Professional Degree courses in Dentistry, Education, Law, Medicine and Theology (MTS, MDiv)
6000-6999
Courses offered by Continuing Studies
9000-9999
Graduate Studies courses
* These courses are equivalent to pre-university introductory courses and may be counted for credit in the student's record, unless these courses were taken in a preliminary year. They may not be counted toward essay or breadth requirements, or used to meet modular admission requirements unless it is explicitly stated in the Senate-approved outline of the module.
Suffixes
no suffix
1.0 course not designated as an essay course
A
0.5 course offered in first term
B
0.5 course offered in second term
A/B
0.5 course offered in first and/or second term
E
1.0 essay course
F
0.5 essay course offered in first term
G
0.5 essay course offered in second term
F/G
0.5 essay course offered in first and/or second term
H
1.0 accelerated course (8 weeks)
J
1.0 accelerated course (6 weeks)
K
0.75 course
L
0.5 graduate course offered in summer term (May - August)
Q/R/S/T
0.25 course offered within a regular session
U
0.25 course offered in other than a regular session
W/X
1.0 accelerated course (full course offered in one term)
Y
0.5 course offered in other than a regular session
Z
0.5 essay course offered in other than a regular session
Glossary
Prerequisite
A course that must be successfully completed prior to registration for credit in the desired course.
Corequisite
A course that must be taken concurrently with (or prior to registration in) the desired course.
Antirequisite
Courses that overlap sufficiently in course content that both cannot be taken for credit.
Essay Courses
Many courses at Western have a significant writing component. To recognize student achievement, a number of such courses have been designated as essay courses and will be identified on the student's record (E essay full course; F/G/Z essay half-course).
Principal Courses
A first year course that is listed by a department offering a module as a requirement for admission to the module. For admission to an Honours Specialization module or Double Major modules in an Honours Bachelor degree, at least 3.0 courses will be considered principal courses.
A broad introduction to the study of films that will teach the basic vocabulary of film studies, provide an overview of the types of film and videos being made, and examine various critical approaches. By considering a variety of texts, students will learn to analyze and discuss film and video.
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
What is a blockbuster? What is a cult film? What is digital cinema? Discover the answers to these questions and others in a broad introduction to the study of cinema. Students will learn the basic vocabulary of film studies and gain an informed understanding of the different critical approaches to film analysis.
This course examines the history, technology, and forms of television in the U.S. The course analyzes distinctive elements of televisual form (flow, liveness, seriality, advertising); TV's key genres (soap, sitcom, drama, news, reality); modes of reception (fandom, distraction, surfing); as well as television's construction of social difference in America.
Addressing the ways the media create, shape and distort our perceptions and imaginings of crime. The cinema has long given moviegoers a rich vocabulary about lawbreaking and moral transgression. Television and new media will also be examined in terms their fictional and non-fictional negotiations of crime.
Extra Information: 2 lecture hours; 3-hour screening.
In this course contemporary documentary, fictional and short Canadian films are studied. Topics include industrial factors; historical influences; the aesthetics of new narratives; the innovations of Canadian documentarians; experimental work in new media; the short film; internationalist, nationalist, regionalist and multicultural debates.
Extra Information: 2 lecture/seminar hours, 1 3-hour lecture/screening.
This course offers students a survey of Disney's animated features, non-theatrical films and propaganda film shorts. Students will study Disney film's relationship to art, society and politics and examine constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Disney's filmmaking.
This course focuses on the history and techniques of German propaganda under National Socialism. We will cover major propaganda campaigns and the restructuring of mass media: film, radio, newsreel, and print. Topics may include: Nazi feature film, newsreel and documentary, and the discourse on jazz and degenerate art.
Offering an overview of cinemas of disaster from Hollywood and beyond, this course analyzes representative films from a number of different perspectives in relation to such issues as gender, sexuality, race, the family, and the environment and considers the cinematic technologies that have defined and influenced the genre's development.
This course explores the power of animation in film, with a particular emphasis on Japan. Students will study Japanese anime franchises as artistic expressions, as industrial products with relations to other cultural forms, and as objects through which consumers construct their social lives.
This course considers how this horror subgenre has developed over the past century and why it continues to resonate with filmmakers and filmgoers. Using various approaches, we'll examine the cultural anxieties the films raise in relation to such issues as gender, sexuality, race, capitalism, technology, religion, and the environment.
