Film Studies in American Culture to 1960

Pre-1960 American cinema as a lens onto the country's cultural history: you watch a canonical film each week (silent comedy through noir and the studio system) and pair it with a heavy theory reading — Mulvey, Barthes, Benjamin, Adorno, Warshow — so the films become evidence for arguments about ideology, genre, and representation rather than just objects of taste. Expect weekly screenings, dense critical essays, and written work where you apply a framework to a film, with midterms and a final building on that habit. It sits alongside the AMER core as the program's main film-and-visual-culture anchor, and pairs naturally with the post-1960 sequel and later genre or media electives.