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Film & Cinema Studies · Encyclopedia

Film and cinema studies as an applied-and-academic discipline covers the systematic study of cinema as art form, industry, cultural-and-political force, and historical-aesthetic tradition. The discipline operates institutionally through dedicated film-studies departments at universities, professional film-school conservatoires, and the substantial film-criticism-and-journalism ecosystem. Film studies as an academic field consolidated through the 1960s-1970s with the substantial post-1968 emergence of theoretical film-studies through Christian Metz's semiotic film-theory, the British Screen-and-Cinema-Action Group through Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), the substantial post-1970s feminist-and-postcolonial-film-theory tradition.\n\nThe global film-studies institutional landscape includes both academic and professional-conservatoire institutions. In the US: NYU Tisch School of the Arts (Department of Cinema Studies, the principal US film-studies graduate institution; the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television and the broader Tisch graduate-and-undergraduate programs), USC School of Cinematic Arts (the largest US film school, founded 1929), UCLA School of Theater Film and Television, the AFI American Film Institute, the Columbia University School of the Arts Film Program, the substantial Yale-and-Harvard film-studies departments. In the UK: NFTS National Film and Television School (the principal UK film-school), the LFS London Film School, plus the substantial UK academic film-studies departments at Westminster, Goldsmiths, Sussex, UEA, Reading, Warwick. In Continental Europe: La Fémis Paris (the principal French film-school, founded 1986 replacing IDHEC), the Polish FAMU Prague, the Russian VGIK (the world's oldest film-school, founded 1919), the German Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, the Italian Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.\n\nIndia's film-studies-and-film-school infrastructure has structural distinctness. The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII Pune, founded 1960, the principal Indian film-school under Ministry of Information and Broadcasting), the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute Calcutta (founded 1995), the Whistling Woods International Mumbai (the post-2006 Subhash Ghai-founded private film-school), the substantial Indian-private film-school ecosystem. The substantial Indian-cinema industry — Bollywood Hindi-language cinema producing 1,500+ films annually plus the major regional-language industries (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri) collectively producing 700-1,000+ regional-language films annually — gives India the world's largest single-national film industry by absolute output volume. The post-2018 substantial expansion of Indian streaming-platform content (Netflix India, Amazon Prime Video India, Disney+ Hotstar, Sony LIV, ZEE5) has driven substantial Indian film-and-TV professional employment. Indian-origin filmmakers with substantial international recognition: Satyajit Ray (Honorary Academy Award 1992), Mira Nair, Shekhar Kapur, Deepa Mehta, Mira Patel, plus the post-2010 substantial Indian-origin contemporary cinema filmmakers (Anurag Kashyap, Vetri Maaran, Lijo Jose Pellissery, Ritesh Batra).\n\nThe applied film professional practice covers production-side roles (directing, cinematography, editing, screenwriting, production design, sound design, visual effects, music composition), distribution-side roles (festival programming, distribution executive, exhibitor management), criticism-and-journalism, academic film-studies-faculty positions, the substantial film-curatorial-and-archive work at film-archives institutions globally (the Cinémathèque française, the BFI National Archive, the substantial UCLA Film & Television Archive, the National Film Archive of India NFAI Pune).\n\nFor a globally-mobile film professional, the international-festival-and-coproduction circuit (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Sundance, Tribeca) provides substantial cross-border-collaboration infrastructure. The post-2018 streaming-era global-content expansion has substantially reshaped film-industry economics.\n\nCross-references: film studies intersects with academy-arts-design, academy-media-communication, human-root-photography, human-root-theatre, lifestyle-culture, plus the broader entertainment-industry ecosystem.