FTS 1430 OL1 (CRN: 61097)
Film & Television Studies: Contemporary Cinema (OL1)
3 credit hours
About FTS 1430 OL1
Introduction to basic film history, theory, and analytical skills. An historical overview of contemporary international cinema.
Notes
Asynchronous online
Section Description
“No film ends badly. Cinema is true. A story is a lie,” wrote Jean Epstein. His words capture the spirit of this course, which explores cinema’s capacity to reveal truth beyond narrative or meaning. How does film make visible what cannot be seen—violence, love, God, sexuality, grief? What distinguishes the cinematic image from the images that saturate today’s visual culture is its relationship to the invisible. As André Bazin observed, the screen never shows reality in full but only through its partial revelation, its masking. In cinema, truth emerges not by being fully exposed, but through what remains hidden.
Spanning from the 1960s to the present, the course features, among others, filmmakers who expand the possibilities of cinematic form: La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966), Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky), Blue (1993, Krzysztof Kieslowski) Maborosi (Koreeda Hirokazu, 1995), Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997), The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001), The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021), and The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
Through close analysis of these films, we will ask how contemporary cinema transforms the moving image into a philosophical and ethical encounter with the invisible—how it defends intimacy and opacity in an age of exhibition.
Cautionary note: Some of the films shown in this class include scenes depicting various forms of violence, including sexual violence, self-harm, murder, and suicide.
Section Expectation
Every week, students will watch one or two films and read one critical essay. Also, they will submit weekly screening notes (300 words) and response papers (300 words).
Evaluation
Grade breakdown:
Screening Notes 25%
Weekly Reading Response 25%
Two Exams: 50% (25% Each)
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Resources
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