Donna Kornhaber, PhD

If there is one overarching goal to which I aspire in my teaching, it is to give my students a language with which to interpret the strategies of visual narrative that are foundational to modern filmmaking, a language that can serve them in their endeavors outside the classroom and beyond the university. Visual storytelling is omnipresent in my students’ lives, yet they typically have limited means to critically engage what they see every day. In teaching classes on film history or film theory, or on the interrelationship of film and literature or film and drama, I aim to equip my students with the formal vocabulary and interpretive tools necessary to break such images into their component parts and to examine the relationship between those parts. It is a substantial transformation that I ask of them: I want them to learn to stop watching films and instead to start reading them.