Fall 2023 Courses

Any course on this list may count as an elective for the Global Cinema Minor or the Film Studies concentration in English and Comparative Literature. Some of these courses, however, will not automatically count, and in those cases you will need to request a Tar Heel Tracker adjustment.

Also keep in mind that some restrictions may apply to production courses. Be sure to check Connect Carolina for specifications by the department offering the course.

Foundations

ENGL 142 Film Analysis (Flaxman)

Survey II

CMPL 142 Visual Culture II (Flaxman)
CMPL 255 Feast in Film/Fict/Phil (Brodey)

CMPL 227 Global Authors: The Middle Ages in World Cinema (Legassie)

ENGL 381 Literature and Cinema (Veggian)

Depth

CMPL 262 Film and Politics (Christmas)

CMPL 280-001 Film Genres: Horror, Thriller, and Dark Comedy (Warner)

CMPL 280-002 Film Genres (TBD)

Writing-Intensive

ENGL 381 Literature and Cinema (Veggian)

Research-Intensive

ENGL 494 Research Methods in Film Studies (Johnson)

Electives
CMPL 144 Engaging Film and Media: Films of the 1990s (Warner)

ENGL 143 Film and Culture (Ross)

ENGL 148 Horror (Curtain)

ENGL 257 Video Games and Narrative Cinema (Gotzler)

CMPL 180 Race and Ethnicity in Hollywood Productions and Beyond (TBD)

CMPL 230 Global Crusoe: The Desert-Island Idea in Film and Fiction (Baker)

CMPL/KOR/WGST 237 Rebel, Lover, Martyr: Gender and Sexuality in North and South Korean Screen Cultures (Kief)

CMPL/GERM 266 Weimar Cinema (Pollmann)

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FULL COURSE LIST AND DESCRIPTIONS 

CMPL 142 Visual Culture II

MoWeFr 12:20PM – 1:10PM

Gregory Flaxman

Fulfills a major core requirement. This course surveys the visual arts, in particular painting and photography, from roughly 1750 to the present. Pictorial traditions, styles, and genres (as well as the traditions of critical writing that respond to them) will be considered from a proto-cinematic perspective. Theater and the novel may also be examined comparatively.

CMPL 144 Engaging Film and Media: 

Films of the 1990s

MoWe 10:10AM – 11:00AM

Rick Warner

As an academic version of a “film club,” this wide-ranging course will consider both American and international films of the 1990s. We will explore a variety of genres, including the crime film, teen/ coming-of-age film, biopic, horror, action, comedy, science fiction, melodrama, musical/romance, and animation. Among the topics we will address are the explosion of independent cinema, the advent of digital technology and computer-generated imagery, the portrayal of race, characteristic attitudes of Generation X, postmodern pastiche and parody, debates about screen violence, and questions of gender, class and sexuality. Films likely to be shown: Goodfellas (Scorsese), Pulp Fiction (Tarantino), The Silence of the Lambs (Demme), Malcolm X (Spike Lee), The Matrix (Wachowskis), The Virgin Suicides (Coppola), The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan), Fight Club (Fincher), The Birdcage (Nichols), La Haine (Kassovitz), Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki), Being John Malkovich (Jonze), Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang) Ring (Nakata), The Killer (Woo), and DDLJ (Chopra). Join us for a survey of one of the most pivotal and exciting decades in the history of both American and international cinema!

CMPL 180 Race and Ethnicity in Hollywood Productions and Beyond 

Black Women in Popular Culture

MoWeFr 10:10AM – 11:00AM

TBA

CMPL 227 Global Authors: The Middle Ages in World Cinema

TuTh 5:00PM – 6:15PM

Shayne Legassie

Traces major points of convergence among the thematic concerns of medieval literature, global cinema, and academic constructions of “the Middle Ages.” Considers the aesthetic and technological development of film and of medieval painting, sculpture, and dramatic performance.

CMPL 230 Global Crusoe: The Desert-Island Idea in Film and Fiction 

TuTh 2:00PM – 3:15PM

David Baker

The desert-island scenario involves a sophisticated and culturally central thought experiment in which the constraints of history and society are suspended and human nature is exposed in its essence. This course considers the permutations of this scenario in film and fiction from around the world.

