“Ukraine, 1932. Welcome to the village. The men are gone. The fields are burnt.” In Abbey Fenbert’s Sickle, only the women remain in the countryside after Stalin’s campaign to “destroy the body and soul of the Ukrainian people.” It is, the play’s promotional material proclaims, a “reminder that the past is our future.” In January 2014, playwright Fenbert (top, center) read through Sickle with the cast and crew, including College of Fine Arts students (inset, from left) Kaela Shaw (CFA’15), Abby Knipp (CFA’17), and Maria Timonina (CAS’14, CFA’15), ahead of its first night performance.
The production was part of the yearlong @Play Festival of New Work, which showcased the thesis plays of the inaugural MFA in Playwriting class, of which Fenbert (GRS’15) was a member. The master’s program, which debuted in 2012, includes literature and writing workshops and close collaboration with students at CFA. All the thesis plays were produced with the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.
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He has five Oscars and a filmography that boasts classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, but director Francis Ford Coppola once told an interviewer “you never stop learning.”
Welcome news perhaps to those just starting to learn about film in the CAS and BU College of Communication new joint major, Cinema & Media Studies. The interdisciplinary program will teach undergraduates the history and theory of the moving image, says codirector Leland Monk, and will prepare them for fields such as screenwriting, arts journalism, and entertainment law.
Monk, an associate professor of English, has been giving film a scholarly spin for years—one course tackles Shakespeare on the silver screen. Others at CAS have been doing the same, he says, but it’s all been happening piecemeal. The new major, launched in fall 2014, brings all those film-related offerings together, engaging faculty from disciplines as diverse as classics, foreign languages, and philosophy.
It also means that CAS students can stay put. Until now, those interested in the academic study of film had to transfer into the professional program at COM, Monk says. The joint major, he hopes, will allow students to examine film while continuing to flex those “liberal arts skills that CAS instills in people.”