Interested in learning more about the Cinema Studies major? Explore CINE's spring term CORE ED courses below. Cinema Studies offers many courses that are open to all majors and satisfy Core Ed requirements.

Already a Cinema Studies major? Learn more about the interesting TOPICS courses offered spring term below. Visit the course list page for the complete list of spring courses and how they satisfy the major.

Did You Know? Cinema Studies now offers both B.A. and B.S. degree options! Cinema Studies is building connections across new disciplines and is now offering both a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degree option to engage with students wherever their academic training is taking them. Whether you're an IRES major, business major, or studying in a STEM field, consider Cinema Studies as a double major to tell your story at the intersection of science and cinema. To declare the major, simply submit the brief online form. 

CINE 111: How to Watch TV >1 (4 credits)
Tuesday/Thursday, 8:00-9:50 a.m.
Instructor:  Jalen Thompson

With the rise of viewing practices like “binge-watching,” the increased respectability of “quality” television, new content producers like Netflix and Amazon, and technology that allows you to watch your favorite programs on anything from a 5-inch smart phone to a 50-in HDTV, how we watch television is rapidly changing. It’s easy to get swept up in these changes, but one thing will always remain the same: the need for media literate viewers who can talk, think, and write intelligently about what they see on-screen. This course will teach you how to be a critical and informed television viewer, even as the very concept of television is being redefined. In doing so, you will deepen your understanding of specific television texts by using formal and ideological analysis and you will learn to situate those texts within different contexts of history, industry, technology, and reception.

CINE 230: Remix Cultures >1 (4 credits)
Monday/Wednesday, 12:00-1:50 p.m.
Instructor:  André Sirois

In "Remix Cultures," students learn the historical, practical, and critical views of "intellectual property" (IP) by analyzing everything from the UO mascot to Jay-Z. The course highlights how “ideas” are part of a remix continuum: new ideas often remix the great ideas that preceded them and will themselves be remixed in the future. Students will deconstruct the relationship between politics and economics and interrogate the everyday ways that their lives are governed by (and often break) IP laws. As a group-satisfying Arts and Letters course, Remix Cultures provides students with a broad yet fundamental knowledge of how "IP" and "innovation" impact their lives: students of all majors engage with intellectual properties daily and may seek professions in fields that valorize intellectual property. By asking all students to actively and critically engage consumer media culture as intellectual property, the course provides a better understanding of how collaborative efforts are governed by laws that typically value and reward a singular author/genius.

CINE 267: History of Motion Picture III: From 1960s to the Present >1 (4 credits)
Tuesday, 2:00-2:50 p.m.; Thursday, 2:00-4:50 p.m.
Instructor:  Ahmad Nadalizadeh

CINE 267 is the third in a three-part chronological survey of the evolution of cinema as an institution and as an art form from its origin, covers the time period from the "end" of the studio system in the 1960s to the present day. It may be taken individually or as part of a series (with CINE 265 and 266) designed to provide a broad introduction to interpretive, theoretical, and institutional issues central to the study of film and media. The aim of the course is to develop interpretive and critical skills relevant to the study of film by examining the history of both Hollywood and world cinema. Like the other two courses in the series, CINE 267 enables students to engage with major issues within the field, including star studies, the film industry, and censorship and satisfies the university's Group Requirement in the Arts and Letters category. The courses in motion picture history, CINE 265, 266, and 267, may be taken individually or as parts of an integrated series. Previously taught as ENG 267; not repeatable.

CINE 340: Production Studies >1 (4 credits)
Tuesday/Thursday, 10:00-11:50 a.m.
Daniel Steinhart

This course examines the development of production practices and the lived realities of film and television production workers. Our particular focus is not on the production of culture but rather on the culture of production and the ways that production work itself is a meaningful cultural practice. Special emphasis will be placed on analyzing the imagery and rhetoric of production found in making-of documentaries and trade stories. Using various case studies, students will consider not only “above-the-line” personnel, namely film directors and TV showrunners, but also "below-the-line" workers, such as casting agents and camera crews. Throughout, we will take up a range of issues that impact production work, including labor, gender, craft practices, and technological change. 

CINE 360: Film Theory >1 (4 credits)
Monday/Wednesday, 12:00-1:50 p.m.
Instructor:  Allison McGuffie

What is cinema? Is it an art form or a medium? What distinguishes cinema from other arts? Does cinema inherently favor certain kinds of content and modes of expression? How can we describe its relationship to reality? What are the social and cultural effects or functions of cinema? What is cinema’s future in the age of new media? 