CMPL 237 (KOR 237, WGST 237) Rebel, Lover, Martyr: Gender and Sexuality in North and South Korean Screen Cultures 

TuTh 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Johnathan Kief

This course introduces students to the history of North and South Korean film and television through the lens of gender and sexuality. In so doing, it explores the multiple forms of the Korean self and the diverse shapes that Korean identity has taken across the modern and contemporary eras.

CMPL 255 Feast in Film/Fict/Phil 

TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Inger Brodey

Comparative and interdisciplinary study of feasting and its philosophical underpinnings, with special attention to the multiple purposes and nuances of food and feasting in literature, film, and the visual arts.

CMPL 262 Film and Politics 

TuTh 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Danielle Christmas

This course investigates the complex relations between cinema and politics in particular national and/or global contexts. Examining not merely films with narratives about politically charged themes but also the political and ideological nature of filmic representation itself, this course focuses on questions that link politics and aesthetics.

CMPL 266 (GERM 266) Weimar Cinema 

TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM

Inga Pollmann

Explores important German films of 1919 to 1933, locating them in their artistic, cultural, and historical context. Treats the contested course of Weimar film history and culture and provides a theoretically informed introduction to the study of film and visual materials. Films with English subtitles; readings and discussions in English.

CMPL 280-001 Film Genres 

Horror, Thriller, and Dark Comedy

MoWeFr 1:25PM – 2:15PM

Rick Warner

This film course focuses on horror, thriller, and dark comedy. While genres tend to be defined on the basis of their recurring narrative conventions, we will consider our three genres mainly in terms of their emotional, psychological, visceral, and ideological impact. How do suspense and surprise operate? How is it that we enjoy frightening and eerie situations? How do horror and thriller genres make use of multi-sensory atmospheres? Why do we laugh at events that are deeply unsettling? And how do these genres provoke discussion around matters of gender, sexuality, and race? Films likely to be screened: Dracula (Browning & Coppola versions), The Thing (Carpenter), Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (Hancock),  Night of the Living Dead (Romero), Don’t Look Now (Roeg), The Shining (Kubrick), Alien (Scott), Cure (K. Kurosawa), Videodrome (Cronenberg), Get Out (Peele), Candyman (Rose & DaCosta versions) You Were Never Really Here (Ramsay), Barton Fink (the Coen brothers), Memories of Murder (Bong), Jennifer’s Body (Kusama), and Hereditary (Aster). Be advised: several of the films we will examine necessarily feature disturbing scenes.

CMPL 280-002 Film Genres 

Blackness, Horror, and the Limits of Historical Trauma

MoWeFr 11:15AM – 12:05PM

TBA

ENGL 142 Film Analysis 

MoWeFr 11:15AM – 12:05PM

Gregory Flaxman

Examines the ways culture shapes and is shaped by film. This course uses comparative methods to contrast films as historic or contemporary, mainstream or cutting-edge, in English or a foreign language, etc.

ENGL 143 Film & Culture 

MoWeFr 11:15AM – 12:05PM

David Ross

Examines the ways culture shapes and is shaped by film. This course uses comparative methods to contrast films as historic or contemporary, mainstream or cutting-edge, in English or a foreign language, etc.

ENGL 148 Horror 

MoWeFr 3:35PM – 4:25PM

Tyler Curtain

This course examines the complexities and pleasures of horror, from its origins in Gothic and pre-Gothic literatures and arts. Topics include psychology, aesthetics, politics, allegory, ideology, and ethics.

ENGL 257 Video Games and Narrative Cinema 

MoWe 3:35PM – 4:25PM

Steven Gotzler

In this hands-on gaming course, students decipher the narrative design of video games while exploring the legacy of cinema to gameplay. They also apply critical gaming concepts (agency, world-building, point of view, authorship, representation, narrative choice, play) to evaluate cinema as a ludic and participatory artform beyond conventional narrative elements.

ENGL 381 Literature & Cinema 

TuTh 2:00PM – 3:15PM

Henry Veggian

The course introduces students to the complex narrative, aesthetic, and rhetorical relationship between literature and cinema.

ENGL 494 Research Methods in Film Studies 

TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Martin Johnson

Production Cultures: New Methods for Studying Film

How should we study films? For many scholars, close analysis—studying the content and form of the film itself—is the preferred approach, allowing them to draw meaning from a film’s mise en scene, editing patterns, and camera angles. But increasingly scholars are using other methods to study film that go beyond close analysis. What can we learn about a film from focusing on its production? What does a film’s financing, filming locations, and struggles on the set tell us about the film? What about its circulation? How do films change when we see them in different places, environments, and formats, from movie theaters to video tapes to streaming services? What do popular film reviews, whether written by professional movie critics or enthusiastic amateurs, tell us about how a film is received and understood by audiences?

