Cinema Studies Requirements

Cinema studies defines its object of study broadly to include screens of a variety of types. Through our minor, students study cinema’s aesthetic and theoretical foundations, its global history, and its relationship to related fields. Cinema studies minors develop visual and aural literacy in relation to screen media; they learn to connect the aesthetic features and production circumstances of images to the kinds of meanings such texts generate.

Because cinema studies minors develop a variety of approaches to critical engagement that resonate with other academic fields, they are well equipped to confront some of the questions most central to a liberal arts education. Through critical thinking, analytical writing, informal classroom discussions, formal presentations, media production, and independent research, cinema studies students become active participants in a rapidly changing global culture characterized and shaped by the circulation of audio-visual texts and screen-based media.

Chair, Associate Professor Steve J. Wurtzler (Cinema Studies)

Advisory Committee and Faculty: Associate Professors Dean Allbritton (Spanish) and Elena Monastireva-Ansdell (Russian); Assistant Professors Se Young Kim (Cinema Studies) and and Rio Katayama (East Asian Languages and Cultures); Instructor Erin Murphy (Cinema Studies)

Program Affiliated Faculty: Professor Maple Razsa (Global Studies); Associate Professors Audrey Brunetaux (French Studies) and Arne Koch (German Studies); Assistant Professor Ana Almeyda-Cohen (Spanish)

Six courses, including Cinema Studies 142, 251 or 252, 321, one non-U.S. cinema studies course, and two electives selected from the list of courses approved for the minor or approved by the department chair. All courses besides CI 142 must be numbered 200 and above. All courses must be four credit hours (three if taken in Jan Plan), No more than two courses can count toward both the cinema studies minor and another minor or major.

• 210 Contemporary Documentary Filmmaking
• 217 Fundamentals of Video Production
• 224 (MU 224) Film Music
• 225 Video Games and Game Studies
• 226 (EA 226) Japanese Cinema and Culture
• 227 (GS 227) Visual Ways of Knowing: Transcultural Documentary Filmmaking
• 231 New Media, Digital Identities
• 240 (RU 240) Ethics, Destiny, and the Camera Eye
• 242 (RU 242) Celluloid Ethnicities: How the USSR was (De)Constructed
• 244 (RU 244) Russian Cinema from Lenin to Putin
• 246 (IT 247) Mafia Movies
• 247 Visual Storytelling: Found Materials and the Archive
• 248 Digital Storytelling: Telling Stories Online
• 249 (GM 248) German Cinema: Past and Present
• 256 (FR 256) Film for Thought: The Art of French Cinema
• 275 (IT 375) Intro to Italian Cinema
• 280 (EA 280) Topics in Global Cinema: International Action Cinema
• 280 Topics in Global Cinema: Global New Waves
• 280 Topics in Global Cinema: Korean Cinema
• 280 Topics in Global Cinema: Violent East Asian Media
• 285 Cinema and Other Arts
• 287 Postwar U.S. Cinema and Culture
• 289 Streaming Media: Moving Images in the 21st Century
• 298 Melodrama at the Movies
• 297 Cinemas of India: Media and Nationhood
• 297 Gender and Contemporary Horror Cinema
• 298B Militarization and American Culture
• 315 Advanced Video Production Workshop

French Studies

• 237 Francophone African Cinema
• 323 Holocaust in French Cinema
• 397 Queering the Maghreb in Francophone Cinema

• 234 German Culture through Film

• 319 Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Religions through Film

• 239 Latin America at the Movies
• 266 Language of Spanish Cinema
• 344 Bad Women and B Films in Contemporary Latin America
• 357 Borderlands Cinema
• 362 All about Almodóvar