Film Studies in American Culture Since 1960

Post-1960 American cinema is treated here as a lens onto the country's shifting politics, anxieties, and aesthetics — the Hays Code collapses, the auteurs arrive, the blockbuster is born, and you read each shift against what was happening off-screen. Most weeks pair a canonical film (The Graduate, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Do the Right Thing, Thelma and Louise, Pulp Fiction) with a theoretical frame — genre, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism — and you're graded through midterms, a final, and steady written work applying those frames. It sits alongside the department's other culture courses, sharpening the close-reading and historical-context muscles you'll lean on in senior seminars and thesis work.