A comprehensive list of courses the program offers currently and in past semesters is located on the BU Bulletin. The drop down menus below feature courses offered by the CIMS Program and Affiliated programs in the titled semester.
See what HUB Units our courses count for!
Fall 2025
Fall 2025
Course counts as a Film History Requirement
M- 2:30 or 3:35 (Various Discussion Sections); W 2:30-5:15 (screening); F 2:30-4:15 (Lecture)
Faculty TBD
Course counts as an Aesthetics of Film & Media Requirement
M 6:30-9:15 (Screening); T/R 11:00-12:15 (Lecture/Discussion)
Faculty TBD
T/R 2:00-3:15
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
T/R 5:00-6:15 (Lecture); Various Discussion Sections
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
M 2:30-5:15
Course counts as an elective requirement
T/R 2:30-3:15
W 2:30-5:15
Course counts as an elective requirement
Topic for Fall 2025: Maya Deren and American Independent Film
This class explores the films of Ukrainian-born filmmaker Maya Deren, an auteur who serves as an exemplar of American independent filmmaking in the mid-twentieth century. We’ll pay special attention to theoretical questions of authorship and artistic control faced by Deren and other filmmakers working outside (as well as inside) the Hollywood studio system. We’ll explore Deren’s unique visionary style and filmmaking practices that relied on very low-budgets, alternative distribution networks, home-made visual effects, and avant-garde techniques, which went far beyond the conventions of Hollywood. Contrasting with Deren’s approach, other American Auteurs embraced classical Hollywood influences by folding its themes and practices into their own unique visions. Throughout the semester, we’ll examine films by Deren and others to reckon with censorship, budgetary constraints, stylistic choices, and aesthetic ambitions. To better understand Deren’s life and work, the course may also include films by Jean Cocteau, Barbara Hammer, Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, and others. Readings will include excerpts of film theory, film history, and auteur theory. With a creative film project component, the course will also put into practice some of what we learn about visionary auteurs and independent filmmaking.
Course counts as an Auteur Requirement
W 2:30-5:15
Saunders
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
T/R 3:30-4:45
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
T/R 9:30-10:45
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
T/R 12:30-1:45
Faculty TBD
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
A1: MWF 1:25-2:15
B1: MWF 2:30-3:20
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
MW 2:30-4:15
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
A1: T/R 11:-12:15
B1: MWF 10:10-11am
Ofra Amihay
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
MWF 1:25-2:15
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
MWF 2:30-3:20
Faculty TBD
Spring 2025
Spring 2025
M discussion sections; W 2:30pm-5:15pm (screening); F 2:30pm-4:15pm (Lecture)
This course counts as an Elective Course
TR 3:30-4:45pm; varying discussion sections
Cross-List: CAS PH 159
This course counts as an Elective Course
M 2:30pm – 5:15pm
Cross-list: CAS LI 283 A1
This course counts as an Elective Course
MWF 1:25pm-2:15pm
Cross-list: CAS RN 203 / CAS XL 368
This course counts as an Elective Course
MWF 11:15-12:05pm
Cross-list: CAS JS 261 / CAS RN 685 / CAS XL 281
This course counts as an Elective Course
TR 12:30-1:45pm
Cross-list: CAS JS 283 / CAS LH 283
This course counts as an Elective Course
TR 12:30-1:45pm
Cross-list: CAS LY 283
This course counts as an Elective Course
T 3:30-6:15* / R 3:30-4:45pm
*Longer class on Tuesday for film screenings
Cross-list: CAS LG 387
This course counts as a Genre/Movement Course
Course poster here: CAS LG 387 CI 320
Topic for Spring 2025: Avant-Garde Film
Visionary films of delirious subversion, hallucinatory images and kinetic abstractions, dynamic experiments with time, memory and perception – avant-garde cinema has everything. In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the rich history of avant-garde and experimental film and video production across the 20th and 21st century, discovering the many ways that artists and filmmakers have struggled to articulate new ways of seeing and new ways of being. Along the way, we will sample a number of major avant-garde currents—the high modernist interwar cinema of dadaism and surrealism, trance films, structuralism, feminist and queer cinema, video art, minimalism, black radicalism, found footage films, installation work, and experimental ethnography. As we work to place these diverse movements in their artistic, intellectual and political context, students will also be encouraged to experiment with films of their own, pursuing creative projects that invite them to test the imaginable limits of sound and image. Films by Deren, Brakhage, Anger, Warhol, Akerman, Julien, Farocki, Dorsky, Benning, Hopinka, Snow and others.
