ENGFLM

Digital media permeate most social and economic interactions of today. Still and moving images not only serve entertainment but also inform the way we communicate, learn about the world, purchase goods and express our identities. This course focuses on digital media as a contemporary means of communication placing them in the context of remix culture. It will take students through the core themes of narrative, rhetoric and remix, exploring them through three areas of practice-based investigation: composition, image and sound.
 
This intensive and comprehensive course will allow students to create their own portfolio, including a selection of digital media techniques used in a wide range of settings, from marketing videos to audio-visual essays. Quickly and efficiently students will learn how to produce videos for social media, conduct interviews and present themselves in front of the camera. The course will offer basic skills in digital photography, camerawork, editing and podcast production. Students will also be able to choose one of the four specialised areas which include VR production, social media advertising, audiovisual essay filmmaking and digital journalism. The content of the students’ portfolios will be produced as part of weekly assignments throughout the course, as students develop their skills, with a final project in their area of specialisation.
 
While the emphasis is on practice, each class includes a theoretical discussion that provides a critical framework for working with visual media. Topics explored include copyright and political aspects of the online, as well as its business and marketing side. This will allow students to both understand the cultural context of digital media and use them effectively.    

Moving images are ubiquitous. As one of the most pervasive manifestations of the digital age, they broke out with the confines of the cinema theatre and show up on the multitude of screens around us. Just as we are surrounded by many forms of the audio-visual, we also encounter a multitude of editing practices. From blockbusters to YouTube videos we experience images that are carefully selected and artfully cut in a way that is entertaining, persuasive or simply moving.  
 
The course is designed to introduce you to the theory, practice and art of editing. It intertwines historical accounts of editing practice with media analysis and hands-on exercises. Each of the first nine sessions is devoted to one of the key concepts that illuminate intersections between media and culture: conversation, gaze, action, persuasion, story, beat, humour, metaphor and voice. Each session is then divided into three distinctive parts. The first uses film excerpts to showcase editing devices employed in relation to the theme of the class. The second introduces a theoretical understanding of the pertinent editing procedures and instigates a discussion around them. In the last part of the session you will use a pre-selected set of clips to create your own edit.
 
The course is based on an innovative approach to editing techniques that sees them in a close dialogue with the underlying cultural phenomena that shape the current media landscape.       
 

This course fulfills the "Category II: Themes, Genres, and Theory" Film and Media Studies requirement and the "Historical Analysis" General Education requirement for the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
 
This class pursues three related lines of enquiry about cinema as a political practice:
1) Examining the ways cinema has been used by dominant groups – such as states, militaries, corporations – to advance both broad and specific goals for the political and economic management of populations. (E.g. the state development of propaganda; the corporate innovation of Public Relations; the development of a corporate financed and controlled mainstream industry producing film for commercial gain (sometimes in collaboration with the state).)
2) Examining the ways oppositional, radical, political groups from diverse perspectives have innovated and developed a political cinema to challenge power at either local, national, or global level. We will examine some aspects of the global history of these movements, from early oppositional cinematic practices to the flowering of a post-colonial cinema of resistance beginning in the 1950s, to the current proliferation of a digital activism like for example that seen recently in relation to the ongoing intifadas in the Arab world.
3) We will examine these practices, across history and geography, in dialogue with writing that sought and seeks to explore the politics of cinema and media, looking closely at manifestos written by cultural activists and traditions of political modernist scholarship on cinema. Likewise, our examination of the films will enable us to learn about the specific conjunctures of political and economic struggle. The films will help us learn about the past in ways often occluded in mainstream media, and in particular the enactment and struggle against forms of territorial and economic imperialism, and the more recent (post-1973) intensification of a globalizing capitalism enshrined in the neo-liberal agendas exported with devastating consequences from the industrialized West.
Our (expansive) goals are to understand the role film and media plays in the orchestration of power, and how this has been contested and transformed.
In the midst of our 3 broad agendas, the class pursues some pragmatic objectives:

• It will expand knowledge of cinema history, including different histories of production, distribution, and exhibition. (We understand “cinema” here broadly to refer to the production and dissemination of moving pictures.).
• It will explore different forms of this cinema (documentary, experimental, propagandistic, fictional) and lead us to explore the politics of form cross history.
• It will explore the writings of cultural activists and academics as they examine questions about media, power, and influence.
• It will produce knowledge about past political struggles as mediated through film (and push us to learn about the socio-political contexts in which the films were made and circulated).
• Plus it will necessarily prompt questions about how different state systems engage with media and how the production and regulation of media are political acts that shape the possible public sphere. In pursuing these lines of enquiry our work will necessarily be inter-disciplinary, and we will draw in particular (but not exclusively) from scholarship in political history and political science, public policy, film, media, and cultural studies, history, and broadly progressive traditions of historical, cultural, and media analysis. 

Two masterclasses over two separate weeks will be taught over the course of the term. 
Written in Disappearing Ink: Writing for the Screen(s)
In this week-long class we will consider the art, craft, business and history of writing for the moving image or better yet, writing for the screen(s).  We will cover the script building process itself from concept or assignment, to story construction, outline and drafts, rewriting and the kind of ‘rewriting’ that is entailed by the production and post-production processes themselves. While of course discussing feature film writing, we will focus much on writing for Television, and look at the ways television drama is in the process of reshaping in turn the way feature films too are written
Understanding How A Film Gets Made
There is an old Hollywood adage that to make a successful film you must make five films successfully. There is the film you script, there is the film you cast, there is the film you shoot, there is the film you edit and there is the film you release. The course will examine in detail a number of films from this perspective considering each stage of the filmmaking and how they are articulated together.