In the first half of this class, we will consider these questions by looking at the output of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG), a film studio that operated in Wilmington, North Carolina from 1984 to 1988. Over a five year period, DEG produced and distributed more than two dozen movies. Specializing in genre films, the studio released several movies that are now recognized as classics, including David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, Kathryn Bigelow’s New Dark, Stephen Herek’s Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Michael Mann’s Manhunter, which introduced the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter to the screen. But it also released films that are less well regarded, including a two-film series with Hasbro (My Little Pony: The Movie and Transformers: The Movie), and films that flopped at the box office, including King Kong Lives and Tai-Pan, which caused the studio to go bankrupt just two years after its first film was released. In the first half of the class, we will research these films from a variety of approaches, and in the second half of the class students will conduct a research project on a film (or films) of their choice (Note: it does not have to be a DEG film, though students are welcome to write about one or more of these films for their final paper). Students considering writing an honor’s thesis are highly encouraged to take this class.

This course counts as a research-intensive course for the ECL major. In addition, for the Making Connections curriculum this course counts for CI and EE-Mentored Research credit. For the IDEAs in Action curriculum, this course counts for FC-AESTH or FC-KNOWING and the RESEARCH credit.

General Course List

AAAD 250 The African American in Motion Pictures: 1900 to the Present 

Tu 2:00PM – 4:50PM

Charlene Regester

This course will analyze the role of the African American in motion pictures, explore the development of stereotypical portrayals, and investigate the efforts of African American actors and actresses to overcome these portrayals.

AAAD 389 The Caribbean Anticolonial: Caribbean Literature, Film, Aesthetics, and Politics 

TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Petal Samuel

This course will examine literature, film, art, and music from the Caribbean that illustrates and critiques the past and present impacts of colonial rule in the region. What role has anticolonial Caribbean literature and art played in shaping the region’s present and future, and in shaping global anticolonial politics?

ARTS 116 Introduction to Web Media 

MoWe 2:30PM – 5:15PM

Sabine Gruffat

Basic computer skills required. This course investigates the emergence of Web, interactive, and mobile technologies as artistic tools, communication technologies, and cultural phenomena. Students will design and produce interactive Web sites. The course covers principles of Web-based programming and design via HTML and CSS.

ASIA 427  Cold War Culture in East Asia: Transnational and Intermedial Connections 

TBD

TBD

This course introduces students to the specific contours that the Cold War accrued in East Asia. Focusing on literature and film, it explores what the fall of the Japanese Empire and the emergence of the post-1945 world meant across the region.

ASIA 436 Language, Exile, and Homeland in Zionist Thought and Practice

TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Yaron Shemer

Employing Zionist and post- and anti-Zionist documents, treatises, and mostly literary and cinematic texts, this class will focus on the relations between language, Jewish-Israeli identity, and the notion of homeland. Previously offered as HEBR 436.

COMM 130 Intro to Media Production 

Tu 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Kristin Hondros

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Prerequisite for all production courses. Introduces students to basic tools, techniques, and conventions of production in audio, video, and film.

COMM 131 Writing for the Screen/Stage 

Mo 7:00PM – 10:00PM

Howard Craft

Restricted course.  Dramatic writing workshop open only to students in the writing for the screen and stage minor.

COMM 140-001 Introduction to Media History, Theory, and Criticism 

MoWe 9:05AM – 9:55AM

David Monje

An introduction to the critical analysis of film, television, advertising, video, and new media texts, contexts, and audiences.

COMM 140-01F Introduction to Media History, Theory, and Criticism 

TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM

TBA

COMM 140-003 Introduction to Media History, Theory, and Criticism 

MoWeFr 11:15AM – 12:05PM

David Monje

COMM  230-001 Audio/Video/Film Production and Writing 

TuTh 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Kristen Hondros

Prerequisites, COMM 130 and 140; Grade of C or better in COMM 130; permission of the instructor for students lacking the prerequisites. The material, processes, and procedures of audio, video, and film production; emphasis on the control of those elements of convention that define form in the appropriate medium. Lecture and laboratory hours.