This Arts & Letters group-satisfying course introduces students to some of the key authors, debates, and concepts that have motivated cinema scholarship since the early twentieth century. By applying the writings of groundbreaking theorists to films from across the globe, students will explore cinema as an art, ideology, social/cultural institution, and as a technological mediation of "reality." 

CINE 362M: Contemporary Korean Film >1 >GP >IC (4 credits)
Monday/Wednesday, 4:00-5:50 p.m.
Instructor:  HyeRyoung Ok

The course "Contemporary Korean Film" is interdisciplinary in nature as it aims to help students acquire vocabularies to address and inquire into some of the key issues across multiple disciplines such as cultural studies, media studies, and regional/global studies. In particular, this course will endeavor to train students to think both within and beyond the concept of a national culture and help them cope with increasingly globalizing popular culture. The content of the course covers recent South Korean political, economic, and cultural histories and the impact of economic modernization as well as South Korea’s entry into the global marketplace on the production of local cultures. It introduces students to South Korean and, by extension, global popular culture as a serious object of cultural, aesthetic, economic, and political analysis. The ultimate goal of the course is to have students understand basic (trans)national terms and conditions through which border crossing in global media has been configured. Hence the course will provide students a critical methodology for understanding a wide range of global film and media (through lectures, visual analyses, screenings, and readings) and the practical application of that methodology (through written assignments and discussion) that will lead to an ability to analyze and evaluate cultural texts.

CINE 381M*: Film, Media, & Culture >1 >GP >IP (4 credits)
Monday/Wednesday, 2:00-3:50 p.m.
Instructor:  Allison McGuffie

This course studies works of film and media as aesthetic objects that engage with communities identified by class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. It considers both the effects of prejudice, intolerance and discrimination on media and filmmaking practices and modes of reception that promote cultural pluralism and tolerance. It historicizes traditions of representation in film and media and analyzes works of contemporary film and media to explore the impact and evolution of these practices. Classroom discussion will be organized around course readings, screenings and publicity (interviews, trailers, etc). Assignments will supplement these discussions by providing opportunities to develop critical /analytical /evaluative dialogues and essays about cinematic representation. CINE 381M satisfies the Arts and Letters group requirement by actively engaging students in the ways the discipline of film and media studies has been shaped by the study of a broad range of identity categories, including gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. By requiring students to analyze and interpret cinematic representation from these perspectives, the course will promote an understanding of film as an art form that exists in relation to its various social contexts. CINE 381M also satisfies the Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance multicultural requirement by enabling students to develop scholarly insight into the construction of collective identities in the mass media forms of film and television. It will study the effects of prejudice, intolerance and discrimination on mainstream media. Students will study the ways representational conventions, such as stereotypes, have resulted from filmmaking traditions that have excluded voices from varying social and cultural standpoints. The course will also consider filmmaking practices and modes of reception that promote cultural pluralism and tolerance. Previously taught as ENG 381; not repeatable.

CINE 440: Contemporary Global Art >GP >IC (4 credits)
Tuesday/Thursday, 2:00-3:50 p.m.
Instructor:  Daniel Steinhart

In this [Global Perspectives] satisfying course, we survey cinematic traditions within specific national and/or regional contexts to critically explore how and why cinema is perceived as a cultural form that explicitly addresses/engages national identity. We simultaneously address the specificity of a national cinema tradition (beyond that of the U.S.) while also complicating and challenging the fixed notion of a "national cinema." In this course, students critically engage elements, themes or innovations of film that inform or disrupt the category of national identity. Students learn to identify how “nation-ness” is represented, reassured, questioned or challenged in a film text. Can a film’s nationality possibly determine cinematic styles, genre conventions or aesthetic elements? What does it mean to associate a film or media product with a particular nationality in an increasingly globalizing world? How can we determine and understand the nationality of a film text when it is often produced by multinational staff or investors or targeted towards global or diasporic markets? Further, as the specificity of each cultural sphere is linked to a more global media culture (which is engaged to form an increasingly cosmopolitan dialogue), we explore how this process is reflected in and constructed by motion pictures. By looking into these compound questions and issues that have come to define the concepts of “national” and “regional” cinema, this course serves as both an introduction to filmic traditions in a specific cultural context, but also—and more importantly—as an in-depth case study that challenges and expands the discussions of national cinema.

