The Film Concentration for Salisbury University English Majors

Chungking Express (1994), dir. Wong Kar Wai

The Film Concentration is an option for Salisbury English Majors who wish to learn more about the medium of film.  In these courses, students study the history of the medium, from its invention to the present day; international cinemas, from New Zealand to Hong Kong to Russia to France; the origins of the Classic Hollywood studio system and its evolution into its present-day incarnation; independent film; the genres that have shaped film; the relationship between literature and film; and many critical and theoretical approaches to film, such as psychoanalytic theories, gender-based approaches, considerations of race, postcolonial theories, realist theories, and the idea of the auteur.  Students write regular essays, attend weekly screenings, and engage in lively class discussions about the cinema.  When you graduate, you should have a much broader appreciation for the various histories, cultures, and ideas that have inflected the development of film as we know it today.

Before you read any further, you should print out the English Major Checklist for the Film Concentration, a pdf that can be accessed by clicking here.  It is crucial for your timely progress through our program that you complete the general education requirements as well as the other course requirements for earning an English Major with a film concentration.  Check with your advisor if you have any questions, or contact one of the film concentration faculty if you do not yet have an advisor or are considering switching majors.

These descriptions are for the required film courses for the film concentration but may also be of use to students from other majors who wish to take a film course while they are at Salisbury University.  For students taking these courses as electives, bear in mind that the upper-level courses in the English Department are challenging and require serious dedication to the course material, and the film courses are no exception.  That having been said, we welcome students of any major who have a genuine interest in learning more about the cinema.

Charlie Chaplin behind the camera

ENGL 220:  Introduction to Film.  4 hours credit.  In this course, you will learn the basic language of film, including terms like mise-en-scene and tracking shot; gain some basic knowledge about various histories and genres of film; and learn how to analyze a film in both the essay format as well as more informal in-class discussions.  Although not required, students new to film would benefit from taking this course first (particularly those in the concentration).  Prerequisite:  C or better in ENGL 102.  NOTE:  Cannot receive credit for both ENGL 121 and ENGL 220.

ENGL 402:  Film History.  4 hours credit.  What are the origins of the medium of film, and how has it developed into the contemporary cinema?  Students in this course will begin with the earliest examples of the medium and survey several of the major periods, including German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, Classical Hollywood, Italian Neorealism, and the French New Wave.  Although one course cannot hope to cover every development in cinema in the past century, students should leave this course with a larger sense of some of the major film periods and movements.  Prerequisite:  C or better in ENGL 102.  Four hours per week.  NOTE:  Cannot receive credit for both ENGL 321 and ENGL 402.

ENGL 403:  Film Genre.  4 hours credit.  Students in this course will study the concept of genre and explore several varieties, including comedy, musicals, westerns, and science fiction.  While this course is not historical per se, students will be encouraged to consider how films are constantly reshaping themselves as they respond to--and challenge--the demands of their particular genre.  Prerequisite:  C or better in ENGL 102.  Four hours per week. 

ENGL 404:  International Cinema.  4 hours credit.  To what extent does a narrative film represent its own culture, and how does it engage in representations perhaps different (perhaps not) than ones we are more familiar with?  Students in this course will study cinemas from Italy, Japan, New Zealand, and many other nations and cultures.  They should leave this course with a better appreciation of cinemas outside their native context.  Prerequisite:  C or better in ENGL 102.  Four hours per week. 

ENGL 405:  Major Film Directors.  4 hours credit.  What do directors do, and why, when speaking of a film, do we so often discuss its director as its main creative author (or to use the term more specific to film, auteur)?  What are the potential values--and the potential problems--of the idea of a film auteur?  This course explores some of the major ideas about film through many of the medium's most famous directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Agnes Varda, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee.  Prerequisite:  C or better in ENGL 102.  Four hours per week. 

ENGL 408:  Film Theory.  4 hours credit.  To borrow the title of Andre Bazin's famous study, What is the cinema?  How does it create meaning, and how have different bodies of theory been used to answer that question?  Students in this course will study a variety of different theoretical perspectives, including psychoanalysis, realism, auteurism, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, investigations of race, and postcolonial theories.  Prerequisite:  C or better in ENGL 102.  Four hours per week. 

ENGL 494/CMAT 490:  Film Noir.  3 hours credit.  The class is cross-listed as having English and Communications discussion sections. As well as exploring stylistic and thematic patterns associated with film noir, we will analyze how the genre has historically depicted issues of gender, race, and class. We will discuss the resonance of these representations in terms of American society and media industries. Much of the course will be devoted to examples of noir from the Classic Hollywood period (such as the Big Heat (1953)) before moving on to examples of neo-noir and revisionist noir (such as The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)). Students are required to develop a research paper and a brief class presentation. Students who enroll in a discussion section (of either CMAT 490 or ENGL 494) will automatically be enrolled in the film lecture/screening on Monday 7:00 - 9:45pm in Henson 243.

ENGL 401:  Studies in Documentary.  3 hours credit.  What does it mean for a film to be a documentary?   To what extent do documentaries objectively report, and to what extent do they passionately persuade?  While students in this course will learn some of the basic history, the approach will be primarily speculative and theoretical, as we learn how both filmmakers and viewers negotiate the difficult territory of representing reality.  (This course is not a production course, and though we welcome students with production background, you need not have it.)  Prerequisite:  C or better in ENGL 102.  Three hours per week. 

ENGL 221:  Literature and Film.  4 hours credit.   What are the processes by which a play, novel, or short story becomes a film?  How might we think about those processes in terms of how they reflect their mediums, their cultures, and their historical moments?  Students in this course will study film adaptations of Shakespeare, Victorian novels such as Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, and more recent work such as The Virgin Suicides and The Silence of the Lambs.  Prerequisite:  C or better in ENGL 102.  Two hours lecture, two hours screening per week.  Meets General Education IA.