For more than 15 years, filmmakers Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino have feuded publicly over the use of the N-word in Tarantino’s films. “Quentin is infatuated with that word,” Lee complains. “What does he want to be made—an honorary black man?” Without missing a beat, Tarantino strikes back: “As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. And to say that I can’t do that because I’m white […] is racist.” 

This completely online course offers students a broad overview of the mass media (print, film, recorded music, radio, TV, internet) with a particular focus on how these media impact our everyday lives. Students will develop critical frameworks for understanding how power operates across the media spheres of production, circulation, representation, and reception. Attention is placed on how the social categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and nationality inform each of these media spheres. The course also considers how recent developments in digital technologies, media convergence, and globalization have transformed our media culture. No prerequisites required.

Storyteller, auteur, anti-auteur, businessman, idea machine, the most powerful director in Hollywood, genius, grown-up child, philanthropist, family man, racist, and sexist: over 30 years in the public eye, filmmaker Steven Spielberg has been labeled each of these things. Some labels are genuine while others are speculative. Either way, our class will look at the life and work of Spielberg through designations such as these. To discern the “truth” about one of Hollywood’s most well-known filmmakers and his cinematic legacy, we will watch at least nine feature-length films as well as read academic analyses, interviews, and critical biographies. Moreover, so that students understand that Spielberg’s films—as all films—are products of the time period and industry in which they are created, we will place them in their historical and cultural contexts. ​

This course offers students a broad overview of the mass media (print, film, video, recorded music, radio, television, and the internet) with a particular focus on how these media impact our everyday lives. Students will develop critical frameworks for understanding how power operates across the media spheres of production, circulation, representation and reception. Attention is placed on how the social categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age and nationality inform each of these media spheres. The course also considers how recent developments in digital technologies, media convergence and globalization have transformed our media culture. 

In an essay for Sound Stage (1965), Hollywood song-and-dance man Gene Kelly confesses to his readers that dancing, because it is "a three-dimensional art-like sculpture," is actually not a good medium for motion pictures. In fact, the star continues, when such bodily movement is transferred to screen, most of the physical force is lost. Also missing is what Kelly calls "the personality of the dancer's whole body, which coupled with line and style, form the basis of a dance performance." For these reasons (and others we'll explore), Gene Kelly along with his frequent co-director Stanley Donen, worked arduously to modify the way dance numbers were shot onscreen. Indeed, via special effects (Anchors Aweigh), vigorous camera movement, on-location shooting (On the Town), and even through the burden of Cinemascope (It's Always Fair Weather), Kelly and Donen created and perfected something called cine-dance, or "any dancing choreographed specifically and particularly to be filmed or televised." This class will consider the concept of cine-dance and its evolution over a decade in six films starring and/or (co-)directed by Gene Kelly.