CINE 399: Sp St Middle Eastern Cinema (4 credits)
Monday/Wednesday, 10:00-11:50 a.m.
Instructor:  Ahmad Nadalizadeh

This course will investigate various film cultures of the Middle East and will situate its national traditions within regional and global perspectives. Taking a critical approach to national cinema studies in a world of increasingly globalized film audiences, we will explore both the influence of world cinema on the Middle East film cultures and, in turn, the extent to which the aesthetics of the Middle East cinema is integral to our conception of world cinema. Our discussion of films in class will be supplemented by pertinent scholarly analyses in order to complicate any facile understanding of the Middle East, but also to deepen our awareness of the cultural contexts through which cinema has emerged as an aesthetic form. Drawing on various national traditions, this course will include films from Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.

CINE 399: Sp St Cult TV (4 credits)
Tuesday/Thursday, 12:00-1:50 p.m.
Instructor:  Erin Hanna

This class examines the history, production, and consumption of cult TV, drawing on examples from network era programming through to the current surge in “quality” television production. Historically, the term “cult” has been used to describe media objects attracting a passionate and devoted fan-base, often outside of the mainstream. In recent years, however, this cult mode of engagement has become an increasingly visible and widely accepted part of television and production and consumption. This class will explore these changing definitions by considering how cult television functions textually, industrially, and culturally, across a variety of historical and social contexts.

CINE 399: Sp St South Park & Society (4 credits)
Tuesday/Thursday, 12:00-1:50 p.m.
Instructor:  André Sirois

This class uses the animated cartoon as the launch point for understanding the representation of social issues in the media and critical cultural and social theories. In this course we will examine how South Park has represented or parodied labor/class, race, religion, capitalism, the media, gender, sexuality, patriotism, politics/democracy, celebrity, censorship, PC culture, etc. Because each episode was made the week before it was aired, we will also use the cartoon to examine the specific historical moment and social issues of that time in order to better understand the significance of each episode and its social critique.

CINE 399: Sp St Global South Film Industries (4 credits)
Monday/Wednesday, 2:00-3:50 p.m.
Instructor:  Adhmad Nadalizadeh

Drawing upon such concepts as “southern theory,” in this course we will turn to the Global South in order to explore the complex world of everyday practices shared by filmmakers emerging in those parts of the world which have been severely impacted by globalization and, as a result, have witnessed political and economic upheavals. Our course focuses on the economic and sociopolitical conditions of production, regulation, and distribution in screen cultures ranging from Iran and Egypt to India and Nigeria. We will investigate the role of such local and national film industries in mediating the global imaginaries, and we will consider how the growing trade and globalized export markets have helped standardize their regulated representations of intimacy and violence. In addition, we will examine how the globalized world, with its proliferating video technologies, has in turn vastly democratized the conditions of production and the modes of media ownership and control in those film cultures.

CINE 399: Sp St Ghibli Studio Anime (4 credits) 
Tuesday, 4:00-7:50 p.m.
Instructor:  Dong Hoon Kim

This course surveys the globalization of Japanese animation, focusing specifically on Studio Ghibli, one of the most acclaimed animation film studios. The course will offer an introduction to Studio Ghibli animations and employ them to gain insight into Japanese animation and popular culture. We will also examine a range of factors that have transformed anime into a global cultural form by tracking the rise of Studio Ghibli as a global animation powerhouse and its impact on global animation industry and culture. No prior knowledge of Japan or Japanese is required.

CINE 410: Cinematography History/Theory (4 credits)
Tuesday/Thursday, 10:00-11:50 a.m.
Instructor:  Michael Aronson

Vittorio Storaro, one of history’s great cinematographers, once defined cinematography as ‘…writing with light in movement. Cinematographers,’ he went on to say, ‘are authors of photography, not directors of photography. We are not merely using technology to tell someone else’s though, because we are also using our own emotion, our culture, and our inner being.’ For Storaro and many others, cinematography is an expressive art. This admittedly romantic definition of cinematography, must be contextualized as it is, after all, an industrial craft, made within a system based on hierarchy, mass-production, and the commercial imperative. Keeping both sides of cinematography in mind, this course will explore the story of cinematography in American cinema, working out how a complex art and craft changed across the decades, from hand-cranked cameras to digital work flows. The course will be a bit of a theory & practice mashup, utilizing both historical research and aesthetic analysis, as well as some low-fi creative exercises and the occasional industry guest speaker on all things camera and lighting.