This course serves as an introduction to elements of film form and grammar, including narrative, mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound, and acting. Students taking this course will learn how to describe a film's formal qualities and will use these descriptions to make analytical claims about film.
This course serves as an introduction to the history of film as a medium, ranging from its origins to the current moment. Students taking this course will learn how to situate a film in its historical and cultural contexts and will use these contexts to make analytical claims about film and history.
This course examines the connection between film and national identity, studying at least one non-US cinema in order to explore the relationship between film art and national culture. Students taking this course will learn how to understand a film in its national, political, and aesthetic context, using these contexts to make analytical claims about the relationship between film and nation.
Course Description: This course examines the relationship between film and genre, either in the traditional sense of story-type (horror, musical, etc.) or in the sense of a particular filmmaker (Hitchcock, Kurosawa, etc.) or filmmaking movement (the French New Wave, New Hollywood, etc.). Students taking this course will learn how to situate specific films within broader generic contexts and will learn how these broader contexts can operate as an expression and/ or critique of cultural values and ideologies.
This course examines some aspect off film production (ranging from screen writing to costuming, directing to acting, etc.) with the goal of understanding how the process of film production shapes film meaning. Students taking this course will learn how to use the circumstances of production to explicate and analyze film and other media objects.
This course examines film as a means of expressing some aspect of human experiences, ranging from the political to the ethical, the philosophical to the spiritual, the cultural to the personal. Students taking this course will learn how filmic language expresses express ideas, emotions, experiences, and beliefs, using this knowledge to understand both particular films and broader questions of spirituality, philosophy, politics, culture, and/or social justice.
This capstone course synthesizes student learning through the film studies program by examining some aspect of film and media studies (determined by the instructor) through multiple disciplinary lenses. Students taking this course will learn about the topic in depth, apply a variety of disciplinary and theoretical frameworks to the topic, and conduct student-driven research about a topic within film and media studies.