COMM  230-002  Audio/Video/Film Production and Writing 

TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Julia Haslett

COMM 330-001 Intro Writing Film/Tv 

MoWeFr 4:40PM – 5:30PM

TBD

An introduction to screenwriting for film and television. This course is reserved for first year and sophomore COMM majors only for the first two weeks of registration. Non-majors and upper class students can enroll after April 18th.

COMM 330-002 Intro Writing Film/Tv 

MoWeFr 5:45PM – 6:35PM

TBD

COMM 345 (WGST 345) Gender and Film

TuTh 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Sarah Bloesch

This course examines the representations of women in contemporary American film and also considers women as producers of film.

COMM 450-003 Media & Pop Culture 

MoWeFr 11:15AM – 12:05PM

Alice Marwick

Prerequisite, COMM 140. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Examination of communication processes and cultural significance of film, television, and other electronic media.

COMM 455 Sound Studies 

Fr 9:00AM – 11:35AM

Aaron Shapiro

Prerequisite, COMM 140; permission of the instructor for students lacking the prerequisite. This course is about sound and the auditory dimension. In a society dominated by images and spectacle, sound and listening have been remarkably under-appreciated. Sound is physical-the vibration of molecules according to frequencies, pitches, and intensities-and biological-our ability to hear is an evolutionary trait. But sound is also cultural (what qualifies as signal or noise?), technological (how is sound recorded and reproduced?), and historical (how has the soundscape changed and how have we listened differently).

COMM 537 Master Screenwriting 

We 5:00PM – 8:00PM

Michael Acosta

Prerequisite, COMM 433. Open only to students in the writing for the screen and stage minor. Students will write and workshop a full-length feature film screenplay. Students will learn about the film and television business through a combination of research, in-class discussions, and interactive interviews with industry insiders.

COMM 635 Documentary Production 

TuTh 2:00PM – 3:15PM

Julia Haslett

Prerequisite, COMM 230. A workshop in the production of video and/or film nonfiction or documentary projects. The course will focus on narrative, representational, and aesthetic strategies of documentary production.

COMM 638 Game Design 

TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Joyce Rudinsky

Prerequisite, COMM 150. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Studio course that explores gaming critically and aesthetically. Practice in game design and production including 3-D worlds and scripting.

FREN 315 Imposteur!: Faking and False Identities in French and Francophone Drama and Film 

TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM

Ellen Welch

Prerequisite, FREN 255, 260, or 262; Pre- or corequisite, FREN 300; permission of the instructor for students lacking the requisites. Examines how French-language plays and films explore questions of identity through stories of imposture, disguise, cross-dressing, and mistaken identity. Authors studied include Molière, Marivaux, De la Chenelière, and others.

FREN 379 Topics Fren Francophone Study 

MoWe 1:25PM – 2:40PM

Sean Matharoo

Possible topics include cinema, transnational francophone literatures, gender studies. In English.

HIST 124 United States History through Film 

TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM

William Brundage

Explores the history of the United States through films made about various historical eras. For each film, the instructor will lecture on the time period(s), the class will read relevant primary and secondary sources, and then the class will watch and discuss the film.

ITAL 335 Themes in Italian Film 

TuTh 2:00PM – 3:15PM

TBD

Themes in Italian cinema: literary adaptation, neorealism, a single auteur or period, representations of fascism, the city, the country, industrialization, social space, north/south difference, regionalism, gender, and sexuality.

ITAL 388 Italian Environmental Literature & Film 

TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Serenella Iovino

Prerequisite, ITAL 204 or permission from instructor for students lacking the prerequisite. This course examines how Italian literature and film convey relevant insights about ecological crises and planetary communities, contributing to shaping environmental imagination. Repeatable for credit. In Italian.

KOR 447 Documenting Diasporas: Korean Diasporas in Films and Documentaries

TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM

Ji-Yeon Jo

In this course, we will explore the multiple, shifting, and often contested diasporic subjectivities represented and produced in Korean diaspora cinemas; these subjectivities encompass various Korean diaspora communities in Asia, Central Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

PHIL 381 Philosophy and Film 

Mo 3:35PM – 6:05PM

Alan Nelson

Prerequisite, one previous PHIL course. An examination of how philosophical issues are explored in the medium of film.