Overall: Professor Hornby, while very funny and sweet, is excellent at putting me to sleep. I had so much trouble staying awake during the first few lectures because they were so boring. The class borders on philosophy and the readings were hard and SO SO SO boring. I wouldn't say it's the easiest GE, but it will get the job done if you really have nothing else to take.

Class Material: The class is kind of misleading. I thought it would be a really cool film class, but each week is broken down into a different category (color, white, black, blindness, etc.) The topics vaguely touched on film and were more about abstract concepts that came off as pretentious and silly to me. If you're really artsy and enjoy philosophical readings, you'll like the material but personally, it wasn't what I expected.

Lectures: She doesn't use slides and when she does they are just pictures so they aren't helpful at all. She talks for the whole time and often doesn't really have a great structure or main idea to her lectures. I just wrote down what I thought was important but it was hard since she just rambles. I would recommend going to the lectures because without going, I would not know wtf is going on in the readings.

Homework: The homework was all reading and even though they are extremely boring, I would read them or at least skim. If you skim, definitely go to lecture so you know the main ideas. Personally, I found most of the readings very pretentious and hard to understand, but reading them was VERY helpful for the midterm, final, and papers.

Tests/Quizzes: There were no tests or quizzes, only three papers. The papers are sort of hard to write because the prompts are really vague and open. However, I found it best to just use the ideas she gives in lecture and then go to your TA. I would go to my TA's office hours every time there was a paper and she was really helpful in telling me if I was on the right track/what to fix.

Midterm/Final: The midterm was 7 questions and you choose 5 to answer in one paragraph. They were pretty specific, so you do need to have read the readings to know how to answer them. IDK if she does this every year, but for us she dropped the question that we got the lowest score on so it was kind of a grade booster/curve. The final was a bit harder. She gives us 5 images from movies we watched and we have to describe what is happening, the movie it is from, the director, and we had to use readings to supplement our answers. The scenes she used were all scenes that she focused on during lecture so it wasn't too bad. Then, we had to choose 2 essay questions to write, 4-6 paragraphs each.

TA: I had Brenda as my TA and besides her office hours, discussion was not very helpful. It was very student oriented, meaning we would just kind of talk among ourselves. This isn't helpful because in the papers and on the midterm/final, you just have to talk about the ideas Professor Hornby gives, not really your own. But Brenda is really nice and going to her office hours saved me for the papers.

first off, the grade in this class is fully based on 3 essays (only 1000 words tho) and 1 final mind map project (so if you hate writing don't take this class), that are all graded by your TA so make sure to be on your TA's good side. However, the lectures were kind of all over the place as it is pretty much just her talking with pictures on the screen, nothing written down to show you important take aways. The readings/films for homework are WAY too much content. You do not have to look at it all, because there is no graded homework, however, it makes the final project hard if you don't read. I would not recommend this for a GE, but if you are really interested in film as well as how colors/light relates to our culture, this professor has some interesting stuff to say. For me personally it way just alot of over analyzing texts and films that gave me no knowledge i would ever you in real life. Prof is nice tho!

I really loved this class! It was not a crazy hard class, but it was still challenging at some points. The essays were very broad and I struggled with them but still made it out with an A. I studied really hard for the final and it wasn't too bad. Hornby's class is really intriguing, but if you're looking for a film class where you watch movies every day it is not this. Also, I barely did the readings and I turned out fine. Just go to the lecture for her key points and DONT SKIP THE FINAL REVIEW!

So, this was one of the first classes I took at UCLA and I really loved it. I barely did any of the readings but attended every lecture but even if I was just shopping online, you can get what you need from it from listening. I don't think you really need to do the readings so long that you go to lectures because the entire time Professor Hornby will pick apart all that you will need to know/be tested on. She's really funny and I thought she was fun to listen to, even if the concepts she talked about were pretty abstract and sometimes seemed like unfair extrapolations; it was still really fun because the class is just her stream of consciousness on the given subject of the week. I did start to fall asleep during some lectures, though, but I par that to it being in a dark and warm room more so than the class being boring. I started writing all 3 papers the day before they were due and got an A-, A+, and a B+ on them, so as long as you are a pretty good writer (literally just mimic Prof Hornby's style of speech) and are able to back your claims and extrapolate, it is easy to make the essays fit the prompts because the prompts are pretty loose. The midterm was really easy so long you just listen in lecture and the final was exactly what you'd expect. They don't try to trick you at all. 10/10 review . Absolutely loved this class.

Although I liked how interesting the lectures for this class were and that the weekly assignments were very easy, the workload when it came to the weekly readings was way too much. In a busy schedule, especially for new freshmen who are still adapting to the increase of difficulty in their classes from high school, a minimum of 6 readings in tiny font usually over 10 pages long each is very overwhelming. I often found myself being weeks behind on the readings because I just could not find the time to do them in between my other classwork. I would not recommend taking this class if you are not a reader or if you procrastinate easily.

