MHIS-429-SU01-2026: Topics in Film + Media Theory
The Stuff of Cinema: Materials, Materiality, and Materialism
Recent years have seen a wealth of new film and media studies focused on what we might broadly call the materialist turn – that is a move away from the scholarly focus on language and representation and towards a renewed interest in the material world: objects, the body, and the environment. This course takes up this new scholarship in order to theorize the material relations of film and media production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption.
This course is divided into three thematic sections: materials, where we consider film objects, including celluloid, the archive, the apparatus, and infrastructure; materiality, where we consider the film labour, surface, and haptics; and materialism, where we consider post-humanism, eco-materialism as alternative approaches to film and media.
Course readings will examine the material conditions of film and media workers, the development and use of various media technologies, as well as the material impacts these technologies and this work can have.
- Teacher: Joe Clark