Courtesy of Phoebe Marin

Phoebe Marin ’26 discovered her love for cinema during her first year at Bowdoin.

“I came to Bowdoin intending to do a biology major.… I realized my first year that that was not what I wanted to do whatsoever,” Marin said. “I took my first cinema studies class in the spring of my first year to meet my [Visual and Performing Arts] requirement, and I fell in love with it.”

Taught by Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema Studies Professor Allison Cooper, the course included a portion on video essays. For Marin, the class showed her how video essays could be created and studied at an academic level beyond what she was already familiar with.

“I think often [about] the YouTube video essay where it’s some guy talking about something for five hours,” Marin said. “Technically, it’s called the videographic essay. It takes a film, and it asks you to make a visual argument through editing and using clips from film to make that argument. So that was kind of my first foray into creating something.”

Additionally, Cooper helped Marin get involved with Bowdoin’s Kinolab, a curated repository of film clips that are used for film research.

“I’ve been the head student curator for a year and a half now,” Marin said. “I would watch a movie each week, and then I would sit down, and I’d be like, ‘Okay, what were distinctive moments in this film that I think are important or that have something really interesting happening in them?’ I would cut them out of the film, upload them to our database and then I would tag them with the film language terms that I thought were applicable.”

Kinolab has helped Marin bring her work from the classroom into a real-life setting.

“It’s helped me kind of really get a good grip on close analysis in film and my cinema studies classes. I think it used to be a lot harder for me to closely analyze a film and get all the different terms about what’s happening in a scene,” she said. “And now it’s something that I can do really easily. And I think, [Kinolab] also allowed me to study a wide range of film and a wide range of different parts of cinema studies.”

Marin appreciates the depth of the world of cinema, something she hadn’t considered before Bowdoin. Her experience at the College continues to transform her relationship to the disciple.

“I literally never thought about studying it. I was always like: ‘I’m sure people do this for a living, but it was [as] the average film critic who reviews new popular movies,’” Marin said. “When I took my first cinema studies class I was like, ‘Oh, there’s so much more to it than I ever thought or that I ever realized growing up.’ Each class that I took in cinema studies kept reshaping how I thought about the films I watched and the media I engaged with.”

One course focusing on Italian films in particular, changed Marin’s perspective on the opportunities of cinema for societal commentary.

“We looked at Italian films from 1940 through 2019, 2020. We were thinking about how these films reflected distinct moments in history and how they commented on them and how they critiqued the regime or the government, or how they were saying something about sexuality or gender in Italy at the time,” Marin said.

Throughout the course, Marin was impressed by how film could be used as a tool for social critique.

“I don’t think I’d ever really understood that film could do that.  [That film could] consciously critique or comment on society, the government, until I took the class,” she said. “I think it’s something that you subconsciously understand, but I don’t think it’s something that you consciously think about until you are shown that it’s possible.”

As she looks ahead, Marin is interested in learning more about the intersection between film and video games and wants more people to be educated about the media they engage with.

“Outside of course work and outside of Kinolab, [I have specialized in] examining video games. Narrative and video games [is] something that’s really novel [in] media studies, so that’s something that I want to contribute to and grow,” she said. “But more than that, I also just want other people to think about film in a similar way, or the media they watch in general—whether that’s YouTube or video games, movies, whatever—just  to consciously think about how they situate themselves into our culture.”

Marin’s professors have helped her feel comfortable and valued in the classroom during her time at Bowdoin. Inspired by them, she looks forward to being able to contribute to academia in her own way.

“I’m applying [to graduate school] this semester.…  The idea is a [doctorate] one day, becoming a professor and continuing the legacy of my professors before me,” Marin said.