Using film as an intellectual passport
to an interconnected world.
Who We Are
The GW Film Studies Program offers a minor that immerses students in the history, theory and genres of cinema. In the minor program, undergraduate students learn classical film aesthetics, survey the history of cinema and take an in-depth look at films from around the globe. Combining works from Japan, Italy, Russia, China, India, Latin America, the Middle East, the United States and more, our faculty encourage students to see cinema as a window to the world.
The Film Studies Program is housed within the American Studies Department in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and also draws on courses from across the college’s language departments.
Why Study Film?
No discipline is more international than cinema. Modern film originated simultaneously in the United States and France. But whether one looks to Thomas Edison or the Lumiere brothers, they were merely the beginning of an art movement and industry.
Great innovation came from all corners of the globe: Russian revolutionaries, the American studio system, Japanese anime, Italian neorealism, Indian Bollywood, the French New Wave, Latin American telenovelas, the Korean Golden Age, the Ealing comedies of postwar Britain and many more.
By studying cinema — its historical context, its impact or even how films are produced and scored — students sharpen their critical thinking skills and develop a worldly perspective on the power of moving images.
