what is a film criticism course

Full Answer

What does it take to be a movie critic?

Movie critics must be passionate about film and knowledgeable about the elements that come together to make it all work.

What is movie criticism and why is it important?

Movie criticism is a great medium for helping viewers understand and appreciate filmmaking. Movie critics must be passionate about film and knowledgeable about the elements that come together to make it all work.

What is a film analysis class?

This course introduces students to the basics of film analysis, cinematic formal elements, genre, and narrative structure and helps students develop the skills to recognize, analyze, describe and enjoy film as an art and entertainment form.

What films can I study in the seminar?

The films to be studied includes: Yellow Earth, Judou, Horse Thief, The World, The Puppet Master, and Chungking Express. The seminar is for both undergraduate and graduate students and satisfies the international requirement.

What do you mean by film criticism?

Film criticism is the comparison, analysis, interpretation, and/or evaluation of films. There are two different types of publications that offer opinions about films: Academic criticism by film scholars that appears in scholarly journals. Journalistic film reviews that appear in newspapers and other popular media.

What education does a film critic need?

bachelor's degreeA film critic is a journalist with knowledge of the film industry. Some film critics have a background in film studies, while others have a degree in communications or journalism; studying both disciplines through major and minor options may give you an advantage. A bachelor's degree can prepare you for employment.

How do you learn film criticism?

Whether you want to become a professional movie critic or focus on academic film criticism, there are a few key steps you should follow:Obtain a film degree. ... Study the film industry. ... Hone your writing skills. ... Build a portfolio. ... Gain real-life experience.

What are the types of film criticism?

In general, film criticism can be divided into two categories: journalistic criticism which appears regularly in newspapers, magazines and other popular mass-media outlets; and academic criticism by film scholars who are informed by film theory and are published in academic journals.

How much do movie critics get paid?

Salary Ranges for Movie Critics The salaries of Movie Critics in the US range from $10,518 to $213,261 , with a median salary of $38,902 . The middle 57% of Movie Critics makes between $38,902 and $96,771, with the top 86% making $213,261.

How do film critics make money?

Build your reputation.Earn a bachelor's degree. Earning your bachelor's degree is recommended as you build your career as a movie critic. ... Gain experience. ... Learn about film. ... Create a portfolio. ... Gain entry-level experience. ... Build your reputation.

Is film criticism an art?

Film criticism is the art of analyzing and evaluating film and television in written form. Film criticism can include plot recaps, critiques of performances and visual and aural aesthetics, character analyses, and commentary on the film's political and cultural context.

What is the difference between film theory and film criticism?

Film criticism usually offers interpretation of its meaning, analysis of its structure and style, judgement of its worth by comparison with other films, and an estimation of its likely effect on viewers. Film theory (e.g. feminist, postmodernist, etc.) often informs the critical analysis of a film.

Is being a movie critic a job?

Film critics and reviewers generally work for print or online magazines, journals, television networks, radio stations, or newspapers. Some might work as freelance reviewers, submitting their work to multiple publications, while others might establish film review websites to publish their work.

What makes a good film critic?

A film critic should not merely describe the plot, scenes, music, and style of the film they are studying, but also be able to analyze these elements. To analyze a film, think about how different elements work together and the effect they produce.

How much do film critics make UK?

Salary estimates based on salary survey data collected directly from employers and anonymous employees in United Kingdom. An entry level movie critic (1-3 years of experience) earns an average salary of £20,480. On the other end, a senior level movie critic (8+ years of experience) earns an average salary of £33,498.

Who is the best film critic?

Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America."

What is a movie critic?

A movie critic is a person who views and analyzes the various elements of a film, like character and plot development, performance, cinematography, directing, editing, and writing.

What is academic movie criticism?

Academic movie criticism: Academic movie criticism focuses on in-depth critical analysis and is often more objective than other types of film criticism. This type of movie criticism is typically published in academic journals or books.

How to become a movie critic?

Obtain a film degree. If you want to pursue a career as a movie critic with a major publication, having a certified background in film (like a bachelor’s degree in film studies or screenwriting) can round out your knowledge and allow you to speak authoritatively on the subject. Additionally, gaining a basic understanding ...

Why is movie criticism important?

Movie criticism is a great medium for helping viewers understand and appreciate filmmaking. Movie critics must be passionate about film and knowledgeable about the elements that come together to make it all work.

How many subject headings are there in the film criticism catalog?

When searching the online catalog for film criticism, there are 3 subject headings used in this catalog and they are listed below.

What is critical dictionary?

The Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory clearly and accessibly explains the major theoretical approaches now deployed in the study of the moving image, as well as defining key theoretical terms. This dictionary provides readers with the conceptual apparatus to understand the often daunting language and terminology of screen studies. ...

What is feminist auteurs?

