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Cinema and Media Studies

The Program in Cinema and Media Studies is an interdisciplinary unit focusing on the history, theory, and analysis of cinema and other audio-visual media. 

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Undergraduate Major

Cinema and Media Studies Major

The Undergraduate Major in Cinema and Media Studies has been designed by faculty across the College of Arts and Humanities to enable students to explore the aesthetic, cultural, economic, historical, and technological dimensions of the most globally influential art forms of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. The Cinema and Media Studies major brings together courses in cinema and media from varied nations, languages, and cultures.

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For Graduate Students

Graduate Field Committee

The Graduate Field Committee in Film Studies allows graduate students to study in their home department and include film studies faculty as advisors and committee members. Many Film Studies faculty are also members of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature, which allows another avenue for graduate studies in cinema and media studies at the University.


Faculty and Research

Faculty and Research

Our Faculty represents a wide swath of the College of Arts and Humanities, including the Departments of English, History, and Art History, and the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. The Program has teaching and research strengths in world cinema, film and media theory, early cinema, feminist and women’s cinema, the history of American cinema, science and the moving image, and various national cinemas throughout the world.

Meet the Faculty in Cinema and Media Studies

Cinema and Media Studies Fund

Cinema and Media Studies Fund

The primary mission of the Cinema and Media Studies Fund is to support the teaching and research activities in the Program of Cinema and Media Studies, and to help develop the Program’s activity as the central place for the study of cinema and one of the key sites for the critical study of media at UMD.

Donate to the Cinema and Media Studies Fund

The faculty in the Program in Cinema and Media Studies represent a wide swath of the College of Arts and Humanities, including the Departments of English, History, Art History, and the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

The Program has teaching and research strengths in the world cinema, film and media theory, early cinema, feminist and women’s cinema, the history of American cinema, science and the moving image, and various national cinemas throughout the world.

The Program in Cinema and Media Studies is committed to the advancement of research and teaching on all aspects of cinema and media studies, and welcomes participation from across campus. The faculty maintain ties with colleagues across the U.S. and the globe, and regularly sponsor scholarly events at the UM campus. Cinema and Media Studies aims to promote a robust and vigorous intellectual event, and to create a scholarly home for the advanced study of cinema and media.

The Undergraduate Major in Cinema and Media Studies takes a capacious view of cinema and media studies, and allows students to choose classes among various areas: Cinema and Media Theory; Topics in National & International Cinema and Media; Documentary, Animation, and Experimental Media; and the study of Cinema Genres, Auteurs, and Movements. In addition, students can elect to add courses in digital media practice and film production.

Advising & Courses

Advising

The purpose of academic advising is to provide students with information on academic requirements needed for degree completion and to answer questions related to the Cinema and Media Studies undergraduate major.  Academic advising is a shared responsibility between the student and the advisor.

More information about academic advising in the Program in Cinema and Media Studies can be accessed here

Courses

Course Catalogues

See the Undergraduate Catalog for a full list of our course offerings and Testudo for our current courses.

Degree Program Requirements

Please consult the Cinema and Media Studies Undergraduate Major pages for the degree requirements.

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Between History and the Discord of Time: The Figure of the Migrant in A Seventh Man and Transit

Essay published in The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Cinema and Media Studies

Author/Lead: Luka Arsenjuk
Dates:

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the figuration of migratory movement in A Seventh Man (1975), a photo-essay reportage produced by the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr, and Transit (2018), a film by the German director Christian Petzold. It seeks to make sense of the curious figure of the migrant one finds in Petzold’s film (based loosely on Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel by the same name about World War II refugees). As a close reading of the film shows, Transit rejects the coherence of the history or period film genre, plays with multiple generic forms, uses incongruous modes of narration, and introduces a protagonist who pretends to be someone else and whose time is therefore someone else’s time. In these ways, the film ties the figure of the migrant to an experience of time that is essentially one of discontinuity and crisis—time as a superimposition of discordant temporalities. To set in relief the historical novelty of such a migratory figure, the chapter approaches Transit through a reading of A Seventh Man, a text that relates the temporal discord of migratory movement to the Marxist historical schema of combined and uneven development. What is new about Transit, and what the film offers as a distinct problem for the figuration of migration in our own situation, is precisely the waning or even the absence of any such historical schema or shared temporal horizon. Based on this diagnosis, the chapter argues, the task of the figuration of migratory movement today lies in reinventing a shared sense of temporal existence, a collective time that would allow the figure of the migrant to not only inscribe the crises of our present moment but also prefigure future forms of emancipation.

The Problem of Political Art: Notes on Red Aesthetics

An essay published in online journal Nonsite (issue #41: Socialism or Moralism)

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Cinema and Media Studies

Author/Lead: Luka Arsenjuk
Dates:

"“Don’t start with the good old days but the bad new ones.” -- Bertolt Brecht

 

Read More about The Problem of Political Art: Notes on Red Aesthetics

The Audio-Visual Nonrelation and the Digital Break

An essay published in The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory (2022)

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Cinema and Media Studies

Author/Lead: Luka Arsenjuk
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Kyle Stevens (ed.)
Dates:

In the most widely accepted narratives about the recent history of cinema, the introduction of digital technology typically figures as a significant break, in which the loss of cinema’s analog photographic basis brought about a profound transformation of its nature or ontological status. This essay proposes to revisit this rather straightforward and vision-centric narrative of the digital break in order to question it from the perspective of a more rigorous understanding of cinema as an audio-visual discourse. Drawing on the work of Michel Chion and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the essay develops a concept of audio-visual discourse as something structured around a constitutive nonrelation between image and sound. Following this, the essay interrogates what consequences such a discursive and non-relational conception of audio-visual phenomena might have for our understanding of cinema’s historicity, in particular when the latter is derived from some kind of figuration of a historical break.

Luka Arsenjuk, ""The Audio-Visual Nonrelation and the Digital Break," in The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, ed. Kyle Stevens (Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 359–375

Read More about The Audio-Visual Nonrelation and the Digital Break

Program Director

Caroline Eades

Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, French
Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
Affiliate Professor, Classics

4120 Jiménez Hall
College Park MD, 20742

(301) 405-4029

Program Advisor

Marianne Conroy

Lecturer, English
Cinema and Media Studies

3229 Tawes Hall
College Park MD, 20742

(301) 405-9651

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