Spring 2025 Courses

SCRN Courses

 

Screen Writing Courses

 

Approved Electives & General Education Courses

Please note that courses offered by other programs and departments may have additional prerequisites or enrollment requirements. Please consult the schedule booklet and/or the course catalog for more information.

 

The following ART courses may require prerequesites for enrollment. Please consult the catalog for more information.

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Course Descriptions

SCRN 2203 | Introduction to Global Cinemas

Nkosilathi Moyo

This course takes a thematic approach in the study of representations of socio-political issues in popular cultural forms including films, short stories, newspaper articles, and short essays. The course will present three main regional foci: North America, Africa, and Europe. The issues or thematic areas that we will explore include, but are not limited to, race, colonialism, immigration, poverty, war, terrorism, and climate change. Our study of each thematic area will always entail a class screening of films from all three continental regions of our focus. Film screenings will constitute an entire class period and film discussions will occur in the subsequent class meeting. All reading materials for this course will be provided on Moodle. We will study works of such writers as James Baldwin, Frederick Douglas, Charlie Chaplin, Mbongeni Ngema, Ousmane Sembene, and more.

SCRN 3010 | Cinematography

Glen Pitre

A mostly workshop course, SCRN 3010 is designed to teach motivated beginners how to use digital cameras and associated gear to tell compelling stories with moving images. Students complete successively more ambitious film assignments working hands-on with gear available for check out from Screen Arts. Planning and reviewing students’ films and practicing film industry procedures occupies the bulk of the 3 hour weekly class time. Emphasis is on how to control and manipulate lighting, framing, movement, sound, and image qualities to shape mood, convey emotion, tell story, and create a coherent look, first working individually, then as a crew. Classes will offer some basic, relevant cinema history but will concentrate on a workshop style, largely nuts-and-bolts approach. While grades remain private, the instructor’s critiques of each student’s work will be shared publicly among all students.

SCRN 3023 | Comparative Literature and Film Adaptations

Dorota Heneghan

This course examines the complex cultural work of adapting literature to film. Through critical analysis of short stories, novels, plays and the films they inspire, students will investigate the cultural significance of film adaptations. As we read and watch, we will consider how literary texts and their respective cinematic adaptations reflect the societies and conditions that produce them. Literary texts and films will include works by Spanish, German, British, American, Russian, and Polish artists. All visual and literary materials are in English. 

SCRN 3501 | North African Cinema

Touria Khannous

An introduction to contemporary North African cinema covering the period from after the 1960s to the present. We will examine the technological, aesthetic, cultural and political developments which have influenced North African cinema. We will particularly focus on the different images of the body.  Main topics are gendered bodies, digital bodies, migrant bodies, body and trauma, religious bodies, etc.

SCRN 3503 | Introduction to Japanese Cinema

Kathryn Barton

This course offers an introduction to the Classical Master Directors of Japanese cinema. Kurosawa (dir. Seven Samurai), Ozu (dir. Tokyo Story), and Mizoguchi (dir. Ugetsu). An analysis and appreciation of the major works of these very different directors will be explored to gain insight into the era in which they were made. For this term, we will focus on the 1920s through the 1970s. Through secondary readings, lectures, and discussions students will critically examine how Japanese cinema as an institution both responds to and intervenes in the social, cultural, and political history of Japan.

SCRN 3505 | Vampires in Film and TV

Vampires are having a moment again as seen from the popularity of television series like Hulu’s What We Do in the Shadows, AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, and films including A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2015), Renfield (2023) and The Voyage of the Demeter (2023). But these newly revived vampires are either unadulterated monsters of the type in Stoker’s Dracula, or ridiculous narcissists. In The Vampire in Film and Television, we will examine vampire media from the silent era to current film and television.

SCRN 4001-1 | Documentary Production: Interviews

Zachary Godshall

In this course you will study the art of the interview for documentary films and productions. You will practice professional interview strategies and artful techniques, all of which begin in a film or project's development stage. You will gain experience in front of the camera as an interviewee before you serve in various roles behind the camera as interviewer, cinematographer/camera operator, and production sound mixer/boom operator. You will also practice editing interview transcripts and interview footage. By the end of the semester, you will have an experienced understanding of a successful interview begins in the story development stage and runs through pre-production all the way until the final edit.

SCRN 4001-2 | Federico Fellini

This course is dedicated solely to Federico Fellini. From 1945-1993 Fellini defined Italian cinema in Italy and globally. Thanks to him, we are familiar with the expressions “La Dolce Vita”, “paparazzi”, “Fellinièsque”. He continues to influence cinema today in filmmakers like Quentin Tarrantino, Paolo Sorrentino, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and more. During this semester we will be examining his films, writings and criticism of his works. We will also explore his influences and legacy. Through our study, we will come to an understanding of how and why this single film director has had such an influence in film, media and global culture. Throughout the course we will study many of Fellini’s films. Students will engage in discussions, make presentations and develop and present a final paper on a topic/film related to this course.  

SCRN 4012 | Advanced Film Directing

Glen Pitre

Students who already have some background in practical filmmaking will learn in depth and detail the practices and disciplines that go into film directing by applying what they learn in class to, working together over the course of the semester, making one or more complete or near-complete short films suitable for submission to competitive film festivals, etc. Students will be shepherded by the instructor through the pre-production, production, and at least some post-production. These projects will be made as team efforts alongside fellow members of the class and may also employ the services of people outside the class. Enrolled students will hold directing-related crew positions such as screenwriter, producer, casting director, director of photography, editor, production designer, script supervisor, as well as director per se and may be asked to perform other roles as needed. Video lectures, workshop sessions, one-on-one consultations, and student presentations for class discussion and critique will all be employed in order to provide educational content and improve the quality of the finished films.

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CMST 3107 | Rhetoric of Contemporary Media

Joni Butcher

This course will focus on TV sitcoms and opening theme songs from the 1960s to present day. We will use various methods of rhetorical criticism to examine the vocal, visual, and musical texts along with the historical contexts (including political, social, and economic) surrounding these shows and their opening themes. 

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ENGL 2231 (Sections 1-6)| Reading Film

Kalling Heck

This class is designed to introduce students to the basic components of the study of cinema, with particular attention given to the analysis of aesthetics. Learning how to make sense of and then write about an image is an essential technique for examining the screen arts and this class will develop these skills by closely focusing on film form. This is to say that this course will address the language of film analysis, but it will more particularly focus on the way that we might move from impression to interpretation, and how we might do this with an eye on cinema’s most basic properties. To achieve these goals, this class will systematically address the aesthetic characteristics of the moving image, focusing on a different film each week in order to draw attention to the basic formal properties of the medium. Additionally, this class will screen films from all around the world, and in so doing offer an introduction to the global media networks that constitute cinema as an industry.