Upcoming Courses

We will examine feature filmmaking as simultaneously an art form and a culture industry, considering

1. Formal components that make up feature films, such as the narration, mise en scène, composition, editing, etc.

2.  Industrial practices that shape its production and exhibition.  

You will consider the gangster genre and the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock to explore how filmmakers have used feature films to comment on dominant social questions such as the challenge of racial and ethnic differences, the relations between genders, and the complexity of violence.

2 Sections:  MW 9-11 am and Noon-2 pm, Bertucci

In this hands-on course, you’ll dive into the fundamentals of digital filmmaking—camera operation, sound recording, editing, screenwriting, and visual storytelling. Through workshops, group exercises, and individual projects, you’ll sharpen your ability to craft compelling narratives and communicate ideas through film. Whether behind the lens or in the editing suite, you’ll develop the technical skills and reflective practices that will provide a foundation for your creative and expressive potential.

MW 3-4:15 pm, Bower

German Cinema examines films as verbal and visual texts in cultural and historical context. Central to the course is the acquisition of a critical vocabulary for “reading” film, both for form and content. With its focus on German film from the 1930s to the present, this course also addresses questions of language and meaning for the non-native speaker of German: How do non-German speaking audiences interpret these films? How do the meaning and impact of the films shift over time and across cultures? What nuances in the visual and textual allegories of the films can be uncovered with additional cultural background from the films’ original German context?

To answer these questions, analysis and discussion of each film are prefaced by overviews of the historical period, the political and social climate, and public attitudes at the time in which the film was produced. Students will also engage with critical readings on the films in context and explore selected components of film form. By the end of the course, the student should possess the critical apparatus to analyze elements of film narrative, compare film productions from different time periods, and demonstrate awareness of the conditions of film production and spectatorship.

Group A elective. 

Black Futures is positioned at the intersection of various African American creative traditions including music, poetry, dance, film, and theory. The course will specifically merge sound and cinema into a critical expanse that lets us look backwards and forwards in time. In the mathematics of general relativity and statistical mechanics, past and future time appear to be symmetric rather than progressing in a single direction as we perceive them.

Considering this context, where does time reside? Our listening will follow the moods of Sun Ra, Doechii, Alice Coltrane, and Erykah Badu. Our screenings will analyze the work of Bill Gunn, RaMell Ross, George Clinton, and Rickey Laurentiis. Derived from an expanded notion of what Amiri Baraka called "Blues people," this course will approach a diversity of art forms with a multimodal lens, presenting questions about the South, the Universe, and ourselves.

Group A elective. 

Writing for the Screen, MW 1:30-2:45 pm, Badgley

As we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by screens of every kind, the ability to communicate through visual storytelling can be considered modern literacy. This course will help you better understand what you want to say and how to communicate those ideas to others through the written word for large and small screens. 

Using time-proven methods such as a three-act structure and exploring story elements such as stakes, character motivation, escalation, plot twists, etc., this course will assist you in turning a budding concept into an undeniable reality. Final scripts will not only be sound in terms of story but will be production-ready. 

In this course, student pairs will develop creative ideas through foundational documents, culminating in one polished, production-ready 7-10-page screenplay.  

Group C elective. 

This seminar will explore the filmmaking of Indigenous people from regions at far remove from Richmond, Virginia. We will begin in the Southern hemisphere’ Oceania by studying the work of Maori filmmakers in Aotearoa New Zealand and Aboriginal filmmakers in Australia. We will then shift our focus to the Northern hemisphere and the Arctic to study the Innuit filmmaking in Nunavut in Canada. In each case, we will consider early groundbreaking features (Barry Barclay’s 1987 Ngati and Merata Mita’s 1988, Mauri, Tracey Moffat’s 1993 beDevil, and Isuma’s 2001 Atanarjuat) along with most recent releases (Miki Magasiva’s 2025 Tina and Kath Akuhata-Brown’s 2025 Koka; Leah Purcell’s 2021 Driver’s Wife and Ivan Sen’s 2023 Limbo; Nyla Innuksuk’s 2022 Slash/Back ) and explore a variety of genres and modes (shorts and features, documentary and fiction, popular and independent/experimental, live-action and animation), as Indigenous responses to the better known films by non-Indigenous directors such as Niki Caro’s 2002 The Whale Rider or Phillip Noyce’s 2002 Rabbit Proof Fence.

We will investigate the historical and contemporary economic, social, and cultural conditions out of which these cinemas have emerged. And we will seek to understand global Indigenous media aesthetics, Indigenous filmmaking as community-building, cultural preservation, advocacy, and empowerment as well as the impact of contemporary technologies, such as digital and interactive media, on Indigenous cinemas. Nov. 20-23, we will participate in the Pocahontas Reframed, the largest festival featuring indigenous films on the east coast. We will interact with filmmakers, producers, and actors. Depending on interests, students may choose to complete the final project in the form of a research paper, a video essay or a short film.