History of Film and Media

COMD 207 traces how communication technologies—from print and photography to cinema, television, and digital media—have shaped, and been shaped by, the political and cultural worlds around them, with film as the central thread tying the story together. You'll watch and analyze key works across movements like silent cinema, Classical Hollywood, the French New Wave, and New Hollywood, write three short essays, and complete two projects that ask you to situate media texts in their historical context. As a second-year requirement, it gives you the historical and analytical vocabulary that later production, theory, and new-media courses in COMD assume you already have.