Designated Emphasis

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 in their degree designation. Designed to bring together faculty and students from different departments, the D.E. is administered by the Graduate Group in Film Studies and provides a unique context for rigorous cross- disciplinary research. Students applying to the D.E. must be prepared to integrate high-level film and media research into their coursework, qualifying exam, and dissertation.

Requirements for Admission

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

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 and Media must be taken at Berkeley:
  • Film and Media 200;
  • Film and Media 201;
  • Film and Media 240 or a graduate seminar cross-listed with Film and Media.

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

  1. A member of the Graduate Group in Film and Media 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.
  2. A Film and Media topic must be included as a subject on the Qualifying Examination.
  3. A member of the Graduate Group in Film and Media must be a formal member of the dissertation committee.
  4. The dissertation must contribute to the study of film and moving-image media.

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 and Media.”

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 each semester.

Film and Media 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 and Media 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):

Sample titles from recent seminars:

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

Applying for the Film Designated Emphasis

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 Completed application form.
  • 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.

Film Graduate Group Faculty

Natalia Brizuela

PhD, New York University; Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Prof. Brizuela 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.

Deniz Göktürk

PhD, Free University of Berlin; Associate Professor of German
Prof. Göktürk has taught courses on transnational cinema, world cinema/global cities, and German cinema.

Anton Kaes

PhD, Stanford University; Class of 1939 Professor of German Literature; Film and Media
Prof. Kaes teaches courses in film theory, silent cinema, film noir, modernism and cinema, and German cinema.

D.A. Miller

PhD, Yale, Professor of English
Prof. Miller teaching and research fall in the areas of nineteenth-century British and French fiction, gay and cultural studies, and film.

Gavriel Moses

PhD, Brown University; Graduate, London School of Film Technique; Associate Professor of Italian; Film and Media
Prof. Moses 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; Film and Media
Prof. Nesbet 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; Associate Professor of Art Practice
Prof. Niemeyer teaches new media and creates digital media installations.

Linda Rugg

PhD, Harvard; Associate Professor of Scandinavian
Prof. Rugg 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; Professor of Scandinavian; Film and Media
Prof. Sandberg works on silent cinema, Scandinavian film history, Carl Dreyer, and pre-cinematic visual culture. He teaches courses on film historiography, location and place in cinema, cinema and architecture, silent comedy, and Scandinavian film.

Miryam Sas

PhD, Yale University; Associate Professor of Comparative Literature; Film and Media
Prof. Sasis interested in experimental film, Japanese film, critical theory, twentieth century Japanese, French, and English literature, and the visual and material cultures of modern Japan.

Jeffrey Skoller

PhD, Northwestern; Associate Professor of Film and Media
Prof. Skoller 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; Rhetoric
Prof. Trinh 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; Associate Professor of Film and Media
Prof. Whissel 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 and Media; Rhetoric
Prof. Williams works on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and “body genres” of all sorts) visual culture, and feminist theory.