How does the shape an artwork takes contribute to its aesthetic and political power? When artworks flex across form and media how do their messages change? What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said “the medium is the message”? How do genre and form shape social and political discourse? In this course, students explore these questions and more as they investigate texts that assume multiple cultural forms and represent a diversity of perspectives.
This course will build on skills and knowledge acquired in Film 1022 to engage students in the critical practices involved in reading various genres of writing in Film Studies. In addition to writing their own film reviews, students will learn research skills that prepare them for writing critical essays on cinema.
This course offers an in-depth examination of a specific national film culture or related group of cultures. The course may address the entire cinematic history of a specific nation-state, be narrowed by a historical period, mode or region within a national cinema, or extended across national borders.
Antirequisite(s):Film Studies 2244E (may be waived by permission of the Department).
Prerequisite(s): At least 60% in Film Studies 1020E or Film Studies 1022, and at least 60% in all subsequent Film Studies courses, or permission of the Department.
Extra Information: 2 lecture/seminar hours, 1 3-hour lecture/screening.
This course offers an in-depth examination of a specific national film culture or related group of cultures. The course may address the entire cinematic history of a specific nation-state, be narrowed by a historical period, mode or region within a national cinema, or extended across national borders.
A survey of the history of world cinema, with a focus on postwar film cultures in areas such as Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Students will study films as expressive audiovisual texts and examine larger social, economic, and cultural patterns of influence in the global cultural economy.
This course traces a history of American film from the silent period to the end of the studio era. Topics include the establishment of the Hollywood style, major directors/genres, as well as key industrial, technological, and cultural factors in the development of Hollywood cinema.
This course looks at Canadian cinema in relation to the category label, national cinema. What is the value of a national cinema? What is the popular imagination? How do the films speak to us about Canada, its history, its people and its politics?
Introduces students to Indigenous cinema across Turtle Island (North America) and beyond. Through lectures and weekly screenings, students will study how Indigenous peoples use the moving image to tell their own stories and foster resilience and resurgence in their communities.
This course is rooted in an auteurist approach to the works of a few major directors, and will consider both the manner in which these directors' personalities are thematically and stylistically expressed in their films, and how their films represent major developments or movements in film aesthetics and history.
Prerequisite(s): At least 60% in Film Studies 1020E or Film Studies 1022, and at least 60% in all subsequent Film Studies courses, or permission of the Department.
Extra Information: 1 3-hour lecture/screening, 2 lecture/seminar hours.
In this course students are encouraged to develop a critical understanding of the role film plays in shaping popular culture. Topics may include: children's film, dystopian film, and fantasy film.
This course offers an in-depth examination of a specific national film culture or related group of cultures. The course may address the entire cinematic history of a specific nation-state, be narrowed by a historical period, mode or region within a national cinema, or extended across national borders.
This course introduces students to Contemporary German Cinema after unification. Topics include the "Berlin School" and transnational film production, Ostalgie, European identity, migration, and historical memory. The relationship to the auteurism of post-war New German Cinema will also be examined.
A survey of Japanese cinema from its prehistory to the work of contemporary transnational auteurs. Students will study films in their historical and aesthetic contexts, and in relation to specific topics in film studies. For example: traditional aesthetics; the war film and propaganda; postwar melodrama; J-Horror; and anime.
This course examines the economic, aesthetic, and ideological transformations in American film from the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s to the contemporary era of conglomeration, globalization, and digital media. Topics include the fall of the Production Code, the Hollywood Renaissance, American independent cinema, and the global blockbuster.
This course will explore the history, politics, and aesthetics of queer film, particularly the representation of queer culture and identity as well as the policing of non-normative sexualities. Course topics may include: Hollywood and the Celluloid Closet, queer independent cinema, and transgender film.
This course offers an in-depth examination of a specific topic or topics in the audio-visual representation of gender and sexuality. The course may be narrowed by a focus on a specific national or regional cinema, a historical period or genre, or a particular theme or issue in audio-visual representation.
An exploration of a variety of marginal film practices and modes of production through an historical consideration of the major trends and developments in European, American, and Canadian avant-garde. Films will be analyzed in relation to the theoretical issues they raise, specifically, feminist theory and practice, film formalism, and spectatorship.
This course explores the history and development of Science Fiction cinema from the silent period to today’s CGI-saturated spectacles. Major themes include: the aesthetics of science fiction, modernity and social change, utopias/dystopias, technophobia/technophilia, identity/otherness, biopolitics, afrofuturism, set design, special effects and the “cinema of attractions”.
