Undergraduate Academics
Film History
Sarah Lawrence students approach film, first and foremost, as an art. The College’s film history courses take social, cultural, and historical contexts into account—but films themselves are the focus of study and discussion. Students seek equal artistic value in Hollywood films, art films, avant-garde films, and documentaries, with emphasis on understanding the intentions of filmmakers and appreciating their creativity.
As a valuable part of a larger humanistic education in the arts, the study of film often includes the exploration of connections to the other arts, such as painting and literature. Close association with the filmmaking and visual arts disciplines enables students working in those areas to apply their knowledge of film to creative projects. And within the film history discipline, the study of film gives students insight into stylistic techniques and how they shape meaning. Advanced courses in specific national genres, forms, movements, and filmmakers—both Western and non-Western—provide a superb background in the history of film and a basis for sound critical judgment. Students benefit from New York City’s enormously rich film environment, in which film series, lectures, and festivals run on a nearly continuous basis.
Film History 2025-2026 Courses
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
FLMH 3207
Despite the global popularity of American horror cinema, horror remains a remarkably “local” genre. Nearly every film-producing nation has made horror films, often drawing on local, long-standing traditions rather than simply copying the Hollywood model. Ideas of what constitutes the horrific, the forms it takes, and its political implications vary widely between different cultures and different historical moments. This course will steer clear of the well-known horror films of the United States, instead examining horror films—both new and old—from the rest of the world. Topics to be covered include the European horror films of the 1960s and 1970s (Italy, Spain), the early 2000s Japanese horror boom, Korean “extreme cinema,” Mexican horror (both classical and modern), and Bollywood horror.
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
FLMH 3109
This course will take an industrial approach to the study of global film and film history, highlighting box-office hits, fans, stars, workers, and dream factories from multiple (trans)national contexts. Foregrounding questions of labor, technology, circulation, and genre, we will examine popular cinema as an industrial film form with a particular emphasis on melodrama, comedy, and the musical. This seminar is framed by some of film history’s most persistent questions: What is “popular” culture? What is a “mass” medium? Is cinema a universal language? Can art be separated from commerce? Proceeding chronologically from the 1920s through the present, we will first explore “classical Hollywood cinema” as an exportable style and mass reproducible system. Next, we will follow the rise of other “-ollywoods” around the world, contextualizing and comparing several major film industries and their popular cinemas. Ranging from Western Europe to the Soviet Union and the Global South, topics will include the studio lot as dream site, urban film cultures, vernacular modernism, colonial film production and cultural imperialism, cine-workers as global workers, divisions of voice labor in Hollywood vs. Bollywood, the transnational feminization of film handiwork, and the relationship between new film industries and new media from polyglot talkies to Nollywood video-films.
Faculty
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Open, Lecture—Year | 10 credits
FLMH 2014
This course will provide both a detailed survey of the history of moving-image arts and an introduction to key aesthetic and theoretical concepts in the study of film. We will study the major elements of film form—editing, cinematography, sound, mise-en-scène—as phenomena emerging from specific historical contexts and chart their development both over time and as they travel around the world. While the emphasis in the earlier part of the course will be on film’s European and American origins, we will approach film as a truly global phenomenon with considerable attention devoted to East Asian and South Asian, African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern cinemas. While the basic course structure will be chronological, we will develop the vocabulary and viewing skills necessary to identify and analyze the key components of film texts; for example, our examination of editing will be situated within our discussion of 1920s American and Soviet cinema, while possible uses and aesthetic implications of sound will be examined alongside a number of diverse early experiments with sound. Other key moments studied will include the development of “classical” Hollywood cinema (and challenges to it), the emergence of new national art cinemas in the post-World War II era, the radical cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and developments in film aesthetics since the introduction of digital filmmaking techniques in the 1990s. Key theoretical approaches in film studies will also be situated in their historical context, including early debates around film’s status as art from the 1910s and 1920s, inquiries into the relationship between photography and reality from the post-World War II period, and different critical approaches to the analysis of the ideological implications of film and its relationship to the spectator.