This class is the most stereotypical example of obnoxious and pretentious art snobbery that I have ever seen. If you want to spend an hour listening to a lecture about a painting of a blue square, stay away from this class. Lectures were pretty much the professor rambling and over-analyzing the readings with a few pictures on the screen. Week to week this class is pretty easy because the weekly assignments are simple, but the grade is mostly based on three essays with prompts that are super vague and a final concept map that is a nightmare to complete. There are way too many readings and films to watch, many of which are not mentioned at all in lecture and could easily me left out of the course. The class is called "Intro to Visual Culture" but the culture part is mainly the culture of fine art and indie film. Your grade mainly is determined by how good you are at writing essays with little guidance and how much time and effort you put into the final concept map. The concept map consisted of organizing all of the films, readings, and artwork on the syllabus into 2-4 categories and writing a summary for each. It was a pain in the a** to complete and took a super long time. Overall I would not recommend this class to anyone, unless you are interested in this type of pretentious over-analyzing.

TAKE THIS CLASS! Professor Hornby is so accommodating and a really engaging lecturer. The content of the class was super interesting and simple. Each week was broken down into different topics regarding visual culture (ex. week 1 was about light, week 2 was about color, etc.) We had 3 super easy papers. The first paper (week 4) we had to describe a picture or film we talked about in class and why it interests us in under 1,000 words. The second paper (week 8) was an essay about the use of color in any work of art or film, literally so easy and also under 1,000 words. The third paper (week 10) was a paper written in first person about your own experience of "being seen", however you want to interpret it, also very easy and also under 1,000 words. The weeks that we didn't have a paper, we just had a simple assignment where we uploaded a photo onto the class page and leave a one-sentence comment under someone else's post (ex. one week we had to follow a color around campus and take photos of it). The final project was basically to rearrange the syllabus how you think it would flow best in class. Attendance isn't mandatory and I barely did any of the readings. I did all of the assignments on the day they were due and never once did I get a grade below an A. Aside from that, I really enjoyed Professor Hornby and the class content was super interesting! She also recorded lectures if you didn't want to go in person.

Weekly assignments- 35%
Papers- 45%
Final Project- 20%

I am taking this course with Prof. Hornby. As a 1st year English major in my fall quarter taking this class, this class is not difficult. There are weekly Visual Assignments (due Fri), where you just turn in a photo and write a caption for it. Every week, there are readings to do and occasionally films to watch. There are three papers to write: Paper #1 is about Light in L.A. (due WK 3), Paper #2 is about writing about an artwork discussed in lectures (due Wk 6), and Paper #3 is going to a museum, picking an artwork there and writing about it (due WK 10). I got an A on Paper #1, but due to the TA strike, I have not received a grade for Paper #2 yet. There is a Final Concept Map that is your "final." Due to the TA strike, it is still unclear whether I need to do this concept map, so I have no feedback/advice regarding this.

There are no exams, midterms or finals for this class (your final is the concept map). Overall, the lectures are boring. If you're not into art, you will find this class and lectures be boring, but if you want a moderately easy class, this is a good one. If you hate studying or taking exams, take this class. However, if writing is not your strong suit, do reconsider this class because most of your grade depends on your three papers.

As for Prof. Hornby, I wouldn't say she's absolutely amazing, but there are occasional comedic times in her lectures. She's just a professor, that's all I would say.

If you take this class, please pick ORIAH AMIT was your T.A. !!! She is absolutely amazing. Her discussions are super helpful and engaging; I got my ideas for Paper #1 and #2 through the activities she had us do in her discussion. Her discussions are fun, engaging and effective, and she is just na overall amazing person.

I wish you good luck in this class!

I would say that this is a pretty interesting and engaging class if you are into the humanities. It looks a lot at pieces of art, photographs, movies, and other types of media outlets. The concepts are pretty manageable but there is a fair amount of reading to complete every week that you really want to keep up with. There is a midterm, final paper, and final project. The grade the papers decently hard (if you are a good writer expect low A, high B and if you are a bad writer expect low B, high C). The feedback on the papers is impossible to understand and they really don't give you much help. So, if you can grasp all the concepts and write about them nicely then you will be completely fine, if you can't do it by yourself then you won't be fine. The final project is extremely time consuming as you have to make a concept map about all the texts you read in the quarter (so make sure you're actually doing them or it can take days to complete).

I thought that this class was really interesting and I enjoyed going to class, however, your grade is up to the Gas and I felt that my TA was too harsh in grading. Even when I went to office hours, my essay grades still didn't improve. As far as workload- on each assignment/reading she assigns TAKE NOTES ON IT. just a few. it doesn't have to be crazy but some key words or concepts. TRUST ME!!! at the end there's a HUGE project that you have to use every single assignment so don't fall too behind. If you're looking for an easy A this might not be the class for you but it was definitely interesting.