Report of the Film Studies Program
Lucy Fischer
The Film Studies Program has had a very active year. We currently have some 250 undergraduate majors and we have had to double the number of sections of the Advanced Seminar in Film Studies to accommodate the needs of our students. Some of our graduating undergraduate students will go on to do graduate work in the field; one, for example, will attend the University of Wisconsin, Madison--one of the most prestigious programs in the nation.
One the graduate level, our Film Certificates (MA and PhD) continue to grow in popularity and many of graduate students in the Department of English are doing MA or PhD work in film studies (sometimes combined with another field). Some of our graduate students also do internships at the Film and Video Department of the Museum of Art.
Our program has brought numerous speakers to campus this year: James Lastra (who spoke on avant-garde cinema), Jeffery Spence (who spoke on irony in film), James Naremore (who talked about comic aspects in film noir) and Lisa Cartwright (who spoke about women and disability in film).
In addition to bringing speakers ourselves, we have co-sponsored numerous film-related events on campus along with the Women's Studies Program, the Cultural Studies Program, and the Western European Studies Program. With the English Department, we co-sponsored a talk on Shakespeare and film around the film Looking for Richard.
On the technological front, we had access, for the first time to 35mm film projection in the newly renovated Masonic Temple. Our inaugural event at the facility was the screening of the independent film NightJohn with its filmmaker (Charles Burnett) present. Additional departments (with faculty in film studies) also used the facility. The Department of French and Italian showed a series of French films never before seen in Pittsburgh; and the Department of Slavic Languages showed a Polish film and will later show some films on Russian Cinema.