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Intermediate, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
FLMH 3127
Prerequisite: a prior film history course or seminar in a related discipline
What happened to women in the silent-film industry? How did typewriters invert the gender of writing? Can patriarchal aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” filmmaking? Should dead stars and inventors be revived as feminist icons? How do we excavate invisible women’s histories? This course offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film and media history. Readings will cover a wide range of feminist film and media scholarship, from psychoanalytic feminist film theory to cyberfeminism and feminist media archaeology. The focus will be primarily on European and US film and media, but conference projects may exceed these bounds. In fall, we will study film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. Weekly screenings will highlight a mix of obscure and canonical narrative, experimental, and documentary films from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. In spring, we will zoom out from film to explore the relatively new field of feminist media studies. Starting in the Enlightenment, we will trace an alternative cultural history of modern gendered media, media machines, and media workers, using formative feminist conceptual frameworks to study spindles, novels, “female thermometers,” fictional androids, telegraphic romances, and computers. In place of a weekly screening, students will examine primary sources across multiple media through a mix of reading, viewing, and listening assignments.
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
FLMH 3145
From the big-budget silent epics of the 1910s to the stylish art films of the 1960s, Italian cinema has long been a major player in world cinema. While Italian cinema, particularly the neorealist films of the 1940s, has had an enormous influence internationally, it has also consistently adhered to specifically “national” themes, directly engaging with Italian political and social issues. This course will examine the relationship between these two seemingly contradictory facets, inquiring as to how Italian cinema has managed to balance worldwide popularity with decidedly local subject matter. We will watch films from throughout the history of Italian cinema, with an emphasis on its years of greatest achievement and popularity. Given the course’s concern with Italian cinema’s close relationship to Italian politics and society, course readings will include a substantial amount of historical background material, as well as analyses of Italy’s self-representation as a nation. Directors to be studied will include Giovanni Pastrone, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Lina Wertmüller, Marco Bellocchio, and Alice Rohrwacher.
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Open, Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
FLMH 2052
Since the Lumière brothers filmed their female employees leaving the factory in 1895, the “working girl” has become a fixture of global cinema. This lecture approaches this archetypal modern character as a foundational figure for film history and an important vernacular link for national film industries competing with Hollywood. We will begin by asking: What is a working girl? How has the category changed over the course of the 20th century as it has circulated around the globe, despite its fraught ideological construction? And how can we turn the category into a tool for intersectional feminist film history? With these questions in mind, we will launch our investigation in the United States and Europe and then move on to the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and Cameroon. We will read classic film theory, short fiction, and local histories of film culture and gendered labor alongside films about shopgirls, dancing girls, telephone girls, factory girls, office girls, laundresses, and maids. Topics to be discussed will include working girls as moviegoers, cultural imperialism and vernacular modernism, migration and mass reproduction, sex work, workplace romance, and contradictions of capital and care. In this class, students will conduct comparative, multimedia analyses of film texts and read global film history through the globalization of modern gendered labor.
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Open, Small Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
FLMH 2505
Note: Closed to students who have taken Not For Children: Alternative Animation 1960-Present (FILM 3504). Same as FILM 2505.
This discussion-based lecture with screenings is designed to provide an overview of animation based on alternative writing and the relationship of form and style to content in artist-animated film. We will examine various forms of animated films produced between 1960 and the present, with a focus on the history and cultural cross currents in these works. The course will survey a wide range of animated work from a diverse selection of artists. The focus of the course will be on animated film forms alternative to commercial animation, including hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, and, more recently, Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) independents. The guiding factor in selecting works for review will be the artist, in most cases, retaining control of their own work; this differs from the battery of decision makers in commercial studio systems. As a class, we will look for aesthetic consequences and structural differences within the auteur system versus an animation studio’s divisions of labor. Animation production will not be taught in this course; however, a creative conference project in studio arts, writing, media, or performing arts and documentation of this project will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and entries in a research/creative practice notebook.
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