The program is vigorous and comprehensive and is designed for highly motivated individuals who prefer a more independent, individualized program of study. Students should have a potential for self-motivated undergraduate study within the environment of a graduate film school.
Curriculum goals must include breadth of experience, depth in the selected area of concentration, and superior achievement demonstrated by tutorials, coursework and the thesis. Two primary tutorial programs are available: film production and film studies.
Program Overview
There are five elements to the tutorial program in Film:
Tutorials
Eight individual tutorials on topics in Film Studies and Film Production are required. Possible tutorial topics in Film Production include all aspects of film and video pre-production and post-production, screenwriting, producing, directing, and special topics in film/video production. Possible tutorial topics in Film Studies include: film theory, criticism, history (including history of experimental, documentary, and narrative film and video), historiography, film and society, research methods, and international cinemas.
Liberal Arts education
The nature of the film medium requires a broad background in liberal arts and a multidisciplinary approach to learning. Students are expected to select 12 credit hours of elective courses in history, English, media arts and studies, comparative arts, foreign languages, and other disciplines.
Production and scholarship courses in film
Breadth of understanding can often best be achieved through practical courses in film and video production and courses in film scholarship. Because film is a collaborative art, tutorial students will join with other students in appropriate courses.
Minor area of specialization
The student will plan a cognate minor consisting of three courses outside the Film Division. These courses will be chosen according to the individual plan developed by the students with the Director of Studies. Students wishing, for example, to enter careers in producing or arts administration might complete a cognate minor in management, accounting, or business.
Thesis
Each HTC Film student is required to complete a thesis, which may take the form of a completed film, or feature-length screenplay. Students completing a creative project will also to be asked to write an accompanying scholarly paper as part of their thesis.
The topic and scope of the thesis is approved by the Director of Studies and the Thesis Advisor no later than the beginning of Fall Semester in the student's senior year.
The Director of Studies assigns tutors in accordance with the student's interests and, in consultation with the student, develops an individual plan of study leading to the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film.
Eligibility
Admission requirements include submission of a portfolio of recent creative work and a recent substantive writing sample. (Creative writing projects fall into this category.)
The deadline to apply for admission is November 15th. Please submit all artwork on labeled DVD or video tape; the school cannot accept original artwork.
Director of Studies
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf
Associate Professor of Film Studies
(740) 593-1323
schlumpf@ohio.edu
Education
M.A./Ph.D., Comparative Literature (Film Studies Minor), Harvard University
B.A., Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College
About
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Ohio University. Her research deals with the impact of historical forces on artistic forms and offers in particular a feminist reappraisal of how historical trauma and globalization influence affective form in transnational film and literature. Her book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma (SUNY, 2025), examines literature and cinema from Post-Occupation France and Post-Tiananmen Square China to argue that strategies of feminist refusal can be found in the ways that these texts enact a series of affective response to the historical and social erasure of traumatic history: melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion. Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf's courses examine how image and text interrogate national, racial, gendered, and sexual identity politics. She has previously held teaching positions at Seattle University, Simon Fraser University, and Harvard University.