2011 - 2012 Film Studies (FILM)

Program Goals | Academic Minor | Course Descriptions

Faculty: Richard Badenhausen, Sean Desilets (Chair), Peter Goldman, Jeff Nichols, Mark Rubinfeld, Colleen Sandor, Gretchen Siegler

Program Goals

• Students will understand film as a distinct language as well as a combination of languages including images, movements, sounds, and words, recognizing their semantics, syntax, and rhetoric.
• Students will be prepared to respond to film with active interpretation and analysis, rather than being acted upon passively.
• Students will understand the way film incorporates other arts and is distinct from them; how it influences other arts and is influenced by them.
• Students will understand film as an element of culture--how it influences, and is influenced by, the culture in which it is made; how film influences the ways we view ourselves and others in cultural terms such as race, gender, economics, and history; and how film is both an agent and result of social change.
• Students will understand the uses of film: to document, persuade, entertain, represent, and expand our means of representation and ways of understanding.
• Students will be able to write detailed film critiques, critically evaluating the use of formal elements, narrative structure, and the place of films in their historical and cultural contexts.
  

Academic Minor