Film & Media Studies Department

Film studies at Emory stands firmly within the tradition of a liberal arts education, committed to the traditional goals of critical reading (of filmic texts) and writing in order to teach value discrimination. Film is the public literature and graphic art of our time. In the same way that we should be able to distinguish poetry from advertising copy and post-impressionist painting from soup labels, we should be able to distinguish good cinema from bad, and the truly serious from the merely exciting, sensuous, or novel. Film is a contemporary language form whose presence is pervasive, though we have traditionally treated this language as a medium so ephemeral as to deserve contempt or so mysterious as to defy comprehension. The film studies department seeks to correct these cultural oversights by leading the student through progressive stages of encounter toward a level of critical understanding associated with concentrations in more traditional humanities disciplines.