Few art forms have had a greater impact on modern culture than cinema. Over the course of cinema’s relatively brief history, film criticism and theory have grappled with some of the issues most central to the humanities, including how to represent and transform the world and how technological changes have affected the production and consumption of images. As an academic discipline, cinema studies has addressed these and other attendant issues through a range of strategies. As a truly transnational, collaborative, interdisciplinary field, it directs attention both to the highest form of rarified art practice and to the most popular forms of entertainment and diversion.

The cinema studies minor provides a foundation for understanding the diverse ways in which the discipline has addressed itself to cinema history and theory, emphasizing the discipline’s connection to aesthetics and national cultures. It focuses on the history, theory, and culture of film and related media such as digital media and photography, and makes coherent both the historical and aesthetic dimensions of cinema, including its cultural, technological, national, and transnational contexts. As a distinct field of study profoundly influenced by a range of disciplines—among them art history, English, and the sciences—the cinema studies minor draws its strength from connections among departments at the same time that it provides a core of courses foundational to the discipline of cinema studies itself.

Faculty