Feminist Auteurs examines a rich and diverse body of work that has received insufficient attention both in film studies and in feminist theory on film. Looking at individual films within the context of feminist film as a genre, Ramanathan examines film from diverse cultural traditions, while paying close attention to what might be regarded as feminist in different cultural contexts. The films chosen expand our ideas of feminism covering as they do film from Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the US.

What is feminist reader in early cinema?

A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema marks a new era of feminist film scholarship. The twenty essays collected here demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies. Drawing extensively on archival research, the collection yields startling accounts of women's multiple roles as early producers, directors, writers, stars, and viewers.

Is Jump Cut a review?

Jump Cut: A Review Contemporary Media is an Open Access journal run on a nonprofit basis by its staff and is not affiliated with or supported by any institution.

What are the four key concepts of film and media criticism?

This writing-intensive seminar takes a close look at four key theoretical concepts for film & media criticism: textuality, authorship, genre, and narrative. How do we understand the boundaries between any film “text” and its broader intertextual contexts? How does authorship frame our understanding of the style and ethics of any given film? How do genre categories help us make sense of films and media, as well as their cultural contexts? How do films and media tell stories in distinctive and innovative ways? Through theoretical readings and exemplary screenings, we will learn to become sharper critics of films and media.

Who wrote the parts of criticism?

Noël Carroll, “The Parts of Criticism (Minus One)”

What happens if you don't complete the final essay?

If you do not complete the final essay with its component parts to a satisfactory level, you will not pass the course.

What is course design?

The course design is based around a series of core learning goals, assembled in a hierarchy of sophistication. Students will highlight their own learning goals from this list, as well as devise their own. These are roughly grouped in tiers that correspond to expected grade levels, with each student expected to reflect their particular goals via written and conversational reflection.

What are students expected to do in class?

Students are expected to actively engage in class discussions, speaking and listening to each other with mutual respect and productive contributions. The course will tackle many challenging issues, so students will be expected to both speak and open their minds, while being mindful of the impact that words and images might have on classmates. Professor Mittell welcomes all feedback on how to best make our classroom a productive space of engaged dialogue.

What is a film critic?

Film critics are knowledgeable about directors, actors, film genres, and the history of movies. They write reviews that discuss plots, themes, and the visual and emotional impact of a movie.

Why is film criticism important?

Studying film criticism is valuable for many reasons. If you plan on going into a career related to film, a film criticism course can offer you the knowledge and skills needed to make yourself more appealing to employers. The following benefits are just some of the perks to enrolling in film criticism courses: A deeper understanding of art

What is online film studies?

Online Film Studies Courses Explore our exciting range of Film courses, from How to Read a Film to our Masters of Cinema specialist courses. We offer introductory and in-depth courses to suit all levels of interest and experience, where you can revisit classic films and make cinematic discoveries from the UK and internationally.

What is a Tier IV course?

Tier IV courses are small theory and practice courses in script analysis/writing, film criticism, and forms of filmmaking. They are open only to cinema studies B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. students.

What is a cinema studies degree?

The M.A. in Cinema Studies provides students with an advanced course of study in the history, theory and criticism of motion pictures. Graduates from the program have gone on to successful careers as film curators, programmers, preservationists, as well as film critics, instructors, screenwriters, filmmakers and industry professionals.

What is the online certificate in film studies?

ONLINE CERTIFICATE IN FILM STUDIES: Making the Director's Chair Accessible The Certificate Program in Film Studies offers undergraduates a comprehensive course of study in the history, criticism, theory, aesthetics, and production of the moving image in the unique context of an interdisciplinary program. Since the Film Studies Program began in 1991, our graduates have used the Certificate to ...

What is the course on film and literature?

This course investigates relationships between two media, film and literature, studying works linked across the two media by genre, topic, and style. It aims to sharpen appreciation of major works of cinema and of literary narrative. The course explores how artworks challenge and cross cultural, political and aesthetic boundaries. It includes some attention to theory of narrative.

What is a film history course?

This course is an introduction to film history covering the period 1895-1941. Students will study the major industrial, technological, aesthetic, and cultural developments in motion picture history. Topics will include the invention of motion pictures, the establishment of a film industry and audience, the narrativization of film, developments in the use of cinematic technique, the history of theatrical film exhibition, the establishment of national cinemas, the idea of film as art, changing notions of cinematic realism and its alternatives, and technological innovation (especially the widespread adoption of synchronized sound). Films will includes shorts by the Lumière brothers, Méliès, Smith, and Porter, one-reel films by Griffith, and feature films such as Broken Blossoms (Griffith), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene), Nosferatu (Murnau), Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), Un Chien Andalou (Dalí and Buñuel), Sunrise (Murnau), Rules of the Game (Renoir), and Citizen Kane (Welles).

What is the focus of the Film Noir course?

