Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular term. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the MyBU Student Portal for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• COM FT 524: International Cinema
  This course exposes students to a wide range of narrative, stylistic, and representational approaches in the film medium across the globe. Its broad, transnational, and transhistorical scope invites explorations of films and filmmakers seldom studied in traditional film history and offers students an opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the many levels on which film creation and film reception operate. This course is designed to help emerging filmmakers locate their own craft and creative impulses among historical and stylistic cinematic traditions and to guide emerging film scholars to challenge gaps and silences produced in traditional film history. As such, it encourages students to contemplate their own responsibilities as storytellers, directors, producers, critics, and scholars of cinema. The course material aims to raise the question of what can be gained and learned from appreciating, analyzing, and discussing a diverse group of films from distinct cultures and time periods and to destabilize traditional canons of World Cinema. *Undergrad pre-req: FT250
• COM FT 526: Directing
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT353) - Students learn all aspects of directing, with particular emphasis given to script analysis and working with actors. The director's involvement in blocking action, composing shots, managing the production process and editing are also covered. Acting experience is helpful but not required.
• COM FT 527: Crowdfunding and Distribution
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: FT201 - Whether you're producing web series, long or short format fiction, documentaries or video games, media makers are expected to build and develop their own audience, as well as raise the funds necessary to produce and get their work out in the world. In other words, a media maker must be more than just a creator. To be truly successful, you must also become a creative entrepreneur. Effective Fall 2024, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Oral and/or Signed Communication.
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  • Oral and/or Signed Communication
• COM FT 534: Critical TV Industry Studies
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT303) - Whether you want to work in the television industry or focus your research on it, your connection to it will be incomplete without a critical interrogation of its history and processes. Tv industry studies is a scholarly reading and discussion-driven seminar that conceptualizes the u.s. television industry as a complex site of negotiation between producers and audiences, labor and management, creativity and commerce, and government and corporations. Whereas other television studies courses might privilege the intricacies at work within specific programs or genres, this class asks students to locate those programs within the broader context of a capitalist media system.
• COM FT 536: Film Theory and Criticism
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: Undergraduate pre-req: FT250 - An introduction to classical and contemporary film and media theory. Topics include montage theory, realism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and cultural studies. The course includes screenings of films that have contributed to critical debate and those that challenge theoretical presuppositions.
• COM FT 538: City in Film
  This course explores the relationship between the moving image and urban spaces in the 20th and early 21st century. We initially focus on a subgenre of avant-garde film and experimental media, the city film, which includes the European ¿City Symphonies¿ of the 1920s and numerous examples of experimental shorts made about the city in the big metropolises of the West. We continue into the post-World War II era with films rendering the impact of the war on European cities through the stylistic paradigms of realism and expressionism. The second half of the course focuses on narrative features and experimental (often digital) documentaries portraying life in cities around the globe.
• COM FT 541: TV Genres
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT303) - This class uses fan studies and genre studies approaches to critically analyze the ways that fan practices have shaped and been shaped by the television industry as well as how fans have used their position to influence the norms of television. We will focus on genres with extremely active and integral fandoms and how they are similar or distinct: science fiction/fantasy, melodrama/soap operas, and sports.
• COM FT 542: Advanced Screenwriting
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT412) - Graduate Prerequisites: (COMFT713) - The student will write a first-draft screenplay and two sets of revisions. In addition to participating in weekly discussions on aspects of screenwriting that are tailored to student needs, each student will complete and revise a full length motion-picture screenplay. 4cr.
• COM FT 544: Documentary Production
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT353) - Graduate Prerequisites: (COMFT707) - This course is designed to develop skills necessary for producing long-form documentaries. There is an emphasis on exploring new, more engaging forms of storytelling and a broad range of stylistic approaches. It covers the entire process: finding a topic, developing a story structure, conceiving a style, shooting, editing, and post-production. Students develop their own ideas and form small groups to produce them.
• COM FT 545: Television and Childhood
  Children represent an important target for mediated messages. However, there are important rules, ethics and differences we should keep in mind when creating content for this audience. In this class, we will consider the effects messages have on behavior and development in younger populations. We will also consider design and programming decisions that influence these effects.
• COM FT 547: Avant Garde Cinema
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT250) - A survey of global avant-garde film and experimental media from the 1920s to the present. We will explore film, video, and digital video as mediums of unadulterated artistic expression resulting in daring, experimental forms and controversial contents. The course covers 1920s and early 30s high modernist cinema of "isms" (Dadaism, Surrealism, Impressionism), Transatlantic and international currents after World War Two including trance film, underground film, structuralism, and "psychedelic expanded cinema of split and multiscreen films (Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Peter Kubelka, Rudy Burckhardt), 1970s video art including feminist and gay/lesbian filmmakers, X-rated Europeans (Kren and the Vienna Secessionists) and international "trash" cinema auteurs, the digital video avant-garde, masters of found footage cinema, queer digital media, recent transnational trends. Disclaimer: Some of the films shown in this course contain sexually explicit and graphic bodily acts.
• COM FT 552: Special Topics
  Relevant topics in Film and Television. Course information and descriptions sent out in the FTV newsletter. Email filmtv@bu.edu for more information.
• COM FT 553: Special Topics in Media Studies
  Topics vary per semester.
