Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Berkeley offers an interdisciplinary undergraduate program leading to a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Film & Media. The program offers rigorous engagement with the entire culture of moving-images, teaching students to think historically, theoretically, and analytically about a wide range of cinematic forms. At the same time, it encourages students to look at moving images from the vantage point of other disciplines. To this end, the Department of Film & Media cooperates with a number of other departments and programs on campus. Students earning their BA in Film & Media may also choose to complement their study of the history and theory of moving images with the hands-on experience provided by production and screenwriting classes.
Declaring the Major
To declare a major in Film & Media, students must have completed a minimum of 30 units, and have satisfactorily completed FILM 10 or FILM 20. For further information regarding prerequisites, please see the Major Requirements tab on this page.
Honors Program
To be eligible for admission to the honors program in Film & Media, a student must have attained senior standing with a grade point average (GPA) of 3.3 or higher on all University work and a 3.5 GPA or higher in courses in the major. Students in the honors program are to take FILM H195 for a letter grade to complete a senior honors thesis. Although the production of a film may be part of the preparation of the thesis " and the film may be submitted as a documentation, or example " it is expected that the thesis will be a substantial piece of writing on film and media theory, criticism, or history.
Minor Program
There is no minor program in Film & Media.
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After completing the Film & Media major, a student will have a working knowledge of the film-making process from concept to exhibition and will be able to interpret films through a variety of aesthetic, cultural, historical, and theoretical frameworks. The critical thinking skills promoted in the film major involve seeing beyond one's immediate reactions to a film by developing a repertoire of productive interpretive questions and approaches that lead to more complex understanding and appreciation of the filmic experience. Analytic reasoning is encouraged in both oral and written assignments that require students to perform systematic analysis of film sequences, to construct careful, step-by-step arguments in larger research projects, or to create a coherently constructed film or script. Communication skills are developed through participation in classroom discussions, in the effective writing of critical essays and research papers, and in the articulation of creative ideas through film-making and scriptwriting.
More specifically, the successful graduate from the Film & Media major must be able to:
- produce formal and aesthetic analyses of different media forms drawing on both medium-specific and comparative approaches;
- think beyond the surface impressions of popular film and media texts by developing a repertoire of critical questions and approaches that facilitate deeper understanding, including concepts of concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, empire, colonialism, class, gender, and sexual orientation;
- engage in the critical study of film and media in an expanded framework, focusing on experimental (social and political), documentary, and global perspectives as part of a comparative approach to a range of media forms including film, television, new media, sound, photography, and more;
- learn basic principles of film analysis through the early emergence of film form;
- develop the skills of shot- and sequence-analyses, both orally in class and in written form;
- talk and write about how individual films or media texts fit within a historical context and the mode of production from which they emerge;
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identify and understand the place of film and media as visual and fine art, as well as its influence on major art movements and discourses in modern and contemporary art;
- demonstrate the ability to understand and apply key concepts from film and media theory when analyzing or producing a media text, making a film, or writing a screenplay;
- for those students with special interests in film and media production, develop the technical production skills necessary to express original and critically-informed creative ideas in an accomplished form of visual expression;
- write essays and papers that are clear, well-researched and organized, and that mount an original argument;
- organize ideas in oral presentations and general classroom discussions.
