The Film Studies Program aspires to integrate the critical, historical and theoretical study of cinema, media and the visual arts, with artistic and commercial practices. Our program offers the BA and MA degrees in critical film studies, and BFA and MFA degrees in film and video arts. All of our students in the critical and production tracks complete a number of critical studies requirements including cinema history, film analysis, film theory, genres, documentary practices, directors, national and regional cinemas, the history of the avant-garde, the golden age of television, etc. These courses are all integrated with art-making students and critical studies majors mixing and matching their different expertise to make for a more engaging, deeper understanding of the subject of our studies.
We sincerely believe that it makes for better artists to know and understand the history, aesthetics and the major shifts in the development of their medium, and that it makes for better critical thinking for the historian or critic to know something about the technical and formal complexities of their object of study. Recent course offerings include “Cinema and Landscape,” “Horror Film,” “History of Russian Cinema,” “Avant-garde Film and the Arts,” “The Hollywood Musical,” and “Lives of 007.”
Our distinguished faculty of scholars and working artists come from institutions as distinguished as the Massachusetts College of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, UCLA, UC San Diego, the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and the University of Texas-Austin. The Film Studies Program also hosts a wide variety of artistic, academic and extracurricular programs to enhance our students’ experience with a rounded arts-immersion experience. Among these are the International Film Series, the First Person Cinema Program, the Brakhage Center for Media Arts, and our association with the Boulder International Film Festival as well as the Denver Film Festival.
Graduates of our program have realized career opportunities in organizations such as The Sundance Institute, The Tribeca Film Festival, Indiewire, and The Hollywood Reporter; in network and cable television venues like NBC, National Geographic, HBO, and TLC; in hit shows like Glee, American Horror Story, Mad Men, South Park and Weeds; and in many hit movies like Madagascar, Easy A, I Love You Man, X Men, Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines, The Hobbit, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Boxtrolls, Gone Girl, Pirates of the Caribbean, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty, and American Hustle. Yet others have successfully pursued MA, MFA, and PhD degrees from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Duke, NYU, UCLA, USC, Northwestern, Indiana University, University of Kansas, University of Miami, University of London and many others.
If you have further questions about the Film Studies major at the University of Colorado Boulder, please contact me directly at Ernesto.Acevedo@Colorado.edu or write to filmstudies@colorado.edu.