• COM FT 554: Special Topics in International Studies
  Topics vary per semester. FT554 can fulfill the Undergraduate Additional Studies requirement. Effective Fall 2023, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Creativity/Innovation, Digital/Multimedia Expression. Effective Summer 2025, this course carry's no Hub requirements.
• COM FT 555: Advanced Documentary Production
  Prerequisites: COMFT 544 or instructor permission. - This course will refine the technical skills and aesthetic sensibility learned in FT544 Documentary Production. In this advanced production course, students may continue or expand a project started in FT544, with the aim of creating a festival-worthy film. Students who have shown proficiency in documentary production may also choose to begin a new project. In either case, the emphasis will be on a vital sub-category of contemporary creative nonfiction: vérité documentary production and the unique challenges and opportunities of working within this cinematic tradition.
• COM FT 556: American Independent Film-Part 1 The Foundational Masterworks
  The course comprises one unit of a four-semester survey (each part of which is free-standing and may be taken separately and independently of each other and in any order, with no prerequisites) of the major achievements of the most important artistic movement of the last sixty years in American film--the independent feature filmmaking movement, in which American narrative filmmakers broke away from the financial, bureaucratic, and (most importantly) imaginative influence of Hollywood values and entertainment story-telling methods to create the most important works in American film--a series of generally low-tech, low-budget, DIY, personal-expression films, made and distributed more or less outside the mainstream exhibition system. This section of the survey focuses on the foundational masterworks created by the first generation of American independent feature filmmakers. These are the works that not only changed film history at the point they were made but that continue to inspire generations of independent filmmakers with their example. Since women have made some of the best and most important works in this area, as many female filmmakers as possible are being included. Offered in the fall of odd numbered years.
• COM FT 557: American Independent Film-Part 2 The Second Generation
  Graduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor. - The course comprises one unit of a four-semester survey (each part of which is free-standing and may be taken separately and independently of each other and in any order, with no prerequisites) of the major achievements of the most important artistic movement of the last sixty years in American film--the independent feature filmmaking movement, in which American narrative filmmakers broke away from the financial, bureaucratic, and (most importantly) imaginative influence of Hollywood values and entertainment story-telling methods to create the most important works in American film--a series of generally low-tech, low-budget, DIY, personal-expression films, made and distributed more or less outside the mainstream exhibition system. This section of the survey focuses on the second generation of American independent feature filmmaking. Since women have made some of the best and most important works in this area, as many female filmmakers as possible are being included. Offered in the spring of even numbered years.
• COM FT 558: American Independent Film'Part 3 Recent and Contemporary Work
  The course comprises one unit of a four-semester survey (each part of which is free-standing and may be taken separately and independently of each other and in any order, with no prerequisites) of the major achievements of the most important artistic movement of the last sixty years in American film--the independent feature filmmaking movement, in which American narrative filmmakers broke away from the financial, bureaucratic, and (most importantly) imaginative influence of Hollywood values and entertainment story-telling methods to create the most important works in American film--a series of generally low-tech, low-budget, DIY, personal-expression films, made and distributed more or less outside the mainstream exhibition system. This section of the survey focuses on the third generation of American independent feature filmmaking in the period running from approximately 2000 to the present. Since women have made some of the best and most important works in this area, as many female filmmakers as possible are being included. Offered in the fall of even numbered years.
• COM FT 559: American Independent Film-Part 4 Mumblecore, the Voices of a Generation
  The course comprises one unit of a four-semester survey (each part of which is free-standing and may be taken separately and independently of each other or in any order) of the major achievements of the most important artistic movement of the last sixty years in American film--the independent feature filmmaking movement, in which American narrative filmmakers broke away from the financial, bureaucratic, and (most importantly) imaginative influence of Hollywood values and entertainment story-telling methods to create a series of low-tech, low-budget, personal-expression films. This semester will focus on the contemporary generation that has been referred to by reviewers as "mumblecore" filmmakers. The past fifteen years have seen the birth and development of a new kind of ultra-low-budget DIY filmmaking created by filmmakers in their 20s and 30s who write, shoot, edit, and often act in their own movies. The result is a series of works that have their finger on the pulse of contemporary sexual and social mores and communicate what it is to be young, restless, eager, and uncertain in the world as we actually experience it today. Since women have made some of the best and most important of these films, screenings will include many female filmmakers. No pre-requisites and no permission required.
• COM FT 561: Contemporary East Asian Cinema
  This course studies the astonishing artistic flowering of contemporary East Asian film, focusing on selected works from directors working in China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand. We will focus on post-1997 films, though we will occasionally look back at earlier films that these directors made or that influenced them. The course aims to survey a variety of different genres, styles, and themes as we look closely at the significant output from key directors in these countries. Some of the notable directors we will discuss include Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong, Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke, Ann Hui, Wong Karwai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hayao Miyazaki, and Edward Yang. Our discussions will deal with their styles and themes as auteurs, industry developments in Asia that have affected the kinds of films produced and distributed, and cultural values and history embedded within these films. A background in film/TV analysis, as taught in Understanding Film (FT250) and in other film/TV studies-oriented courses, will be essential. Prior knowledge of East Asian cultures, histories and language will help but is not essential. (The films will be screened in their native language whenever possible, with English subtitles.)