Did you go to college at the movies?
CINEMA U: Representations of Higher Education in Popular Film
Edited by Randy Laist & Kip Kline
Movies about college have been a staple of American cinema since the silent era. Films like Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925) and Buster Keaton’s College (1927) engaged popular ideas about the culture of campus life as it evolved throughout the 1920s, while also setting precedents for future cinematic representations of the college experience. Benchmark college movies such as The Paper Chase (1973), Animal House (1978), and Higher Learning (1995) provide insight into the ways that college has been variously imagined as a middle class rite of passage, a landscape of hedonistic fantasy, a microcosm of societal hypocrisy, a repressive system of deindividuation, and a carnivalesque holiday from “real life.” Even the most juvenile examples of the college movie genre reveal ideological assumptions and communicate influential messages about the role of knowledge, learning, and intellectualism in society.
This unique volume examines the representation of college and campus life in movies, with particular focus on scholarship that examines the relationship between cinematic portrayals of campus life and the lived experience of real college students. Chapters discuss the extent to which movies about college inform the expectations, perceptions, and attitudes of students, faculty, and the public. Cinema U: Representations of Higher Education in Popular Film includes close analysis of individual films as well as broader examinations of the manner in which college films have addressed issues such as race, class, gender, technology, sexuality, and cultural difference.
Featuring
“A Distorted Trick Mirror: The 1920s Collegiate Film and Critical Participatory Spectatorship” by Christina Petersen
“It’s Really About America: Representations of University Humanities and Youth in Selected Films of Noah Baumbach” by Michael Bulfin
“The Female Body as Prop: Dismemberment and Objectification of Women in College Movie Promotional Stills” by Katherine Kalagher
“Suspicious, Petty, Jealous: Stereotyping Young Women’s Friendships in College” by Ingrid E. Castro
“Does This Community College Make Me Look Stupid?: Representations of Two-Year Colleges in Film” by Natalia Cherjovsky
“Ivory Tower Misfits: The Images of College Professors in Hollywood Films” by Robert L. Dahlgren
“Monstrous Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Monsters University as Neoliberal Dystopia” by Gabriel Thomas Keehn
“Beating Critics to the Punch: Support for Student-Directed Education in the Film Accepted” by Kristan Morrison
“Rituals of the Academy in Educating Rita” by John A. Beineke
“Racism, Nazism, Sexism: Entering the University Campus of Higher Learning” by Tatiana Prorokova
“Reading ‘Dap’ and ‘Big Brother Almighty’: Black Male Collegians’ Agentive Educational Experiences in Spike Lee’s School Daze” by Heather C. Moore Roberson
“30 Years of School Daze: Spike Lee’s Challenge and Rememory of the Anachronistic Black College as a Controlling Image and a Cinematic Encounter” by Hilton Kelly
“Queer Males in College Movies: Moving from Denial to Acceptance” by Kylo-Patrick R. Hart
Listen In
In the first half of a two-part interview, Adam Chamberlain interviews author, editor, and educator Dr. Randy Laist about his career, his influences, and his approach to his craft. Considering the role of the college movie in shaping our understanding of knowledge and learning, the pair discuss Cinema U: Representations of Higher Education in Popular Film, available now.
“Taken together, the perspectives presented in this section of the book exemplify the manner in which diversity of opinion and perspective challenges us to think harder, to feel more deeply, and to see other people and ourselves more clearly. Certainly, these simple aspirations constitute the highest kind of learning, and they define the criteria according to which the success of a college education should be assessed.”