Every era imagines its own way to tell stories: in our moment it is film, television, and media. The COVID pandemic has further highlighted how much media connects us through stories. As the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu has said, “Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves.” Could the same be said of streaming television, of Tik-Tok, or of video games? In the Department of Film, Television, and Media Studies, we think so. We teach classes on everything from classic films from around the world, to the best streaming TV series, to the very latest in wearable media technologies.
As a top-ten film school, we know that we attract some of the very best, brightest, and most creative students in the world. Our students explore film, television, and media as art forms, as an industry. Students take small seminars with preeminent scholars and dedicated teachers. Our faculty are respected nationally and internationally as researchers in their fields, which include such areas as Bollywood Cinema, video games, global melodramas, classic European and U.S. directors, queer film and television, Hollywood history and current industry studies, stardom, and contemporary Korean and Japanese cinema. Together, we see how film, television, and media are timepieces of their political, cultural, and social moment and beautiful examples of the complexity of the world around us. We examine how race, gender, sexual orientation, class, ability, and nationality are represented on screen and behind the scenes. Many of our majors and minors choose to spend a summer in Bologna, Italy as part of our International Study Abroad Program and attend the annual Il Cinema Ritrovato—the largest and most prestigious film restoration festival in the world–and watch films together under the stars.
Thank you for exploring this program. I encourage prospective students to contact us for more information.
Miranda Banks
FTVS Department Chair
Miranda.Banks@LMU.edu