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.

The DE requirements and application process are described below.

Any UC Berkeley PhD student in good standing may apply after completing either the Film Theory seminar (Film Studies 200) offered each fall semester, or the Film Historiography seminar (Film Studies 201) offered each spring semester.  Students must be admitted prior to taking their Qualifying Exams.

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 requirements 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."

Please note that descriptions will vary according to the instructor. Additional seminars with substantial film or visual culture components are offered by various departments 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):

Applications to the Designated Emphasis program are accepted in fall and spring semesters for admission in the following semester. The deadlines are April 15 for admission the following fall semester, and November 15 for the following spring semester.  Only a limited number of students will be admitted.

Please submit the following material in hard copy to the Film DE Graduate SAO in 7406 Dwinelle Hall.  Check back approximately one month later about your status if you have not been notified.

• A succinct one-page statement about your research interests and background in film.
• A writing sample (maximum 25 pages), ideally relating to a film topic.
• A current, unofficial copy of your UC Berkeley transcript.
• At least one letter of recommendation from a faculty member from your home department.
• Graduate Petition for Change of Major or Degree Goal.  This is a Registrar’s Office form. Petition for Admission to the Designated Emphasis in Film.

NATALIA BRIZUELA
(PhD, New York University; Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese) has areas of research that lie at the intersection of Latin American literature and visual technologies /new media, specializing in Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean literature and culture.

TIMOTHY CLARK
(PhD, London University; Chancellor’s Professor of History of Art) is interested in visual culture.

CAROL J. CLOVER
(PhD, Berkeley; Class of 1936 Professor of Rhetoric and Film Studies and Scandinavian, Emerita) works in film and popular culture and teaches courses in film genre (Horror, Courtroom, Noir).

ULYSSE DUTOIT
(PhD, Lausanne; Senior Lecturer in French) teaches history of French cinema and visual arts, focusing on Resnais, Renoir, and Godard.

DENIZ GÖKTÜRK
(PhD, Free University of Berlin; Associate Professor of German) has taught courses on transnational cinema, world cinema/global cities, and German cinema.

RICHARD HUTSON
(PhD, University of Illinois; Associate Professor of English) teaches American film and popular culture from the beginnings to the 1960s (Griffith, films of the Depression) in its historical context, focusing on cinema as a diagnostic of culture.

MARTIN JAY
(PhD, Harvard University; Professor of History) is interested in theories of visuality and visual culture and is the author of books on German intellectual history and theory (Adorno, Frankfurt School, Lukács) and cultural criticism.

ANTON KAES
(PhD, Stanford University; Chancellor’s Professor of German Literature and Film Studies) teaches courses in film theory, film noir, and German cinema.

GAVRIEL MOSES
(PhD, Brown University; Graduate, London School of Film Technique; Associate Professor of Italian and Film Studies) teaches courses in Italian cinema, literature in film, film theory, and Renaissance roots of the cinematic apparatus.

ANNE NESBET
(PhD, Berkeley; Associate Professor of Slavic and Film Studies) teaches courses in film theory and Russian and European cinema before WWII.  Her research interests include Eisenstein, Soviet cinema, and European experiments in the “dialectical image.”

GREG NIEMEYER
(MFA, Stanford University; Assistant Professor of Art Practice and Film Studies) teaches new media and creates digital media installations.

LINDA RUGG
(PhD, Harvard; Associate Professor of Scandinavian) has teaching and research interests that include Swedish literature and culture, 1870 to the present; August Strindberg; Ingmar Bergman; autobiography, including visual autobiography, and literature and the visual arts.

MARK SANDBERG
(PhD, Berkeley; Associate Professor of Scandinavian and Film Studies) works on silent cinema, Scandinavian film history, Ingmar Bergman, and pre-cinematic visual culture.  He teaches courses on film historiography, silent cinema, and Scandinavian film.

MIRYAM SAS
(PhD, Yale University; Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese) is interested in experimental film, Japanese film, critical theory, twentieth century Japanese, French, and English literature, and the visual and material cultures of modern Japan.

KAJA SILVERMAN
(PhD, Brown University; Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film Studies) teaches film theory and cultural studies, feminist theory and psychoanalysis.

JEFFREY SKOLLER
(PhD, Northwestern; Assistant Professor of Film Studies) teaches film/video production and the theory and practice of counter-cinemas. His work focuses on experimental/avant-garde film and video art, documentary/non-fiction film, Third Cinema, and tactical and activist media practices.

TRINH T. MINH-HA
(PhD, University of Illinois, Champaign; Professor of Women Studies and Rhetoric) is a documentary feminist filmmaker and expert on avant-garde and Third World post-colonial film theory.  She teaches seminars on Third Cinema, film theory and aesthetics, cultural politics and feminist theory.

KRISTEN WHISSEL
(PhD, Brown University; Assistant Professor of Film Studies) works on American modernity in early cinema, including representations of the Spanish-American wars, new technologies at World's Fairs and expositions, and the "white slavery" scandals.

LINDA WILLIAMS
(PhD, University of Colorado; Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric) works on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and "body genres" of all sorts) visual culture, feminist theory and pornography.