TR 11:00am-12:15pm
Cross-List: CAS EN 329
This course counts as a Genre/Movement Course
TR 3:30-4:45pm
Cross-list: CAS LC 287
This course counts as an Elective Course
TR 2:00pm-3:15pm
Cross-list: CAS CL 325
This course counts as a Genre/Movement Course
TR 11:00am-12:15pm
Cross-List: CAS LN 380
This course counts as a Genre/Movement Course
Staff
T 3:30-6:15pm
Cross-list: CAS LJ383
This course counts as an Auteur Course
TR 11:00am-12:15pm
Cross-list: CAS LI 386 / CAS JS 366
This course counts as a Genre/Movement Course
TR 11:00am-12:15pm
Cross-list: CAS LF 462 / CAS LF 662
This course counts as a Genre/Movement Course
CI 390 Topics in Film and Media
May be repeated for credit as topics change. There are two topics in Spring 2025:
A1: Russian and East European Film. Examination of a series of masterpieces by filmmakers from “the other Europe.” Explores both the stylistic aspects and the role of film as a social and political commentary in socialist and post-socialist periods. No prerequisites. In English.
TR 12:30pm-1:45pm
B1: Critical Theory and the Politics of Cinema. An exploration of cinema’s relationship to power and ideology through key texts in the critical theory tradition, from Marx and Engels to the Frankfurt School, Black British cultural studies, and feminist film theory.
TR 12:30pm-1:45pm
This course counts as an Elective Course
CI 490 Modes of Independent Filmmaking
May be repeated for credit as topics change. Topic for Spring 2025: Modes of Independent Filmmaking. Students will learn the ways in which independent cinema functions as a viable alternative to mainstream filmmaking by studying works from movements such as the American avant-garde, Third Cinema, and the recent resurgence of no-budget film production in the digital age. Additionally, students will gain experience in collaborative video production through topics such as cinematography, editing, and sound recording.
R 3:30pm -6:15pm
This course counts as an Elective Course
Course poster here: CI 490
TR 5pm-6:15pm
Cross-list: CAS EN 569
This course counts as a Film/Media Theory Course.
Topic for Spring 2025: Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini
TR 2:00-3:15pm
Cross-list: CAS EN 564
This course counts as an Auteur Course
Course poster here: CI 551
Affiliated Courses
Affiliated Classes in CIMS
The following courses are not guaranteed to CIMS students, though can be recognized for certain requirements should they be taken. This list provides an overview of what courses are available in the entire University. Actual offerings will vary semester to semester. Please check the student link for availability in a given semester.
This course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Course
This course counts as an Elective
This course counts as an Elective
This course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Course
This course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Course
This course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Course
This course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Course
CFA AR 576
Motion Graphics
Introduction to methods and processes of creating motion graphics for broadcast and cinema. The focus is on story-telling in a time-based context through ambient and linear narratives. Students will consider how design elements–such as type, image, framing, pacing, rhythm, sequencing and sound–influence time-based narratives. Students will broaden their individual aesthetic by exploring a variety of mediums from analog to digital formats and animate with Flash and After Effects.
This course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Course
This course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Course
This course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Course
This course counts as an Elective Course
This course counts as an Elective Course
This course counts as a Genre/Movement Course
This course counts as an Elective Course
CAS WS 329
LGBTQI+ Representation in Film
Before Pose there was Paris is Burning. Before the L Word there was Bound. Explore the often-overlooked history of queer representation in film. Write your own queer script as we expand and problematize “queerness” and reimagine a queer cinematic future.
This course counts as an Elective Course
College of Communication Affiliated Courses
Students who have taken CI 200 are eligible to take the upper level Film Studies courses. Upper-level TV studies courses do have FT 303 (Understanding TV) as a prereq.
Course counts as an Aesthetics of Film & Media Requirement
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Requirement
COM FT 353
Production 1
An intensive course in all the fundamental aspects of motion picture production. Students learn to use cameras, sound recording equipment and editing software and then apply these skills to several short productions. The course emphasizes the language of visual storytelling and the creative interplay of sound and image.
Pre-requisite: CI 200 or FT 250
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
COM FT 404
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. The course focuses on post-1997 films, though it occasionally references earlier films made by the key directors or that influenced them. By examining a range of genres, styles, and themes, the course looks at a variety of important East Asian films during this period. Discussions deal with auteurist styles/themes, industry developments in Asia that affected the kinds of films produced and distributed, and the cultural values and history embedded in these films. Some notable directors discussed: 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.
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
COM FT 457
American Masterworks
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
COM FT 458
International Masterworks
An eclectic survey of a small number of the supreme masterworks of international film. Approximately half of the works studied will be classic and the other half will be by contemporary filmmakers. The focus will be on cinematic style. What does style do? Why are certain cinematic presentations highly stylized? How is that different from realistic, representational work? We will consider the special ways of knowing, thinking, and feeling that highly stylized works of art create and devote our attention to the function of artistic style and form to create new ways of thinking and feeling.
