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Film Culture at VU

The Film Studies Program is committed to nurturing a film and media culture in Nashville, and particularly on the Vanderbilt campus. "Film culture" means a fabric of events and shared knowledge, appreciation, and analytical interest in film as an art form, as an element of global mass culture, and as a mode of expressing attitudes, ideas, and opinions about histories both global and local.

By taking Film Studies courses, attending films at Sarratt and in other campus venues (such as course screenings and a film discussion club) and gaining a vocabulary for analyzing film's cultural and aesthetic meanings, students will ideally take "film studies" out of the classroom and transform its tenets into a form of cultural and media literacy that makes new conversations, new friendships, and new fields possible for individual students and the student body of Vanderbilt as a whole.

As the Committee plans its Major Programs and considers the construction of a Graduate Certificate in Film and Media Studies, both undergraduate and graduate students are invited and encouraged to contact Committee members with ideas about how to cultivate such a culture on campus, and welcome volunteers to aid in planning special screenings and other film culture events.

The longstanding bastion of film culture on the Vanderbilt campus is the Sarratt Cinema, a student committee dedicated to bringing films of all kinds--new and old, domestic and "foreign," narrative and experimental, entertaining and challenging--to an international campus with wildly divergent interests.

Students, faculty, and staff should also be aware of the presence of a truly great arthouse cinema near campus. The Belcourt Theatre plays films that no other cinema in Nashville plays: the tiny independent feature, the "difficult" foreign film, the "art" movie, and so on. Housed in one of Nashville's oldest auditoriums (and the former site of the Grand Olde Opry), the Belcourt Cinema lives up to its reputation as the most fiercely independent movie house in town.

For more information, please contact Paul Young.