Skip to main content
Skip to main content

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. 

Explore Cinema and Media Studies

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.

Explore the Cinema and Media Studies Major

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.

Sorry, no events currently present.

Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture

The essays in this collection address the German television series Babylon Berlin and explore its unique contribution to contemporary visual culture.

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

Author/Lead: Hester Baer
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):  Jill Suzanne Smith
Dates:

Since its inception in 2017 the series, a neo-noir thriller set in Berlin in the final years of the Weimar republic, has reached audiences throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and has been met with both critical and popular acclaim. As a visual work rife with historical and contemporary citations Babylon Berlin offers its audience a panoramic view of politics, crime, culture, gender, and sexual relations in the German capital.

Focusing especially on the intermedial and transhistorical dimensions of the series, across four parts-Babylon Berlin, Global Media and Fan Culture; The Look and Sound of Babylon Berlin; Representing Weimar History; and Weimar Intertexts-the volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to critically examine various facets of the show, including its aesthetic form and citation style, its representation of the history and politics of the late Weimar Republic, and its exemplary status as a blockbuster production of neoliberal media culture.

Considering the series from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture is essential reading for students of film, TV, media studies, and visual culture on German Studies, History, and European Studies programmes.

Read More about Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture

Form as Critique: On Fire at Sea

Explore the deeper ethical dimensions of Fire at Sea through this thought-provoking analysis.

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

Author/Lead: Mauro Resmini
Dates:

In Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 film Fire at Sea, the haunting duality of Lampedusa—an idyllic island off the coast of Sicily—unfolds. By day, a slingshot-wielding local kid named Samuele explores woodlands, blissfully unaware of the migrant crisis that engulfs his home. By night, navy warships patrol dark waters, their radios echoing the desperate pleas of migrants lost at sea. Lampedusa, once serene, has become a primary transit hub for those fleeing Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Their perilous journey across the Mediterranean, often on overcrowded makeshift boats, is the deadliest migration route globally.

Read More about Form as Critique: On Fire at Sea

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.

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

Connect With Us

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram | Join us on Facebook | Join our mailing List |