The College Circuit: Experimental Film and the Rise of Film Studies

This dissertation examines the "academicization" of American avant-garde film during the late 1960s and 1970s, tracing how a generation of renegade, anti-institutional filmmakers were recruited into rapidly expanding university film programs. What does it mean that the founding faculty members of many influential film studies departments were oppositional avant-garde rebels, distrustful of mainstream representation and of the very institutions that hired them? What does it mean that the major figures of the North American film avant-garde, often seen as an obscurity in film history, had major roles in developing film studies as a discipline in higher education? While the limited existing scholarship on the period explores how academicization shaped experimental film, this project inverts the question to examine how the academicization of the avant-garde shaped film studies pedagogy, institutional structures, and the broader discipline of university media education, including in departments like Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature.