 25457

    Instructor: Dolores McElroy

    Location: Dwinelle 188

    Date and Time: TU, TH 12:30pm - 1:59pm

    This course will focus on introductory topics related to the field of digital media studies. ... More
  • Dissertation Writing Seminar

    FRENCH 297 001 - SEM 001 | CCN: 33871

    Instructor: Damon Young

    Location: Dwinelle 226

    Date and Time: TH 2:00 pm - 4:59 pm

    Students having completed doctoral qualifying examinations and now working on a dissertation or prospectus will undertake a structured process leading to the completion of a finished piece of work, in most cases a dissertation chapter. Each week... More
  • The Craft of Writing – Film Focus – Regarding Violence

    R1A 001 | CCN: 10050

    Instructor: Jonathan Daniel Mackris, Miles Herbert Taylor

    Date and Time: 12:00am - 12:00am

    Of the questions asked of representation today, chief among them is the issue of how to properly depict violence and the problem of evil. In everyday small talk, one commonly hears two basic positions put forward, one... More
  • The Craft of Writing – Film Focus – Racial Histories of Surveillance Technologies

    R1A 002 | CCN: 10051

    Instructor: Osarugue Otebele, Lou Silhol Macher

    Location: Dwinelle 223

    Date and Time: TU, TH 9:30am - 10:59am

    Have you ever used apps to help you optimize your sleep, organize your to-do lists or your work schedule, or maybe to track your physical activity and alert you when you’ve reached your x-thousand steps goal? And... More
  • The Craft of Writing – Film Focus

    R1B 002 | CCN: 19922

    Instructor: Nicholas Vila Byers

    Location: Evans 41

    Date and Time: TU, TH 9:30am - 10:59am

    Intensive argumentative writing stimulated through selected readings, films, and class discussion. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. ... More
  • The Craft of Writing – Film Focus – Monsters!

    R1B 003 | CCN: 19923

    Instructor: Morgan Jennings

    Location: Social Sciences Building 180

    Date and Time: TU, TH 11:00am - 12:29pm

    Vampires! Werewolves! Zombies! What do monsters—and monster films in particular—reveal about the cultures that create and consume them? By looking closely at the various forms in which monstrosity appears on screen, we will analyze how these imagined... More
  • The Craft of Writing – Film Focus

    R1B 004 | CCN: 19924

    Instructor: Gianna Theodora Ward-Vetrano

    Location: Evans 31

    Date and Time: TU, TH 11:00am - 12:29pm

    Intensive argumentative writing stimulated through selected readings, films, and class discussion. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. ... More
  • The Craft of Writing – Film Focus – Animating the Shadow: Proto-Cinema, Early Film, and pre-Code Sexuality

    R1B 006 | CCN: 19926

    Instructor: Tulasi Johnson

    Location: Dwinelle 189

    Date and Time: TU, TH 5:00pm - 6:29pm

    When we think of the advent of cinema, we might think of the dramatic, black-and-white, experimental silent films of the 1920s. If we’re looking even further back, we might recall Edweard Muybridge’s generative photographic “animal locomotion” studies... More
  • The Craft of Writing – Film Focus – Healthy Realism: Italian Neo-Realism in Taiwan

    R1B 007 | CCN: 19927

    Instructor: Matteo Cavelier Riccardi

    Location: Dwinelle 188

    Date and Time: M, W 5:00pm - 6:29pm

    It has been widely argued that Italian Neo-Realism heavily informed the first Golden Age of Taiwanese (ROC) Cinema in the 1960s. Taiwan’s Central Motion Pictures Corporation president championed Italian Neo-Realist cinema as the foundation of a home-grown “Healthy Realism,”... More