This course fulfills the "Category II: Themes, Genres, and Theory" Film and Media Studies requirement and the "Specific Geographic Region" and "The Arts" General Education requirements for the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
 
London has existed for more than two thousand years, and the ghosts of the recent and ancient past remain abroad in its streets and its culture. This course aims to explore the deep funds of strangeness and otherness that permeate London’s places and spaces, through examining films and television series that show the city as a brimming reservoir of past and future shocks.
The course will examine science fiction, horror and noir/neo-gothic cinema and television from all eras, with a particular emphasis on works that take London itself as a major part of their story. These might be disaster or alien invasion films that see the city as a site of destruction or devastation, horror films which render a familiar city frightening and strange, or noir explorations of London’s underbelly that expose sides of the city that are normally hidden.
The course will both present an alternative history of London on film, and also provide students with rich possibilities for the analytic study of film and television. Horror and science fiction are notorious as vessels for the expression of both social and political anxieties, and the selection of films would encourage analyses of both psychological content and broader contexts (areas might include, for instance, Cold War-era fears, body horror, racial or class concerns).
Readings will be both critical and complementary, and hope to locate uncanny London on film in relation not only to American cinematic tropes in genres such as horror, but also to the large fictional and occult literature which features London as a place of archaic energies and occult forces.
All students develop their basic skills in analyzing film texts, and will also develop a good grasp of long-trends and recent themes in British horror and science fiction cinema. They will gain insight into the ways that film can reflect and respond to contemporary social and political conditions and events, and the way that film and television relate to literature. Students will gain an understanding of horror and science fiction as key genres in British film, and gain awareness of some key points at which these genres in British cinema and television differ from their counterparts in US film.
As a result, students on this course will:
- understand and engage with the international history of cinema (as well as that of other visual media forms) and be able to ­place media texts within their social, political, cultural and historical contexts.
-have hands-on experience in at least one area of film and media production (e.g. photography, film, video, video installation, or digital imaging).
-be able to write clearly, coherently and skillfully about the cinema (its history, theory, aesthetics, and/or social/cultural context).

This course fulfills the "Category III: Film/Photo/Video Production" Film and Media Studies requirement and the "Creative Work" General Education requirement for the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
 
The Urban Scavenger course takes the camera as a tool for the excavation of ordinary things scattered in the urban spaces of a modern metropolis. With a focus on the archaeology of banality and the relation between the public and the private we will explore the iconography of London through the lenses of surrealism, psychogeography and material culture studies. The course will look at a variety of moving image practices but with a special attention to the genres of the film essay, film diary and vlog, covered concurrently in the partner City Symphony course. By closely integrating practical elements with theoretical sessions, we hope to draw connections between the discourse on urban consumer society and the images surrounding it, between collecting objects and editing, between the order of things and creating a political narrative.     
Students will be asked to gather shots on a weekly basis responding to the discussions during the theoretical sessions. The shots will be uploaded to a dedicated video blog and commented on by the whole group throughout the term. Towards its end the footage collected by the students will be revised and they will be encouraged to use it when editing their own essay film.    
Methods of instruction will include screenings, in-class presentations and analyses, filming sessions, field trips to unusual London locations, crits or review sessions and editing supervision.

This course fulfills the "Category I: National Cinemas and Filmmakers" Film and Media Studies requirement.
 
The city symphony film emerged in the 1920s, when filmmakers were experimenting with the mobility of viewpoint enabled by the portable film camera and more sensitive panchromatic film stock. The city, in particular its interwar technologies of urban transport and machinery, provided the ideal testing ground for the newly sensitive and mobile camera. It demanded to be seen, and shown, in a new mode that for Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, only film could provide. But of all the international cities that were given the symphony treatment in the 1920s – New York, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, Sao Paulo – London was missing. If London lacked its own ‘city symphony’ film in the 1920s, what were the significant representations of the urban experience? This course looks at the ways in which London both invited and defied the filmmaker’s gaze in this critical period of early cinema, and considers how a contemporary city symphony for London might be composed.
The city has been an integral part of the filmmaker’s vocabulary since cinema’s genesis in the late nineteenth century. The urban environment and the craft of film grew up together in the twentieth century, seasoned by various convergences of technology, one notable one in the 1920s with broadcast radio, telephony and the talkies, and another over the last fifteen years, with broadband, smartphone cameras, and digital media. This course bridges these two periods, drawing on history and theory to interrogate the form of the city symphony film essay, and develop an urban filmmaking practice that allows students to gather and formulate their own reflections on London.
The course will be run alongside Urban Scavenger, in which students will develop and make their own film within a taught theoretical framework. Students will be strongly encouraged to bring ideas from one to the other, and to combine critical analysis with practical filmmaking.

These courses can be fulfilled through Pitt-Recognized or Exchanges. 

This course will be a hands on learning experience in which you will be engaged working collaboratively with classmates in making a short film reflective of what you learn about the film and TV industry.   The subject matter will be determined once we get there, but right now the three subjects which are being considered are 1) doing a film made up of interviews you will have with entertainment professionals, many of whom will be Pitt alum who have had success in the industry.  2) a film about what it is like to intern at Lionsgate, as surprising the studio does not present have such a video and/or 3) a film interview our guest speakers and others about their own “early experiences breaking into the industry.”