Film and Media Theory

A survey of the major critical and theoretical approaches to film and media to include the impact on contemporary digital media convergence and transmedia productions. This paper will examine major problems, issues and orientations in the theorization of film, television and other moving-image-based media. The emphasis will be largely on commercial media, with a focus on the implications for consciousness and culture of changing technologies of representation. Special attention will be paid to the digital transformation of contemporary moving images through intermediality and transmedia phenomena and the challenges these present for historical understandings of media specificity. The course explores the various ways in which film and media theory has considered the experience of the moving image in terms of ontology, representation and signification and how it has analyzed the position of the spectator.