A film studies minor will be added to Tufts' academic offerings next fall, after the faculty voted Monday to approve the new program. The minor, which will be housed under the Communications and Media Studies (CMS) program, was created in response to students' growing interest in film-related courses.
The structure of film studies will parallel the mass communications and media studies minor. Previously, film courses could be used to satisfy part of the communications minor, but the creation of a separate minor will increase emphasis on film by allowing students to focus their courses and senior projects on the subject.
"There has been a history of student interest in film in several departments over the years in a decentralized manner," film studies co-director Sudipto Chatterjee said. "This is all in response to student demand and what departments have been doing. It's kind of recognizing the truth that film studies is necessary on this campus."
Students pursuing the film studies minor will be required to take Introduction to Film Studies and four film-related courses from an approved list of classes in departments ranging from drama to Japanese to child development.
Film studies will be co-directed by Chatterjee, a drama and dance professor, and Hosea Hirata from the department of German, Russian, and Asian languages, both of whom have strong backgrounds in film. CMS faculty anticipate that, in the immediate future, there will be 15 to 20 seniors completing the minor.
In the five years since its conception, the CMS program has succeeded in bringing together several departments and creating a well-liked interdisciplinary minor. Mass communications and media studies has proved popular among students, and 50 seniors will complete the program this year. CMS faculty hope that the interdisciplinary film studies minor will yield the same success, as the program incorporates faculty _ all of whom were already teaching film-related courses _ from more than eight different departments.
Faculty members who led the effort to create film studies believe that implementing the new minor will not prove difficult since there is already a significant intellectual and practical overlap between the new program and CMS. "Already about a third of senior's projects were being done on film studies. It made sense because a lot of our faculty was already supervising those projects," Drama Professor Downing Cless said.
The new minor will guarantee diverse course offerings in a relatively new field of study, which administrators say will allow Tufts to maintain its rapport as a forward-looking institution. "As life becomes increasingly more visual, the way human relationships are understood and expressed changes," Dean of Colleges Charles Inouye said. "People of your generation have grown up in a very visual environment. I think a case could be made that good films are every bit as worthy of our attention as good novels or poetry or good history."
The number of students interested in becoming filmmakers and screenwriters has been on the rise for some time, according to CMS Director Paul Lopes. "It's what I like to call the Tarantino-syndrome," he said. "With the making of films like Pulp Fiction, young people feel more than ever that they can be involved in film. Although the workload of film courses can be more, they still have that appeal that you're reading a different kind of material."
Although discussions of a possible film minor began two years ago, supporters of the program decided to hold off because the university was in the process of creating the film-heavy International Letters and Visual Studies major. There were also no faculty members who had the expertise to teach an introductory class, until professor Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano recently became the first Tufts professor to have a PhD in film studies. Chatterjee has half of his PhD credits in film studies, but more faculty with expertise in film may need to be hired to support the program.
"Despite the changes that are occurring, Tufts doesn't really have a bona fide film studies expert yet," said Inouye. "One of the things that we're trying to do is hire more professors and upgrade [Wada-Marciano's] position to a tenure track position."
Despite the optimism surrounding the program, there are concerns that faculty will be overwhelmed by a large influx of students interested in film. "The hardest thing to address is the fact that as these interdisciplinary programs proliferate, the faculty's attention is drawn in many different directions at the same time. Unless we clone ourselves, we have to become more efficient and more organized." Inouye said.
The lack of studio equipment available to students studying film also poses a problem. In response, film studies minors will only be allowed to take one course in which they actually practice filmmaking or screenwriting.
"The goal is not to train filmmakers, but rather to develop a film consciousness in those who minor in the program so that they can take the next brave step to train themselves as filmmakers or for the study of film," said Chatterjee. " It's a promising start."
