Film Studies offers students the best of both worlds: our small department within a major research university provides our students with close mentoring and an individually tailored course of study. Our department's mission is media literacy, the ability to think critically about the ways in which images and sounds create ideas. We train undergraduate and graduate students to be discerning viewers and thinkers about the most influential cultural forms of the 20th and 21st centuries, by grounding them in a thorough knowledge of American and international film history, the practices of film and television criticism, film and media theory. We also provide interested students with training in screenwriting and filmmaking.