What Is Film History?
Film History is the study of cinema as a dynamic cultural, technological, industrial, and artistic form across time. To study Film History is to understand how moving images emerge, evolve, and circulate within changing social, political, and economic conditions. Students in this specialization examine how film technologies develop; how studios, national industries, and alternative production models rise and decline; how aesthetic styles transform; and how audiences, archival practices, and exhibition contexts shape what cinema becomes. Historical study is therefore not simply chronological—it is material, reception-based, institutional, ideological, and global.
Film History at UMass
UMass Film Studies offers exceptional opportunities for advanced undergraduate study in Film History. Drawing on the expertise of faculty across the College of Humanities and Fine Arts students learn to situate films within the broader cultural forces that shaped their production and reception. Majors engage deeply with multiple periods of film history, from early cinema technologies to classical Hollywood, postwar European art cinema, global New Waves, experimental film, and documentary traditions.
Students pursuing the specialization develop broad historical literacy while also crafting an individualized pathway through one or more periods of interest. Because Film History cannot be studied solely through secondary accounts, all students engage directly with historical sources—films, archives, trade journals, criticism, ephemera—and are encouraged to explore research opportunities, special collections, local film institutions, and digital archives housed at UMass. This hands-on, research-driven approach ensures that students graduate not only with knowledge but with historical method.
Why a Letter of Specialization in Film History?
The Specialization in Film History recognizes Film Studies majors who have cultivated advanced expertise in the historical, cultural, and technological evolution of cinema. Students who complete this pathway gain the critical, archival, and analytical skills that graduate programs, museums, archives, arts organizations, and media industries increasingly value. Whether pursuing futures in film preservation, programming, education, criticism, museum curation, festival research, archival management, or graduate studies in film and media, recipients of this specialization demonstrate the historical fluency, methodological rigor, and cultural insight necessary to understand—and help shape—the moving-image landscape.
Requirements
Students earn a Letter of Specialization by completing 4 courses, selected in consultation with the Specialization's Advisors:
A minimum of 4 courses with a minimum grade of 'C', chosen from this list: Courses offered under this specialization include:
FILM-ST 290V Visionary Screens of the 1920s
FILM-ST 337 Int History of Animation
FILM-ST 351 Classical Hollywood Cinema
FILM-ST 373 Weimar Cinema: Experimentation and Entertainment
FILM-ST 550 Arthouse Cinema
FILM-ST 258 Latinx Hollywood: Early Cinema in Spanish
FILM-ST 412 Advanced 16mm Filmmaking
A 300 or higher level course that directly engages with film history can count as a substitute. Students will need to get approval for such substitutions by a the specialization's advisor, Professor Barry Spence ([email protected])