An introduction to drug discovery, design and development. This course will focus on the potential of proteins (enzymes, receptors, receptor structure and signal transduction) as targets for molecular therapeutic intervention. The strategies of finding a drug target, optimizing target interactions and synthetic molecular therapeutic development will all be considered and discussed. The modern technologies of targeting protein-protein interactions will also be covered.

Discussion course based on published research in biological chemistry and applications of chemistry to study processes of biological significance.

A dissertation will be written based on literature research of a topic of current interest in the field of chemistry. The research will be conducted under the supervision of a chemistry faculty member other than the student's CPS489Y5 supervisor. The research topic must not overlap that of the student's CPS489Y5 project. The goals of this course are to achieve literature research expertise as well as in-depth knowledge of a particular chemistry topic, while perfecting scientific writing and oral presentation skills. Evaluation is based on a final written report describing the aims and results of the research, as well as an oral presentation of the work. The course is normally taken in the student's fourth year, in either the Fall or Winter terms, but may be taken in the Summer term. Enrolment in CHM485H5 requires submitting an application to the department before the end of the term prior to that in which it is intended to undertake the research. Independent Studies Application Forms may be found at http://uoft.me/cpsforms. Applications should be submitted to the CPS Undergraduate Assistant. Registration on ACORN is also required. Students are encouraged to consult with, and obtain the consent of, prospective supervisors before applying for enrolment. 

An experimental or theoretical research topic in chemistry will be investigated under the supervision of a chemistry faculty member other than the student's CHM485H5 supervisor. The research topic must not overlap that of the student's CHM485H5 research topic. In addition to learning to plan, conduct and evaluate a research program, students will receive training in written and oral presentation skills. Evaluation is based on interim and final written reports describing the aims and results of the research, as well as interim and final oral presentations of the work. The course is normally taken in the student's fourth year. Enrolment in CHM489Y5 requires submitting an application to the department in the spring term, with the application due date being the final day of classes. Independent Studies Application Forms may be found at http://uoft.me/cpsforms. Applications should be submitted to the CPS Undergraduate Assistant. Registration on ACORN is also required. Acceptance into the course is dependent on the student having achieved a satisfactory GPA, and reaching agreement with a potential supervisor. Students must consult with prospective supervisors before applying for enrolment, and must list at least two faculty members as possible supervisors. This course is restricted to students in the Chemistry Major, Biological Chemistry Specialist, and Chemistry Specialist Programs.

Introduction to film analysis, concepts of film style and narrative. Topics include documentary, avant-garde, genres, authorship, ideology, and representation.

Looking at a few periods of intense technological change—for example, with the invention of photography, and the introduction of sound, of colour, of television—we will consider the ways in which artists, filmmakers, studios, and media conglomerates have responded to such changes and to accompanying ideas about the role that moving technology plays in our conception of history and the future.

In his 1948 essay “The Birth of the New Avant-Garde: The Camera Stylo,” the French filmmaker and film theorist Alexandre Astruc imagined the motion picture as a new kind of pen, a new way of ‘writing’ philosophy, so much so that he claimed that if Descartes were alive today he would have written his Discourse on Method with a 16mm camera. The time has come to take Astruc more seriously and to consider sound and images not only as the source of traditional essay writing but as the way in which essays are themselves are composed. Thus, this course is designed to introduce students to the practice of audio-visual criticism. In place of the traditional written essay, students in this course will learn to make video essays out of the films and videos they are analysing. In the course, we will also consider the history of the essay film as philosophical questions about rhetoric and logic. There will be no written essay assignments in this course. Instead, students will produce video essays on particular themes, both collaboratively and independently.

The establishment of film as a serious art form is coincident with the earliest critical writing on Alfred Hitchcock that emerged in the 1950s. Since then, Hitchcock has remained one of the most important filmmakers of all time, spawning not only a massive body of critical scholarship but also legions of imitators. This course will serve as an introduction to both the films (such as Psycho and North by Northwest) and related issues: questions of suspense, authorship, morality, and spectatorship.

This course will examine the films of Martin Scorsese, one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. Scorsese's films will be understood in relation to questions about imitation and originality, genre, violence, male hysteria, and also as meditations on the history of film itself.

This course will offer a comparative study of a selection of major contemporary Canadian filmmakers, including Denys Arcand, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Sara Polley, Denis Villeneuve, Ruba Nadda, Denis Côté, Guy Maddin, Michael Snow, and Joyce Wieland.

This course will look closely at the work of a single director. Emphasis will be given to the aesthetic, historical, cultural, and philosophical contexts that inform the director's work. We will also tend closely to the style and central preoccupations of the director under examination.

This course is an introduction to East Asian cinema from the 1960s to the present, including films from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, and Korea. With an emphasis on formal aesthetic analysis of short and feature-length films, we will examine film waves, genres, film festivals, and interconnected film industries. Throughout the course, we will consider not only the production, exhibition, and reception spaces of East Asian cinema but also critically examine its definitions and borders.

This course will survey the work of the Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, and will do so with an especial interest in the way that Kiarostami’s films raise important questions about tradition, judgment, and the fluidity of self and world.

This course is an introduction to contemporary Southeast Asian cinemas from the 2000s to the present. Since the turn of the millennium, the cinematic innovation of Southeast Asia has been aided by an increase in productive interaction and transnational modes of collaborations and co-productions. These waves of cinema augur new possibilities for considering cross-cultural, cross-boundary ways of being, seeing and knowing that can challenge formulaic and essentialist understandings of the region. Through formal aesthetic analysis of short and feature-length films, and the study of Asia-based and international institutions of cinema, we will examine the multifarious potential of contemporary Southeast Asian in spurring the rethinking of the histories, concepts, and borders of the region.

