University of Wisconsin-Madison
Students develop skills for viewing and interrogating entertainment media through the lens of ethical theory and to articulate their own ethical stance on a diverse range of media, including documentary film, sports entertainment, reality television, and digital media. By approaching ethics from a media studies perspective, we will ask questions about how media are produced, …
Examines sports media using the frameworks of media and cultural studies. The relationship between sports and popular culture provides an important site for understanding and critiquing the media’s relationships to social, cultural, economic, and political structures. Topics for discussion will include sports media industries and technologies; representations of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and …
Development and history of documentary film and video from Lumiere to the present.
Survey of the development of animation as a motion picture production technique, as a film genre, a part of the Hollywood classical cinema, and an independent art form.
Theory and practice of media production and screenwriting.
Explores six major film genres — musical; thriller; comedy; horror; drama; and melodrama — investigating their narrative and stylistic conventions and the principles underlying them. Critical, historical, and theoretical approaches examine definitional criteria and ambiguities; key elements, functions, goals, and effects; and significant subgenres, cycles, and trends.
Development of cinema as a communication medium and art form from its origins to the 1960s. Attention given to national cinemas and international trends through the study of landmark films.
Critical overview of the cultural industries driving television in the United States, from broadcast networks and cable to downloading and streaming, focusing on economic and regulatory structures, programming practices, labor, globalization,audiences, and adaptations to changing conditions in the digital age.
Explains how films work using classics such as CITIZEN KANE, VERTIGO, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, THE MATRIX, and DO THE RIGHT THING (all shown during the “lab” screenings). Students study film as an art form and a medium, cover all the major film types (silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film), …
Introduction to the changing images of race and ethnicity in U.S. entertainment media and popular culture. Surveys history, key concepts and contemporary debates regarding mediated representation of ethnic minorities. Critical and cultural studies approaches are emphasized.