Film Studies Minor

The Film Studies minor helps develop the ability to discuss, analyze, and write about film texts. As students progress through the program, they become more active and sophisticated readers of film through their introduction to the language systems that make up the film text; their focused studies in film adaptation, screenwriting, critical methods, and selected topics; and their experience in The Jake Erhardt International Film Series, which offers group viewings, discussions, and presentations. Film studies minors gain insight into film history as well as the way films both reflect and influence the culture in which they were created. Students identify and use a range of sources suitable to the scholarly conversation of film to evaluate and integrate source material and to document accurately.

Film studies minors will demonstrate the ability to:

1. identify the ways in which film viewing can be seen as an active, not passive, process;
2. identify major messages and themes delivered through moving pictures;
3. engage in an informative exchange of ideas and insights;
4. identify and apply the basic language systems of film (photography, mise en scene, movement, editing, sound, acting, sets and costumes, writing, narrative structure, and ideology) to a reading of the film text;
5. discuss the historical and cultural context of American and International filmmaking and the way in which film reflects and influences the society in which it was made;
6. locate and cite key film studies sources and use filmic critical approaches to discuss film texts;
7. sustain controlled, critical, written analyses of film texts that synthesize the basic filmic language systems;
8. give well-planned, engaging, multi-media presentations.