The Film Canon: Debates and Revisions (Film Studies, 1st year, Andrei Gorzo)
Students are invited to explore the question of artistic value (in cinema): how is value decided? By whom? According to what criteria? How have criteria – and consequent hierarchies – changed over time? What larger cultural-political battles are reflected in these changes?
Cinephilia in the streaming era (Film Studies, 2nd year, Andrei Gorzo)
The course invites students to explore cinephilia as a 20th-century cultural phenomenon, to reflect on its current mutations – the result of larger technological and cultural transformations – and to ponder its future.
Romanian film during the Socialist era (Film Studies, 1st year, Gabriela Filippi)
During the Socialist regime, over 500 fiction films have been produced, yet relatively few of them are still known today. This course aims to present a broader view of the era’s standard film production, by introducing films of reputed authors, together with lesser-known films coming from the same artistic traditions – some of them, almost forgotten nowadays. The main cinematic practices of the Romanian socialist cinema will be therefore traced by permanently relating them to the institutional context of the era’s film industry. The course offers a general knowledge concerning the Romanian film production starting from the 1950s to the 1990s, its diversity of genres and topics, and the evolution of different cinematic traditions had changed during the years.
Film criticism in Romania (Film Studies, 2nd year, Gabriela Filippi)
The course aims to trace a history of the Romanian film criticism, from the first writings on cinema to the present-day debates and editorial events. The students will become acquainted with the vernacular traditions of writings on cinema and learn to analyze and contextualize different ways of film reception. The course provokes reflection on how the interpretation of films changes in different socio-cultural contexts or depending on the institutions active in the cinema field, as well as on the new voices emerging among critics and filmmakers.
Film Form (Film Studies, 2nd year, Christian Ferencz-Flatz)
The course aims to introduce students to different practices of avant-garde cinema (which, in spite of its name, already has a well-defined history of practices and reception), as well as narrative cinema in which the style interferes with following the story. The study materials and class presentations will provide the socio-cultural and production context of these films, training students to speculate on the underlying political orientation of some of them. Case studies vary from auteur comedies (by Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis) to slow cinema and „avant-docs” where documentary form borrows experimental film processes.
Film Journalism Workshop (Film Studies, 1st year, Irina Trocan)
Guiding students through the close reading of different formats of film criticism, the course aims to take stock of the very different ways of forming and expressing a critical argument, both in writing and through audiovisual means. The overarching purpose is forming the ability of peer reviewing, looking beyond the information contained in a critical text and observing the argumentative framework, its structure and ellipses, its inherent polemical dialogue with other approaches of the same topic. Over the two term, we will talk about prominent film critics (like Manny Farber or Andrew Sarris), critical formats with decades-long history (from attentive formal analysis to celebrity journalism), we will compare different approaches on divisive topics (for instance, the numerous, diverse famous critical takes on Jean-Luc Godard or Cary Grant) as well as examine the way that the proliferation of multimedia leads to new forms of criticism (such as the video essay) beyond the written word.
Media Philosophy (Film Studies, 2nd year, Christian Ferencz-Flatz)
The main concepts of traditional film theory and film philosophy were developed in regarding cinema as a „unique medium” (Einzelmedium). In contrast to this, the present lecture course takes as its starting point the plurality of media. Such a perspective allows not only for the philosophical analysis of new types of phenomena, concerning the interferences between various media or their historic convergences, but also for rethinking differently those traditional concepts and problems of film theory. Thus, the lecture offers an introduction to the contemporary debates in media philosophy in contrasting two canonic early positions in the field: Walter Benjamin and Vilém Flusser.
Utility Film (Film Studies, 1st year, Christian Ferencz-Flatz)
For the past 10 years, utility film has proven a continuously expanding field of research. Interest in this field is driven not only by the need to delineate – in contrast to the traditional, aesthetic approach to cinema – a different way of dealing with film and a parallel, lesser known history thereof, but moreover by the belief that any firm distinction between film as an autonomous artwork and films with a specific (scientific, pedagogical, military, commercial etc.) use value is ultimately only relative. The lecture aims to explore two main classes of utility film – scientific film and advertising film – in order to show that one can thus find answers to the question: „what is film?”, which also shed new light on its traditional, aesthetic experience.
Post-classical American cinema (Film Studies, 1st year, 1st semester, Dana Duma, Iulia Voicu)
The course synthesizes the aesthetic and technical evolution of the post-classical American film, starting from the Second World War and into the new millennium, tracing the progress of the production system, technology, the various facets of cinema’s links with society, the ideological subtext, its perception by the audience, correspondingly emphasizing the principal tendencies throughout the decades as well as the contribution of auteurs that assured prestige as well as the industrial supremacy of the American cinema. Building upon the study of relevant films and readings, the course contributes to students’ developing capacity of classifying, evaluating and commenting the films under discussion.
Film and Theater: interferences/intermediality (Film Studies, 2nd year, Iulia Voicu)
Studying the mutually beneficial influence of theater on film will take on an aesthetic, sociological and cultural perspective on the phenomenon that involved prominent filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Laurence Olivier, Bertolt Brecht or the Romanian Liviu Ciulei and Lucian Pintilie. The course aims to sustain the acquisition of professional skills which will lead to writing about film in an informed, relevant and responsible manner.
Methods in Non-Fictional Filmmaking (Film Studies, 2nd year, Andrei Rus, Liri Alienor Chapelan)
The course sets out to examine how the idea of ‘documentary’, the functions documentary images entail and the ‘social contract’ established between subjects, filmmakers and audiences have been defined and redefined along film history. The focus of this course is two-fold. By exploring traditions and genres such as Free Cinema, Direct Cinema, cinéma vérité, ethnographic films, essay films, film-diaries, found-footage films, propaganda films, mockumentaries and pseudo-documentaries, as well as avant-garde movements and paradigm shifts connected to new media, students are invited, on the one hand, to problematize the rapport between non-fictional images and our historical past and, on the other hand, to reflect on their present-day relevance and impact. Concepts such as ‘indexicality’, ‘truth claims’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘epistemic authority’ or ‘ideological transparency’ and situating them in the wider context of fiction film form the basis of an introductory analysis of audiovisual non-fictional representation.