Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

This course will focus on the history, theory and experience of moving images since digitization, from Hollywood films and video games to streaming platforms, contemporary art, and mobile media. We will explore how digital technologies have transformed moving images – how they are made, what they look like, and where they are watched. Beginning with the first computer-generated films in the 1960s, we will consider how digital technologies revolutionized Hollywood special effects in the 1980s and ‘90s, and inaugurated entirely new formats for moving images with the advent of videogames, VR, and mobile media. The course will ask questions such as: What new aesthetics have emerged from computer generated images? How have digital technologies transformed how we consume and create moving images? Have digital technologies destabilized the relationship between creators and consumers? How do new forms of moving images today relate to older forms of moving images? What parallels can we draw between the “digital revolution” at the turn of the 21st century, and the emergence of cinema at the turn of the last century?

Theoretical texts will be paired with screenings ranging from international blockbusters – Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000), Inception (Nolan 2010), Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) – to documentaries – Disorder (Huang Wikai, 2012), Notes on Blindness (Hull 2016) – experiments in form – Searching (Chaganty 2018), The Bandersnatch (2018) – and select videogames, web series, and mobile applications.