Antirequisite(s): The former Film Studies 2257F/G; the former Film Studies 2260F/G, if taken in 2015-2016 or 2016- 2017.
With an emphasis on questions of genre and gender, this course pays close attention to cinematic constructions of the home, site of the family, as a symbolic structure of identity. Relationships between the family, domestic space, and the space of the nation will be a central focus.
This course examines a specific film genre or cycle, focusing on its historical contexts and development and its aesthetic, cultural and political significance.
This course examines stardom in its cultural, historical, industrial, and national contexts. The course may examine the development of the star system in a specific national context, focus on a particular star or stars, a historical period or movement, or a specific theoretical aspect of the star phenomenon.
Musical films are one of the most enduring forms of cinema, in Hollywood and around the world. This course explores the range of musical films, from all-singing, all-dancing extravaganzas to the eruption of "musical moments" in popular films, art cinema, and the avant-garde.
This course examines how race is inscribed in cinema and intersects with local and global networks of power and resistance. Topics might include: race and representation, the colonial stereotype and Orientalism, racial passing and masquerade, Black independent cinema, Afrofuturism, Blaxploitation, racial hybridity and post-race discourses.
This course examines aesthetic, generic, and theoretical approaches to the representation of the Vietnam War in film from the 1950s to the present. Key topics include: Vietnam war cinema; television and the Vietnam War; veteran narratives; and the mediation in film of history, trauma, and militancy in this conflict.
Antirequisite: Film Studies 3330F/G or American Studies 3330F/G, if taken in 2010-2011 or 2011-2012.
This course investigates key periods, forms, and figures in American quality television. Topics include how television has been framed in relation to literature, theater, and cinema; how quality television engages with cultural hierarchies; the role of cable TV; and quality television's attention to social conflicts and debates in postwar American culture.
This course examines the narrative and aesthetic innovations of film noir in relation to its literary origins and cinematic influences. Tending to key figures such as the hard-boiled detective and the femme fatale, the course will chart the development and revision of noir from WWII to the present.
This course will explore the stylistic functions of basic film elements, e.g., camera movement, editing, sound, and colour,
through the analysis and production of films.
Antirequisite(s): The former Film Studies 2270F/G.
This course will investigate major writings in classical and contemporary film theory, including the realism-formalism debate, auteurism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminist film theory, cultural studies, affect theory, and digital culture.
This course provides an opportunity for advanced formal investigation of film, including historical and conceptual debates on style, and technological developments like digital processes. Students may complete course requirements with a short video.
This course will introduce students to theories of nationalism and national identity, to determine how they influence our understanding of national cinemas. Issues such as colonialism, postcolonialism, imperialism, multiculturalism, regionalism, and globalization will be explored through reading political and cultural essays. The course will examine one or two national cinemas.
This course focuses on Japanese cinema as part of a global `new wave' of films in the 1960s that scandalized audiences with unsettling representations of sex, violence, and politics. Students will debate the ethics and aesthetics of new wave films, and discover the role of the films in creating film studies.
This course will focus on the sensational origins of cinema in Germany. Topics may include the transition from "attractions" to narrative; the history of film exhibition; the early star system; Expressionist horror, gender and genre; early film theory and the auteur/art film; and/or modernity.
Antirequisite(s): German 3321B, if taken in 2015-2016.
This course is rooted in an auteurist approach to the works of a few major directors, and will consider both the manner in which these directors' personalities are thematically and stylistically expressed in their films, and how their films represent major developments or movements in film aesthetics and history.
This course focuses on German directors and actors who emigrated to the U.S. before and after the Nazi seizure of power, including Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich and Ernst Lubitsch. Topics include: expressionism, film noir, diaspora/exile, historical trauma, the anti-Nazi film/anti-fascist aesthetics, the Hollywood studio system, importing/exporting entertainment.
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of the Department. The course is restricted to students in fourth year of an Honours Specialization in Film Studies.
Prerequisite(s): Registration in fourth year of an Honours Specialization in Film Studies and permission of the Department. Permission is normally granted only to students having at least a high "B" average.
The third course in the Film Department's Aesthetics progression, the seminar provides students with the opportunity to further develop their skills in film and video production.
Extra Information: 5 hours.
Note: Enrollment is limited to ten students and based on the submission of a portfolio of creative work and a statement of purpose.
Third or fourth year students enroled in a honours, major or specialization in Film Studies, who have a modular average of 75% are eligible for an internship within an approved media-related organization. The student must find a faculty supervisor willing to oversee and grade his/her final paper.