ABSTRACT
Teaching nontheatrical film and useful media poses a number of challenges for instructors and students alike. Because these subjects lie at the limits of conventional disciplinary historiographies-organized around aesthetics, artistic movements, entertainment industries, national cinemas, etc.- they receive little attention in most introductory film and media textbooks. [...]while many nontheatrical films have become easier to access online, their availability remains decentralized and often outside of traditional (state/government) institutions. By illustrating how she incorporates these overlooked film histories into her survey course "International Cinema to I960," Goldman effectively demonstrates how doing so can complicate histories of documentary film, contextualize national cinemas and film movements within broader histories, and reveal the ways in which film was enmeshed in colonial discourses and imperial power. [...]she shows how paying attention to amateur and student films enables one to diversify what often amounts to a "greatest hits" survey of feature films, addressing the marginalization of specific groups within the commercial film industry as well as the film canon. Tayara, a film studies undergraduate at Seattle University and a student in SchultzFigueroa's course "Film 8c Science," applied film-studies concepts in the development of a virtual reality tool for analyzing the possible habitability of distant planets while working for VR Ulysses, a software startup founded within the Astrobiology Program of the University of Washington.