Vision Statement
Film Studies at Michigan State University offers an innovative Bachelors of Arts in Film Studies, as well as a Minor in Film Studies, and two filmmaking Minors in Fiction Filmmaking and in Documentary Production. We also coordinate a Graduate Certificate in Film Studies. Our curriculum engages students in the history, theory, and production of world cinema. Classes examine the moving image globally across a range of industrial and artisanal contexts, and encourage students to understand cinema as an art, business, and technology. Learning the craft of filmmaking as well as criticism, students develop the creative and critical skills necessary today in all areas of media art. With this training, our graduates have gone on to a wide range careers that utilize and depend on the moving image: from film production, digital distribution, and film criticism, to arts management, educational programming, and public affairs work.
Our courses offer a holistic grounding in the cinematic arts, and overall, our program has overlapping strengths in three focus areas:
- Global Diversity: Our faculty carry out extensive work on diversity and inclusion in film and media in terms of race, ethnicity, and class as well as gender and sexuality. Stretching globally, we have particular and unique strengths in these areas around issues of social justice that encompass the Global South as well as North America. In particular, we have established strengths in African and African-American cinema, Indian and Tamil cinema, Middle Eastern and Iranian cinema, queer film and media, and we are exploring the ways in which these areas intersect globally through cinema and with new media aesthetics.
- Aesthetics and Technology: Encompassing color technologies in silent cinema, modernist design and sound aesthetics at midcentury, and emergent digital media in the Global North and South, faculty research and teaching in this area is both historically focused and theoretically engaged, particularly around questions of the sensory, cultural, and racialized, gendered, and classed experience of the new technologies of modernity.
- Independent Filmmaking: Within our BA in Film Studies as well as in our two collaborative filmmaking minors, we have cultivated a boutique approach to independent production both in faculty work and amongst our students. We strongly emphasize the integration of critical analysis with critical practice in filmmaking, and train our students to be culturally engaged scholars as well as writers, editors, and directors. In a time when the continued and unacceptable bias against women and minorities in mainstream production work is becoming increasingly contentious, though unchanged, we place issues of diversity and inclusion at the radical core of our filmmaking practice and pedagogy.
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Contact Information
Joshua Yumibe, Director of Film Studies: yumibe@msu.edu
Ellen McCallum, Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies in English: emc@msu.edu
Andrew Murray, Undergraduate Advisor in English: murraya8@msu.edu
Schedule an advising appointment with Andrew Murray here:
https://msu.campus.eab.com/
Peter Johnston, Film and Digital Media Production Manager: john2950@msu.edu
The Film Studies Program
Department of English
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Road
Room C-614 Wells Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824
Program History
The study of film has a long and rich tradition at Michigan State University, and has produced a number of prestigious alumni: for example, we are proud to count visionary producer Bill Mechanic as one of our alumni, and when Sam Raimi attended MSU, he worked closely with Professor William Vincent in the Department of English. Beginning in the 1980s, the Department of English began developing its faculty and curriculum in Film Studies. Between 1991 and 2009, the Department was the lead unit supporting the Specialization in Film Studies in the College of Arts and Letters, and between 2002 and 2014, the Department housed the Concentration in Film Studies as part of its Bachelors of Arts in English (originally an Option in Film Studies until 2008).
The English Department recently converted the Concentration into a Bachelors of Art in Film Studies, which began in Spring 2015. In addition, the Department has offered a Minor in Film Studies since 2008, and Minors in Fiction Filmmaking and Documentary Production since 2009 in partnership with Media and Information in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences. (These filmmaking Minors were originally Specializations.)
Throughout this history, the Department of English’s consistent vision has been to develop an innovative program in Film Studies that integrates the study of filmmaking with a firm grounding in history, theory, and criticism. This is a fundamentally humanistic vision that challenges false distinctions between making and thinking, practice and theory, technology and aesthetics, and thus is in keeping with Michigan State University’s world-grant mission.
The Film Studies Program has cultivated a core faculty of internationally recognized scholars and filmmakers in Film Studies. Film Studies faculty maintain a rigorous publishing record, and in addition, the program also has recognized strengths in film production, with faculty actively teaching screenwriting and production courses, while producing highly successful, award-winning works of their own that have screened at a variety of film festivals. Across our faculty’s research interests, publications, and productions, the Film Studies Program has clear and recognized strengths in independent, minor, avant-garde, and experimental cinemas. Our faculty also have strong commitments to studying film in its global and transnational configurations, with particular emphases on films made in the Global South, third and fourth world filmmaking, and diasporic and accented cinema. Methodologically, media archaeology is a defining strength of the program, in that our faculty’s research looks at the sedimented ways in which historical modes of knowledge and ideology interweave through modern and modernist forms of media production, from nineteenth-century practices through silent and classical cinema and into our globalized digital culture.