Film Studies is an interdisciplinary program that draws on a wide variety of approaches. In completing the minor, students will become familiar with the theoretical and cultural contexts from which we approach film and other visual media. The program understands films as points of access to diverse cultural traditions, and visual media as shapers of contemporary political, economic, and social life. One emphasis of the program is aesthetic and formal analysis. The technical and theoretical principles that govern visual media reward careful analysis, especially in exemplary or problematic instances. Another emphasis is the complex relationship between these media and the societies that create them.

The Black Image in American Film, Roy-Fequiere, Spring 2023

Philosophy and Film

In this course we explore film as a capacity to depict action. In so doing we develop terms by which we can recognize the emergence of film as an event in the history of thought and perception. Our method will be two-fold: we will look at examples from the history of American film to identify certain historical dispositions—early actualities, movies, animation, gangster movies, and so on. Equally we will bring out one particular aspect of film: its power for physiognomic revelation: that is to say, its capacity to reveal human character through the depiction of bodies in action. In so doing we will contrast film with another mode of psychological understanding: psychoanalysis. We will read texts by Plato, Diderot, Lessing, Baudelaire, Freud, Bazin, Cavell, Warshow, Bergson, and others. We will watch movies by the Lumière brothers, Griffith, Keaton, Hawks, Capra, Astaire, Sturges, Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Scorsese, Tarantino, Riley, Haynes, Burnett, and others.