UB Offers New Undergraduate Degree in Film Studies

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo is offering a new undergraduate interdisciplinary program leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree in film studies through the Department of Media Study in the UB College of Arts and Sciences (CAS).

The 120-credit-hour program will focus on the critical study of film and be taught by faculty members from several departments in the CAS, including English, art, theater and media study.

"The career and educational objectives of the program are to offer an undergraduate education in film criticism that will prepare students in depth for further film study on a graduate level," says Royal Roussel, professor and interim chair of the Department of Media Study.

He notes that an increasing number of universities offer general education programs in English and the humanities that incorporate courses in film theory and film history. The new UB program, he says, is a response to those changes and an effort to prepare a generation of students with expertise in the professional analysis of film.

Roussel says students expressed their desire for the program through their ongoing enrollment in film courses and their response to surveys about the proposed program. Twelve faculty members in various UB departments who already make film a primary focus of their course offerings and research also expressed a keen interest in bringing together their work and students under the umbrella of an interdisciplinary major.

The program, he adds, is one of an increasing number of cross- and inter-disciplinary programs and undergraduate majors designed to offer specific vocational skills and help students understand their world so that they can operate in it as conscious agents and not as passive recipients of material transferred to them through film technologies.

The program will organize existing UB film and media courses into a coherent and predictable sequence that will give students access to the most important filmatic texts of their own and other cultures.

Forty-six of the program's required credit hours will be derived from courses in film and media analysis and film history that will cover the development of film as both a genre and as a language, teach them the basic terms of film analysis and enable graduates to watch films analytically.