If cinema was once “an invention without a future,” its history is one of relentless reinvention. In this graduate seminar, you’ll examine how the medium adapts—to new technologies, shifting industries, and social upheavals—and how filmmakers have used it to think through what modern life means. You’ll trace key turns from the early Cinema of Attractions to contemporary ecosystems shaped by streaming and mobile screens. Case studies focus on artists and movements that challenged conventions and rewired film language: from Neorealism to the New Extremity, from No Wave to Weird Wave, from Dogme ’95 to Dogme ’25 (yes, even that got a reboot), and beyond. You’ll connect close analysis with context, studying how framing (both pictorial and cultural), voice, and production technique interact with narrative structure to produce meaning, and how meaning ripens with hindsight. Together, we’ll ask how films register the pressures of their time—labor and economics, censorship and distribution, surveillance and data—and how questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and migration shape both what gets made and how it is seen. With a probing survey of work from around the globe, we’ll ask who gets to say what’s canonical and why, and where this so-called futureless invention might go from here.

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