cinema studies
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Texts and Contexts: On Rethinking the Teaching of Cinema Studies in 2022
My students know how to edit footage and use a zoom lens; they’re experts on lighting and composing a shot. But because they learned those techniques through their phones to upload to social media platforms, they use them in a completely different manner than what usually gets taught in a filmmaking class. It might be easy to dismiss these skills, developed mostly to impress their friends, but more and more jobs are looking for university graduates who can create, use and distribute video content (or just light themselves for Zoom). In that model, appreciating a movie is not exactly a […]
by Peter Labuza on Jul 14, 2022 -
What I Learned in Film School
I learned a bit about cinema studies while getting an MFA at Columbia in the late 1970s and a good deal more once I began teaching, first at NYU and then Cooper Union, around a decade later. Always curious as to why students wanted to study film to begin with, I gave a standard first assignment that included a request for a description of the first movie that a student remembered seeing in a movie theater. As at least a third of the Cooper students were born outside the United States, the answers were fascinating. Really should have saved them…. […]
by J. Hoberman on Mar 8, 2018
