FILMG-6440-2: Film Aesthetics and Theory
Fall 2025
- Subject: Graduate Film
- Type: Seminar
- Delivery Mode: In-Person
- Level: Graduate
- Course Dates: September 02, 2025 — December 15, 2025
- Meetings: Fri 3:30-06:20PM, Double Ground - N203
- Instructor: Nilgun Bayraktar
- Units: 3.0
- Enrolled: 1/2
Nilgun Bayraktar
Chair, History of Art and Visual Culture Program
Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program
Description:
Section description: This course provides a comprehensive exploration of "art cinema," which has served as a key model for audiences, filmmakers, and critics to envision cinema beyond Hollywood since the 1960s. The term "art cinema" is often associated with highly artistic textuality, art-house theater screenings, and the global distribution of "foreign" films. However, over time, art cinema has intersected with popular genres, national cinemas, experimental films, and the avant-garde, drawing on funding from corporate, government, and independent sources. Embedded in an imperialist and Eurocentric history, art cinema offers both material for critique and inspiration for diverse filmmaking practices. This course will examine art cinema as a contested, dynamic, and hybrid category that has, from its inception, created a connection between aesthetics and geopolitics, or cinema and the world. We will approach this study through a comparative, global lens, examining diverse examples of art cinema from China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Iran, Turkey, Senegal, Russia, Poland, Greece, Italy, France, Chile, Colombia, and the U.S. We will connect close readings of film texts to broader theoretical and aesthetic debates about the film image and its dispersals. By exploring the historical significance and contemporary relevance of "art cinema," we will critically engage with mainstream and avant-garde, local and cosmopolitan, historical and theoretical, as well as industry-driven and formal approaches in film scholarship and practice. Course description: This course provides an overview of film theory and its connection to the aesthetics of film for second year MFA Film Students. The course is designed to provide a foundation in academic film study in a manner that can benefit further development of filmmakers' work as well as aid in their ability to discuss their practice in the context of contemporary film research. This is a topics class with a focus chosen by each instructor.
Pre-Requisites and Co-Requisites:
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