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Undergraduate Film Courses 2025-26
For the most up-to-date information about courses, including classroom locations, check LORIS Browse Classes.
Online Learning Resources
Ask your instructors for recommended specialized web resources related to their courses.
Laurier Library
You have access to a large collection of research materials (books, articles, films, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and more) through the Laurier Library. Many of these materials are online.
For quick access, check out the Film Studies Guide.
Contact the Film Studies Librarian for more information: Meredith Fischer (mefischer@wlu.ca).
Sample Online Resources
Fall 2025
100-Level Courses
FS100: Introduction to Film Art
FS110: Film and the City
200- and 300-Level Courses
200-level courses are open to all senior students, and most 300-level courses are also open to all senior students, except for the following courses which require that students have completed two of FS100, FS101, FS102, FS103, or FS105 as prerequisites (FS341, FS342, FS345, FS346, FS348, FS349, FS354, FS363).
FS200: Film in Culture 1
FS205: Film in Culture 2
FS240: Film History to 1950
FS249: Detective Film
FS265: The War Film
FS272: Introduction to 3D Animation
FS344: American Film since 1969
FS345: Film Theory and Mass Media
FS355: Indigenous Film
FS370: Intro. to Video Editing
FS374A: Screenwriting Fundamentals
FS374B: Screenwriting Fundamentals
400-Level Courses
These courses are available to Year 4 majors in Honours and Combined Honours Film Studies.
FS444h: Film and Emotion
The human tendency to become emotionally invested in films seems so obvious that we might readily dismiss one of cinema’s most wondrous capacities. Indeed, why do we cry, laugh, feel afraid, etc. at the movies, even (or perhaps especially) movies that we know to be fictional? While various answers to this question have been proposed over the last century, this seminar will explore recent studies in the psychology of cinema to explain how we engage emotionally with cinema, how movies invite us to feel empathic connections with characters, and how our affective experience shapes the ways we interpret information from the screen. Course topics include the structure of empathy and character identification, the paradox of horror, the rhetoric of disgust, and the onscreen representation of emotions. Along the way we will endeavour to develop a specific vocabulary for describing emotional responses to films.
FS446d: Documentary and Social Change
A study of the documentary film as an instrument of social change. This course will examine the history and the theory of the non-fiction genre of film with particular attention to how it has been used by filmmakers to inform policy and how governments have used it to improve the societies they govern. We will explore approaches and techniques used to achieve these social reform goals.
FS446h: Quebec Film
This course offers a study of Quebec film from 1895 to the present, based on the screening and analysis of selected films. The course foregrounds national and provincial contexts in relation to the Canadian nation state and key cinematic movements that may include conservation, auteurism, art film, popular cinema, feminist film, diaspora, critical Indigenous studies, queer cinemas, and/or Global Hollywood. Through an engagement with predominantly French-language films (with English subtitles), students will investigate the ways in which Quebec cinema developed differently from the rest of Canada. Filmmakers studied may include Denys Arcand, Michel Brault, Denis Cote, Xavier Dolan, Claude Jutra, Robert Lepage, Anne Claire Poirier, Lea Pool, Jean Mark Vallee and Denis Villeneuve, and/or include films such as Le chat dans le sac, La vie heureuse de Leopold Z, Mon oncle Antoine, Le Declin de l'empire american, Les Boys, La turbulence des fludies, J'ai tue ma mere, Beans, Un vrabe dans le tete, Bon Cop Bad Cop, Arrival, Sortie 67, and Dans le villes.
Winter 2026
100-Level Courses
FS105: Introduction to Film and Society
200- and 300-Level Courses
200-level courses are open to all senior students, and most 300-level courses are also open to all senior students, except for the following courses which require that students have completed two of FS100, FS101, FS102, FS103, or FS105 as prerequisites (FS341, FS342, FS345, FS346, FS348, FS349, FS354, FS363).
FS250: French Film
FS258: Film Musical
FS270: The Animated Film
FS280: Audiences and Film Fandom
FS300: Film in Culture 3
FS341: Early Film Theories - Movies and Mind
FS360: World Cinemas
FS363: Brecht, Godard, Hollywood
FS371: Advanced Video Editing
FS380A: Video Production
FS380B: Video Production
FS381: Directing Drama
400-Level Courses
These courses are available to Year 4 majors in Honours and Combined Honours Film Studies.
FS444j: Kubrick's Afterlife
This course explores film authorship from an unexpected angle, focusing on the role of paratexts to understand how auteur directors’ identities and legacies are constructed and maintained. Traditional auteur studies tend to concentrate on the films that constitute filmmakers’ oeuvres as their main object of analysis, developing an understanding of a director’s style and preoccupations by looking at the films themselves; this course, however, follows Jonathan Gray’s directive to look beyond the text—“off-screen studies” rather than “screen studies”—to see how meanings are offered, shaped, or foreclosed via the paratexts that surround the text. Such paratexts include marketing materials, documentaries and DVD bonus features, museums and archives, reviews, intertextual references in other cultural works, pastiches, adaptations and remakes, and even memes and other user-generated material. The course will use Stanley Kubrick as its primary case study, unpacking the construction of his legacy, or “afterlife,” through paratexts created and curated by his official estate and more oppositional paratexts that lack his estate’s official endorsement. With just 13 features released over a 46-year career, the countless pastiches, parodies, and homages that continue to be made well beyond his death uniquely contribute to Kubrick’s continued cultural salience.
FS446e: Health and Bioethics in Film
This course examines the intersections between medicine, health, bioethics, and the cinema. On one hand, we use cinema as a prism through which to explore the history of medicine, the healthcare system, and the medical industry, and, on the other, we will look at how topics such as disease and illness, pain and suffering, aging and dying, disability and activism, among others, are addressed in feature-length films. In particular, this course is interested in asking what kind of cultural and moral work, if any, do these films do in our society. The fields of medical humanities and later health humanities emerged some forty years ago in response to an increasingly commodified health care system, alongside rapid technological and medical advances, whereby the needs and experiences of patients became overshadowed by the dehumanizing agendas of corporate and bureaucratic regimes. It is also prompted by the recognition of a lack of a module on empathy in the training of healthcare professionals, as well as a need to reintroduce a more compassionate healthcare delivery strategy that focuses on narrative, humanity, and compassion. Our focus on the history of the various filmic depictions of different aspects of medicine and health, broadly defined, will allow us to engage with not only how film and narrative represent ethical, moral, social and, to a lesser extent, legal issues surrounding medicine, medical research, and medical knowledge, but also the potential role of film in the delivery of healthcare, the making of public health policy and law, and the construction of discourses of medicine, health, and mortality in our society.