A student looking through a professional video camera on Tappan Square.

Program Overview

Cinema and Media

Explore the art of cinematic storytelling.

Photo credit: Rian Brown-Orso

Film School or Liberal Arts College? Why Not Both?

One of the first programs of its kind at a liberal arts college, the Cinema and Media Department introduces students to the craft, history, and cultural meaning of film, television, and digital media. Students work with faculty mentors and with their peers to make nonfiction, animation, experimental, and live-action fiction films of professional quality, many of which have screened at leading festivals. They also study the history and theory of cinema within a campus community that prizes public engagement with pressing questions of history and contemporary culture. Integrating the creative and critical study of media, Cinema and Media offers our majors the technical training to make first-rate films and the intellectual formation to understand why they matter.

A Film Studio as Your Classroom

The Cinema and Media Department resides above the Apollo Theatre in the Danny DeVito & Rhea Perlman Center for Media Education and Production. With fully equipped sound stages, green screens, animation rooms, editing suites, and classrooms, the Apollo Film Labs is the creative and social hub for our majors. Housed in a state-of-the-art complex within an intimate liberal arts setting, the Cinema and Media Department has helped launch the careers of alumni now working for media organizations including HBO, CNN, PBS, Sony, Bad Robot, and Topple. With the close support of faculty mentors, Oberlin’s film majors build the collaborative relationships that sustain their careers as writers, directors, producers, animators, teachers, and journalists.

Cinema and Media students have screened their films in more than 40 international film festivals over the past 5 years

A Legacy of Filmmaking

Oberlin College alumni—bright, globally minded, innovative, and creatively talented—have a long history as leaders in all aspects of show business, arts, and entertainment. As part of the Arts and Creative Professions career community, the Obiewood Oberlin Entertainment Network launches students into these competitive fields.

Learn more about Obiewood

Students lined up for a photo outside Sony Pictures Studios.

Each year Oberlin-based StoryLens Pictures sponsors a cohort of documentary fellows to create short independent nonfiction films about pressing and locally relevant issues

Meet the young documentary filmmakers working for StoryLens

Where Creative Partnerships Start

Have a conservatory student score your film. Cast actors from theater or dance. Collaborate with students from studio art and creative writing. Pursuing the arts at Oberlin means achieving your best work by crossing disciplinary and technological frontiers.

Explore the Apollo Film Labs

CIME 282

Hollywood Narrative & Genre

This course explores the art, craft, business, and ideology of popular screen narratives from Hollywood’s classical period to the present. Topics to be discussed include narrative structure, storyworld, perspective, temporality, agency and emotion. Our discussions will connect significant films to both practical and philosophical texts, with an emphasis on the mechanics of story and the social ritual of genre. Finally, we will consider the challenge presented to traditional film narrative by the rise of on-demand streaming services and interactive entertainment.

Taught by: Joshua Sperling

CIME 313

Animation

This hands-on course introduces students to the history and practice of animation, an ever-present element in the visual language of news, education, science and media storytelling. As a starting point, we work closely with Oberlin’s Media Archeology Collection to study examples of early sequential art technology, optical toys and magic lanterns. Students then learn a variety of approaches to create their own animations, from hand drawn/painted cell animation, claymation, and collage to the growing toolkit professionally used for digital image manipulation.

Taught by: Rian Brown-Orso

CIME 320

Documentary Filmmaking Workshop

This course explores both critical and creative perspectives on documentaries (in terms of structure, purpose, audience) and then gives students the opportunity to practice basic documentary production (camera, lighting, sound, non-linear editing) and to learn nonfiction storytelling. After completing various individual and small group exercises, students spend the balance of the semester working together to produce festival-quality short documentary films.

Taught by: Geoff Pingree

CIME 360

Strange Cinema

This course explores the effect of strangeness in movies. What are the ways in which this effect is created? To what uses do filmmakers put the experience of strangeness? What baseline of familiar do we use to judge strange movies? We will explore strangeness as both a poetics and an aesthetic, and its relation to effects such as the uncanny, the fantastic, the marvelous, and the wonderful.

Taught by: William Patrick Day ’71

Tribeca Film Fellow

From a young age, Emily Cohn ’17 has been making films. At Oberlin, she honed her filmmaking skills by integrating her diverse experiences in creative writing, internships, and at the Prague Film School. Her first film, CRSHD, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.

Learn more about Emily’s trajectory

Moving Beyond Colorblind Casting

As an Oberlin College Research Fellow, Miyah Byers ’20, a cinema studies major, investigated how directors are developing unique methodologies that move beyond colorblind casting and use race in theater productions as a point of inspiration.

Learn more about Miyah’s research

Creating Stories for a Global Community

Olive Nwosu ’13 discovered her creative passion in cinema studies and is now completing an MFA in Screenwriting at Columbia, where she’s a BAFTA Scholar, an Alex Sichel Fellow at Columbia University School of the Arts, and one of four African Promises directors in the Institut Français’ Africa-2020 Programme.

Learn more about Olive’s creative pathway