Episode 4
Ellen Scott
How Can We Expand “American Film History” Beyond Hollywood To account for the Voices And Movements Left Out?
Ellen and Jasmine met to discuss how Ellen approaches designing her "American Film History" course, a large undergraduate lecture class in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media. You can watch their interview below, or scroll down for the audio version and transcript.
“That course has so much potential to say so much about America and its film history, about the development of the discourse of the cinema in the United States, and the ways that different cultural groups picked up cinema at different moments and it became meaningful to them. So, that was part of the way that I entered into redesigning the course…really thinking through the film movements in the United States that competed in some ways with the film industry in terms of providing a different infrastructure and a different set of production practices for various groups to take up.”
— Professor Ellen Scott on her approach to structuring and teaching FTV6A
In 2015, Rutgers University Press published Dr. Scott’s first monograph. The following year, she was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).
Select courses taught:
FTV 6A — History of the American Motion Picture
FTV 206B — American Film Censorship
FTV 221 — Seminar: Film Authors
FTV 222 — Seminar: Film Genres
Other course titles have included: African Americans in Television and Film, Race and Ethnicity in American Media, and The Social Problem Film