India has arguably the most popular and prolific film industry in the world. This course contextualizes the relatively recent 'Bollywood' phenomenon within the history of Indian commercial cinema and key aspects of modern Indian culture, emphasizing the popular cinema's role in constructing historically changing ideas of national and gendered identity. It also challenges the assumptions of film theories developed in relation to Hollywood or European cinema by introducing film theory concepts that address South Asian image-cultures (such as darshan, frontality, melodrama, and interruption).

This course will explore the animating role that Italian cinema has played in the philosophical and political imagination of film. On the one hand, it will consider the distinctly philosophical sensibility of the filmmaking movements that have defined Italian cinema since the postwar era, taking the films themselves as contributions to a range of reflections on the nature of existence, humanity, images, ethics, justice, and collective social life. On the other hand, the course will explore the pivotal role these same films played in prompting philosophical and political writings about cinema and the culture of art cinema more broadly, working through a range of philosophical treatments of the medium and its relation to the world that emerged in response to the films’ provocations.

This hands-on studio-based course will examine fundamentals of cinematic language and production. Students will work individually and in teams to create a series of works that focus on aesthetics and skill development.

The course may have a historical, genre, theoretical, auteur, or other focus. See the Department of Visual Studies website at www.utm.utoronto.ca/dvs for the current topic.

The course may have a historical, genre, theoretical, auteur, or other focus. Students should contact the program director for the current topic.

The course may have a historical, genre, theoretical, auteur, or other focus. Students should contact the program director for the current topic.

This course is devoted to three major international filmmakers: Michael Haneke (Austria), Olivier Assayas (France), and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Taiwan). While different in many important respects, these filmmakers are nevertheless linked by their tendency to make international films that are themselves meditations on national identity in an increasingly globalized world. Screenings will include Caché, Code Unknown, Carlos, Demonlover, The Flight of the Red Balloon, and Goodbye South, Goodbye, to name just a few.

It is commonly believed that violent images produce violent, or desensitized people. In this class, we will examine the multiple forms of violence in film, television, and videogames as well as the variety of discourses about violence and images. Rather than confirming the moral logic of condemnation of the violent image, we will ask instead what good a violent image might do.

The film In Our Time (1982), which combined short works by four directors (Edward Yang, Jim Tao, Ke Yizheng, and Zhang Yi), is regarded as the beginning of Taiwan New Cinema, generally considered to have ended in the late 1980s. Figures such as Hou Hsiao Hsien, Wang Tung, Chu Tien-wen, Wu Nien-Jen, Hung Hung, Hsiao Yeh, Tsai Chin, and Sylvia Chang played key roles, as directors, screenwriters, producers, and/or actors. From examining films within the era to their impact on contemporary global cinema, this course asks: how may a film be transnationally and transgenerationally re-animated for shifting eras and constellations of viewers? This course speculates that the time of the Taiwan New Wave is still beckoning, even from beyond the contested shores of Taiwan.

Comedies routinely depend on the performance of the unthinkable in the ordinary. Our laughter follows from the saying or doing of the unsayable and the undoable. Comedy is in this way both a form of bad manners and also a uniquely philosophical genre, insofar as saying the unsayable means that we are able to recognize more than what we see or typically say. This course will survey the history of comedy and its relation to thought, perception, and social values.

Since the advent of cinema, filmmakers and film theorists have repeatedly attempted to define film as a unique art form on the basis of its most defining characteristic: movement. Painters can represent movement, but film is movement itself. Not surprisingly, many filmmakers who are recognized as significant artists are most easily identified by the distinctive style of their camera movement. This class will be devoted to a consideration of the nature, meaning, and styles of movement in film.

Migration, voluntary and involuntary, has intensified in an unprecedented manner in recent history. More than ever, it is critical to examine forms of proximity, hospitality, and regionality. Including films by migrants, films about the migrant experience, and the migratory routes of cinema itself, this course addresses the ethics, politics, and praxis of mobility and displacement. How, through East and Southeast Asian cinemas, could we envision counter-bodies and counter-strategies with which we may collectively imagine and inhabit the world?

Considering philosophical, scientific, and historical discourses about colour, this course explores a variety of ways of analyzing colour style in film and video art. As we begin to come to terms with the perceptual instability of colour as a positive phenomenon, we will consider how and why dominant histories of film style have been written, especially as the taming of colour has been central to an ongoing categorical distinction between narrative cinema and the avant-garde, morality and hedonism.

Film and Televisual melodramas regularly enact a conflict between personal desire and social expectation. This course will cover a range of films and television melodramas and consider the social contexts in which these works emerge, and often as critiques of the very cultures to which they belong or reject. 24L, 36P

From magic, spells, ghosts, fantasies, speculative fiction, folktales to mythology—this course delves into the weird and wondrous worlds of Asian cinema. This course is guided by three core questions: 1) How do cinematic hypothetical, nonlinear, alternate or parallel realities, derive from or reinvent existing cosmological beliefs? 2) How through cinema’s enchanted dimension could we reassess how cinema responds not only to the exigencies of its time but also record dreams of the past and future? 3) How do the formal and technical aspects of enchanted films contribute to their capacities for worldbuilding? Films studied in this class could include the genres of horror, drama, science fiction and fantasy, and comedy.

This is a screenwriting course where students will be introduced to key narrative tools, scriptwriting conventions and components so they can develop an understanding and appreciation of the process from script to screen. From a comparative analysis of screenplays and completed short and feature films with varying budgets in the global cinema landscape, students will learn to use freely available specialized software to craft their own short film materials, including logline, synopsis, treatment, and screenplay.