The history of film in Chicago dates back to the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, when on the grounds of the Midway Plaisance - within sight of the newly established University of Chicago - visitors saw their first moving images. Motion pictures have been an intellectual and cultural concern at the University ever since - from the Chicago School sociologists and psychologists who studied the effects of movie-going on children, to the decades of students who have made Doc Films the oldest and most amibitious student-run film society in the country. Recently, film and visual media have assumed even more prominence at the University through the groundbreaking scholarship of faculty in cinema and visual culture and the establishment of the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies.

The Committee on Cinema and Media Studies is dedicated to pursuing innovative work in the history, theory, and criticism of film and related media, with additional strengths in video production and performance studies. While the program centers around the medium of film, the cinema is understood as the point of entry for a whole new culture of moving images and sounds that includes television, video, and digital media, just as it considers earlier practices such as the magic lantern, photography, and sound recording. We emphasize both historical and aesthetic dimensions of film and cinema, with the aesthetic broadly understood as referring not only to particular modes of expression, representation, and style but also, more generally to forms of cinema experience and film culture. We offer courses primarily in U.S. American, the major European, Russian, and East Asian cinemas. Drawing on the University's longstanding tradition in cross-disciplinary scholarship and strong programs in area studies, our research and teaching approaches national cinemas from inter- and transnational perspectives.

Our areas of critical investigation and archival research are wide-ranging. We have particular strengths in the following:

Early Cinema - theory and history; intermedia contexts; modernism and modernity

Film Theory - classical and contemporary; technology and aesthetics; sound; theories of mass and media culture; theories of spectatorship, reception, and the public sphere

New Media - intersections between earlier and current waves of technological innovation; interactive methods of scholarship and teaching

Photography - history, theory, practice

Experimental and Avant-garde Film and Video - history, theory, practice

African-American Cinema and Film Culture - Race film era to contemporary; print media and photography

Subcultural Media Practices - feminist and queer history and theory

Performance and Performance Theory - cinema, theater, opera; acting styles