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
COM FT 520
TV Theory and Criticism
As an omnipresent site of entertainment and information, “reality” and fantasy, “quality” and “trash,” and commerce and the public interest, television requires an active, critical analysis of its texts, uses, and production of meaning. Students in this class will engage in such analysis, confronting television as a rich and contradictory site of entertainment, culture, politics, ideology, and signs. This discussion driven seminar sets aside evaluative considerations of TV in favor of theoretical and critical approaches that challenge widespread assumptions about the medium and expand our understanding of its role in our lives. These approaches, which constitute some of the dominant frameworks in Television Studies, include analyses of culture, industry, narrative, genre, images and sounds, liveness, and the television schedule. This course fulfills the additional TV Studies course requirement.
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media or Film & Media Theory Requirement
COM FT 531
Feminist TV Studies
The men who crafted television–mostly broadcasting and advertising executives–rooted it firmly within the domestic realm. That is one reason why television is branded a feminized medium. What, then, of the women who circulate around and within it’ How are they feminized’ How have television texts represented women’ How has the television industry conceptualized female viewers and female-oriented programming’ In what genres have women dominated’ How have race and class intersect with gender on television’ Feminist Television Studies is a discussion-driven seminar designed to introduce students to the various ways in which television institutions have located and defined women and femininity. Using feminist television scholarship and its multiple methodologies, we will analyze specific television programs, time periods, and genres and formulate arguments about the complicated relationship between women and television
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Requirement
COM FT 534
Critical TV Industry Studies
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.
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Requirement
COM FT 536
Film Theory and Criticism
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.
Course counts as a Film & Media Theory Requirement
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.
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
COM FT 541
TV Genres
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.
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media or Genre/Movement Requirement
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.
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Requirement
COM FT 547
Avant Garde Cinema
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.
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Requirement
COM FT 556
American Independent Film Part I
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
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
COM FT 557
American Independent Film Part II
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
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
COM FT 558
American Independent Film Part III
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
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
COM FT 559
American Independent Film Part IIII
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
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
COM FT 560
Documentary
Surveys the history of the documentary and the changes brought about by the advent of television. Examines the outlook for the documentary idea in national and international markets. Periodic highlighting of special areas such as the portrayal of war, historical events, drama-documentary, and propaganda. Students develop critical and professional skills. Lectures, screenings, discussions.
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
COM FT 567
Film Styles
The style of a stylized film is its strangest, most mysterious, and, often, most wonderful quality. Style begins where realism and representation end. It is all those things a film can do to reprogram our brains that have nothing to do with putting the world we see and hear in our ordinary lives on screen. It involves narrative distortions, weird photographic, editorial, and acoustic effects, strange events, and eccentric characters–all in the service of attempting to alter our definition of “reality.” We will look at some of the most bizarre movies ever made, along with a few apparently (but only apparently) “normal” films that have more insidious designs on our consciousnesses, that aspire to change our understandings of experience in subtler ways.
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
COM FT 570
Uncensored TV: The Rise of Original Scripted Series on TV
Using series like The Sopranos, Weeds, and Breaking Bad as case studies, this course will examine the current state of cable TV with regard to industry, “quality,” genres, auteurs, and the so-called “post-network” era. Students will approach these cable series with a critical eye as they work to connect industry, political economy, and government regulation to issues of social class, television hierarchies, and artistry. Students will also emerge from the course with a thorough understanding of how to perform television-focused research and analysis.
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Requirement
COM FT 571
Religion & TV
Religion and Television critically engages with religious representation on television, focusing especially on American fictional television since the 1980s. The course examines both the representation of specific religious traditions as well as generalized and abstracted religion and spirituality. Using the framework of television studies in conversation with religious studies, Religion and Television analyzes religion as: a tradition, as a grouping of tropes and stories, a functional part of lived experience, a component of identity, a structure of sociocultural power, and a discourse with specific cultural assumptions attached to it. These televisual articulations of religion are shaped by television’s history, ideology, industry, culture, and reception. Thus, this course critically analyzes and maps the relationships among television, religion, and American culture.
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Requirement
COM FT 572
Streaming TV
This course focuses on the variety of ways we watch television beyond the cable subscription and/or broadcast antenna. Starting with VHS distribution and continuing through DVD distribution and eventually streaming and digital on-demand, the course will critically examine if and how these distribution shifts are changing television as we know it. This course will also make connections between these new distribution outlets and practices with antecedents and legacy industrial practices to historicize these shifts. In this class, we will explore ideas of on-demand television and its effects on how television is made and marketed, paying particular attention to narrative structures and assumptions about viewer attention and practices. Additionally, we will look at how taste, class, race, and gender are inflected through which audiences are targeted as cord-cutters or additional subscribers and which audiences and genres are left out of the streaming TV discourse.
Course counts as a Non-Cinematic Media Requirement
COM FT 576
Global New Wave
Explores the interconnected production and reception of selected European, African, and Asian New Wave cinemas of the mid-1940s through the early 1970s. These films experimented with form and style to challenge classical Hollywood norms.
Course counts as a Genre/Movement Requirement
Language-Specific Affiliated Courses
Courses taught in foreign languages that will count toward CIMS credit
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement
Course counts as an Elective Requirement