The emphasis of this course will be the Film Noir genre as it is expressed visually and thematically. Through discussions and course readings, students will explore the origins of Film Noir, the Noir visual style, and the cultural, historical, psychological, sociological, and gender issues that are typically reflected in Noir narratives.

How does cinema affect time?

It may seem a given that cinema is a medium that has a privileged relationship to temporality — cinema takes time and it makes time. Film uses and sculpts time as material, collects the fragmented and the momentary as an archive, a repository of multiple temporalities, and alters and manipulates the spectator’s experience of time and duration in its form — from the temporal condensations of montage to the meandering lassitude of the long take. Cinema thus has much to contribute to philosophies of lived time and systematized time, and philosophical accounts of temporality have much to underwrite an understanding of the cinema. This graduate seminar brings together film theory and the philosophy and cultural histories of temporality, placing them in dialogue with the international art cinema, a cinematic tradition that has perhaps most overtly made its project the act of “sensing time.” The art cinema — historically associated with a non-normative orientation towards narrative construction, long affiliated with modernist and “post-classical” experimentation with the non-linear, non-teleological, and with an often too slow, ill-paced, durationally challenging retinue – provides fertile material for exploring the political and aesthetic stakes of temporal forms in contemporary global film culture. We will explore cinematic tropes and figures intrinsically bound up with temporal concepts: labor and leisure, the everyday, the instant and the fragment, historicity, archive, nostalgia, speed and slowness, contingency and systematicity, boredom and distraction, stillness and movement, waste and plenitude. Thus, this course both addresses the capacity of the art cinema to operate as a conceptual object that anatomizes and experiments with temporality, and to explore the ways that cinematic time is grounded in sensual experience — as the spectator is called upon to live film’s time.

What is the Chinese cinematic imagination?

This course explores Chinese cinematic imagination through a series of films produced in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong . The point of entry is the surge of creative innovations taking place in the 1980s as the Chinese-speaking communities began to re-imagine their world and history, forming new cultural identities and building a symbolic universe that interfaces with the world at large. This course examines how the region’s transnational film making addresses the pressing issues of the world through cinematic affects and sensations unique to Chinese-language cinema. Screenings May Include: Yellow Earth, Horse Thief, Judou, The Puppet Master, and Chungking Express. This course is jointly offered by English, Film Studies, and Comparative Literature.

What is the human body in cinema?

The human body, by dint of its placement in culture and history, is laden with meaning. Its movement in space, posture, stylization, affect and sensation, cannot but signify. But besides this semiotic inevitability, the body also lives a life in materiality. This material body, though unsymbolizable, is intensely explored in cinema, by way of crises that endanger its being, producing narrative tension and visual fascination. This being body in crisis reveals a complex of desire, desire both as a sociohistorical imprint that structures the body’s meaning and as a material transgression against that meaning. Through a group of films produced in different parts of the world, this class will study how the human body in cinema is often straddled between meaning and being, performing the paradoxical function of creating an otherness within the symbolic. We’ll examine how films from different cultures stage unusual situations to call forth the material body, and what critical agency such a body often brings forth. We’ll observe how such psychosomatic practices as religion (eastern), martial arts, music and dance, occult rituals, dragging, psychiatric therapy, scientific experiments, etc., mold, affect, or produce the body’s meaning and desire, and how film diegesis mediates that meaning and desire through its own cultural codes. The objective of our study is to discover how this unique cinematic body opens up dimensions of truth we do not normally see, truth that undermines the entrenched norms of society by overstepping many boundaries, from those of race, class, gender, sex, to what it means to be human. The course satisfies the international requirement of the College of Letters & Science.

What is French cinema?

Echoing the literary genre of the bildungsroman, French cinema offers a wide range of films that deal with coming-of-age stories. In this course, we will explore films that focus on the psychological growth of the protagonist and the challenges encountered by young people as they navigate relationships and social spaces. Facing rites-of-passage and conflicting value systems, these characters are torn by ethical, political, sexual, emotional, and professional dilemmas. By comparing the genres, themes, formal elements, and narrative structure of these films and placing them in their historical, cultural, political, and philosophical context, we will investigate the various figures associated with French youth, such as the écorché vif (the tormented soul). Through weekly readings, screenings, discussions, and written analysis, students will develop sophisticated understandings of cinematographic representations, while expanding their knowledge of critical concepts and vocabulary in French. We will discuss films by Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, Laurent Cantet, Philippe Garrel, Louis Malle, Emmanuelle Millet, Éric Rohmer, André Téchiné, François Truffaut, and Érick Zonca. The course will be conducted entirely in French.

What is the course on road movies?

The course examines how the road movie genre has found articulation in different national contexts as well as in the present global arena. The course pays attention to the transformations and reconfigurations necessary for the road movie genre to undergo in order to address and to engage with the particular cultural discourses of different national contexts—and in some cases of globalization itself.