The Film and Media Studies concentration at Kalamazoo College offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts approach to the study of film. We approach film as a creative, scholarly, and international art form. We seek to engage critically with aesthetics, history, reception, race, gender, and class in production and consumption as well as issues of ethics, politics and economics. We explore mainstream as well as oppositional forms and are investigators of representation in the broadest sense: visual, aural, and verbal. We ask how representations are used, what they communicate, and how they are constructed aesthetically and ideologically. Moreover, we examine how audiences or subjects are installed or positioned within the phenomena they view, often in ways that remain hidden to the unschooled eye.

These broad intellectual issues prepare concentrators for a job market or post-graduate study in which sharp analytical thinking and writing skills are key. Our concentrators have had internships with film and video production companies and have gone on to work in these fields, and they have attended prestigious graduate programs in film studies and in filmmaking.