The Designated Emphasis in Film Studies provides curricular and research resources for students who want to concentrate on film within their respective disciplines and have their work formally recognized. Designed to bring together faculty and students from different departments, the D.E. provides a unique context for rigorous cross-disciplinary research. Students must take the Film Theory and Film Historiography seminars and write dissertations with a significant film, or moving image component.
   
 

Requirements for Admission

Applications to the Designated Emphasis program are accepted each spring semester for admission in the following fall semester. Applicants must be enrolled in a doctoral program at UC Berkeley and must have completed the Film Theory seminar (Film Studies 200), offered each Fall Semester. Only a limited number of students will be admitted.

Special allowances will be made for current students who have fulfilled all or most of the course requirements before the D.E. was officially available, provided they have not yet completed their Qualifying Exams.

Applications are accepted during the Spring semester for admission to the following Fall. The application deadline is April 1st. An application form is attached, and additional forms are available from the Graduate Assistant for Film Studies, Room 7408 Dwinelle Hall, #2670, UC Berkeley Campus, 642-1416.
 
 

Requirements for the Designation

Students admitted to the Designated Emphasis Program must complete the following requirements before completion of their degree:

1. A minimum of three graduate seminars in Film Studies must be taken at Berkeley:

--Film Studies 200;
--Film Studies 201;
--Film Studies 240 or a graduate seminar cross-listed with Film Studies.

Note: Independent study courses are not acceptable to fulfill this requirement.

2. A member of the Graduate Group in Film Studies must be a formal member of the Ph.D. Qualifying Examination committee. Under most circumstances, the Film Graduate Group member in the student's home department will serve in this function. A member of the Graduate Group may also serve as the outside member of the qualifying exam committee.

3. A Film Studies topic must be a subject on the Qualifying Examination.

4. A member of the Graduate Group in Film Studies must be a formal member of the dissertation committee.

5. The dissertation must contribute to the study of film.

Upon completion of these requirement and the dissertation, the student will receive a designation on their transcript to state that they have completed a "Ph.D. in (...) with an Emphasis in Film Studies."
 
 

Seminars:

Please note that descriptions will vary according to the instructor. Additional seminars with substantial film or visual culture components are offered by various departments and listed in our Course Booklet each semester.
 
  Film Studies 200: Film Theory
  This course will provide an advanced introduction to the by-now substantial field of film theory. Equal attention will be given to the classic texts of early and of contemporary film theory, and to the theoretical issues raised in each. It will not be the governing assumption of this course that an implicit teleology underpins the development of film theory, leading from primitive to ever more sophisticated formulations; consequently, while we will of course read that discipline's founding texts through the prism of the late twentieth century, we will also complicate its contemporary debates through the work of figures like Benjamin, Eisenstein and Kracauer. Although the theoretical category to which we will most insistently return will be spectatorship, it will be formally as well as narratively and ideologically specified, and complicated through the related notions of "race," "gender," "class," "nation" and "history." We will read texts by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Bela Belazs, Andre Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath, Linda Williams, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom Gunning, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, and Gilles Deleuze.
 
  Film Studies 201: Film Historiography
  The seminar provides both a theoretical overview of film historiography and an introduction to specific examples and methods of historically oriented film research. One focus of the seminar will be an introduction to methodological aspects to film-archival research. Students will become familiar with campus libraries, film collections, and archival resources, especially Pacific Film Archive. The seminar's theoretical project will be to develop a repertoire of historiographical questions that can help shape research information into historical narrative. On the one hand, we will examine metahistorical writings on film history from the past two decades for an understanding of the questions undergirding various kinds of investigations. On the other, we will examine interesting case-historical examples dealing with film technology, style, studio history, exhibition, spectatorship, and cultural history.
 
  Film 240: Special Topics (selected titles):
  Silent Film Comedy, Horror Film, Film Noir, The Courtroom Film, Racial Melodrama, Griffith, Eisenstein, Resnais/Renoir, Fellini, The Dialectical Image, Weimar Cinema, Italian Neo-Realism and Marxism, Caravaggio: Film and Painting, Narrative Theory in Literature and Cinema, Film and Modernism, Avant-garde, Psychoanalysis and the Socio-Political, Theory of Cultural Studies, Feminist Film Theory, Cinema, Nation, Memory, Third Cinema