Graduate students at University of Pittsburgh expressed the desire for an on-campus context to help build the film community at Pitt and to explore as well as "explode" the film canon also creating a forum to share ideas, interests and ongoing work. Department of English graduate students Alison Patterson, Kathleen Murray, Amanda Klein, and Nathan Koob accepted the challenge to create such a forum, now known as the Cinematheque.

The mission statement for the Cinematheque is as follows: "In organizing the Cinematheque, we wish to provide graduate students studying film a regular forum for watching and discussing films together and to provide a larger context for undergraduates and graduate students in other departments to understand the goals and interests of film studies." Co-founder Ali Patterson has this to say about the Cinematheque's relationship to the canon "Through the Cinematheque, we hope to widen our base of film knowledge and to question assumptions about the inevitability of a canon. By pairing short films with feature length films, the Cinematheque can offer films that will challenge each other and trouble the notion that a single film, or a mode of production, can stand for a genre, a movement, an era, or a national cinema. We are also able to screen film texts that are unlikely to be screened somewhere else, as well as frequently screened films in unlikely and intriguing combinations.”

In the first semester of Cinematheque coordinators experimented on a format even as the program attracted a broad range of students. The Cinematheque now boasts attendees from the English PhD, MA, and MFA programs, as well as undergraduate students, faculty and students/faculty from other departments. 

The 2006 spring semester brought exciting changes to Cinematheque, including moving the screenings to Friday nights and the institution of the standard format of a short film preceding a feature length film. That semester also boasted the Cinematheque’s first overarching theme, the "Cine-city." The new theme for this semester is “Cine-masculinity,” and we have already lined up a number of graduate and undergraduate respondents to present their insights into this theme. 

If you have any interest in attending or presenting at Cinematheque please email the team at:

pittcinematheque@gmail.com

The team is particularly interested in recruiting speakers, attendees, and coordinating team members among film students from departments not yet represented in the Cinematheque.