Film and Visual Cultures

The film studies group is dedicated to comparative, inter­disciplinary research on film, literature, and visual culture in both national and transnational contexts. The faculty offers courses on special topics in film history and national cinemas, such as African, American, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Russian/Soviet, as well as ethnic, diasporic, and regional cinemas such as Asian and Asian American. The faculty explores film criticism and film theory in relation to auteurs, genres, movements, and modes of representation. Methods and issues span cultural historiography, globalization, feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, as well as film and the other arts (music, painting, photography, special effects, et al.).