Film

Vassar was one of the first liberal arts colleges to create a broad and substantive film major.

The Film Department is international in its screen studies scope, stressing a diverse canon ranging from silent films to television to online streaming content. The film major grounds our students in film history and theory and offers seminar courses in fiction and non-fiction production, as well as screenwriting for shorts or feature films. We specialize in integration: integrating film studies and filmmaking; teaching film and television; and offering interdisciplinary approaches to cinema’s wide-ranging cultural influence.

Events

Poster-style graphic for a project titled “Rescoring Richter,” with the word “RICHTER” running vertically on the left, “RESCORING” across the top, and the phrases “New Sonic Environments” and “For a Master of Avant Garde Film” centered between rows of black-and-white film stills showing abstract shapes, floating hats, a group of men, raised hands, concentric circles, two faces with superimposed circles over their eyes, and a frame reading “Un film de Hans Richter,” all framed by a thin red rectangular borde

Rescoring Richter

Rescoring Richter is a multimedia project pairing contemporary sound artists with Hans Richter’s 1920s avant-garde films to create new scores, documented through short films and live performances that reveal and reanimate his revolutionary cinematic imagery.

MODfest 2026

Student Work

More Student Work

News

Several individuals gather closely in a small room with plain white walls and a fluorescent ceiling light. Some are seated while others stand, holding or reviewing stacks of typed pages, with one person in the center crossing their arms and another writing on a pad near the doorway. Attentive expressions are visible throughout the group, with a mix of seated and leaning postures. A tall shelf filled with papers stands to the left, and a small framed portrait hangs on the back wall.

Women’s Work: Organizing New York Independent Film & Video

Women’s Work (Feb 24–May 24, 2026) celebrates the behind-the-scenes organizing labor that powered New York independent film and video collectives from the 1960s–1990s, featuring media clips and archival materials that show how activist media was made and shared outside the mainstream.