This course is an introduction to the critical analysis of film and television. As opposed to social scientific understandings--students become familiar with the concepts on which humanistic understandings--of media and culture are currently based. The course surveys the televisual, filmic, musical, photographic, and digital texts of which the contemporary international mediascape is composed. Students also study the analytic techniques available for making sense of, appreciating, and taking issue with groupings of media texts, individual media texts, and the overall "media ecology," as understood in their proper cultural and historical contexts.