Jane Gaines

She's one of the most knowledgable prof at Columbia who will stimulate you intellectually and willing to spend time in office hour and encourage your own original thinking. She is very down to earth and a true academic, unlike those who's more in the industry. Yes she could be sometimes a bit unexpected with her comments on China, etc. But as other comments mentioned she is one of the key reason why there are so many Chinese film and media students at Columbia and she's trying to bridge Chinese film studies and Western scholarship together. Also she's just trying to make students engaged with all the interesting power point choices. Yes her questions could be confusing but if you actually read them carefully they make tons of sense and way more interesting than some of other professors' prompts.

Jane Gaines is a pretty horrible teacher. I remain confused as to how she has acquired and retained her position here. She is persistently fixated on China and singles out Asian students to ask about Chinese culture (including asking an Asian student from San Francisco what films from Hong Kong are like). She swerves in and out of coherence in her lectures, constantly interrupts her students after asking them a question, and is frequently disrespectful and dismissive even when she invites students into a discussion. She is prone to contradicting herself and doubling down on her mistakes. My TA, however, was wonderful and put a lot of effort into decoding what exactly Gaines was trying to say in lecture. I took this class with Gaines because I was unsure if I’d be able to take it in the spring with another professor. I recommend deferring if you can, because the subject matter and films are interesting, but any positive takeaways you will have will be despite the best efforts of Professor Gaines.

Jane Gaines is possibly the worst professor or educator of any kind I have ever had the complete misfortune of taking a class with. She is not a good teacher; her exam questions are wordy and usually riddled with genuinely astonishing grammatical errors, which make them near impossible to understand. She has opinions about movies, which are usually grounded in solely her own personal feelings and rarely give a nuanced understanding of a film. Furthermore, and honestly, most importantly, she is horribly racist. She has a preoccupation with China that often derails the class and makes everyone extremely uncomfortable. She calls on any student who could even possibly be of Asian descent (of any kind) and asks them about China. She also makes racially motivated comments about Chinese people. She is rude to all students and cannot let a student speak without rudely interrupting by yelling and taunting them as soon as they say something she doesn't completely agree with. Her overall demeanor is simply insufferable, and I hope to never speak to her again. This class felt like a social experiment. I would rather take this course over the summer than take it with her again.

As a film major, I assumed taking introduction to film studies would be a great, easy class. Taking this class with Professor Gaines completely ruined the course for me. Every aspect of her course is incredibly disorganized and incomprehensible. Her powerpoint slides are illegible, her lectures never have a main point and are always scattered that I lose track of what she's saying within the first 5 minutes. I believe she means well and knows so much about film but is unable to teach it in a comprehensible way. She also makes incredibly racist comments in every class meeting and puts every students in an uncomfortable and inappropriate position. Her assignments seem like they should be easy, but neither she nor the TA's are able to actually explain what we are supposed to do, which ends up hurting everyone and leaving the students in the dark about what work we are supposed to be doing. A huge disappointment. Do not take a class with this professor.

Jane Gaines is an interesting and somewhat bizarre character. Half of the time, what she's talking about is so complicated and convoluted that it seems like even she has no clue what she's trying to say, but she definitely knows how to start a stimulating conversation and get you thinking about the way film works. She coins about a dozen new terms or phrases each class using her little "handwriting" stylus thing to write on her powerpoints, but you don't really need to know a lot of what she talks about and luckily the TA's grade everything and sometimes even they don't really understand the assignment. The one thing I couldn't stand was that she was often rude to the projectionists, who, admittedly, sometimes were not paying close attention, but there's no excuse to treat them like idiots. I felt bad for the TA's, who were often criticized by Jane, sorry, "Dr. Gaines", as they were supposed to call her. Basically, take this class if you really want to change the way you think about documentary or want to make them. If you're not too serious and you're just looking for an easy film class, it might just be confusing and stressful.

While I did enjoy the class and have done quite well so far, it was extremely intense and challenging. I recommend it to people who want to push their boundaries of thinking, but not for someone who wants a fun side class. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2024 Course: FILMGR5700_001_2024_3-CINEMA/MEDIAHISTORIOGRAPHY : FILMGR5700_001_2024_3 - CINEMA/MEDIA HISTORIOGRAPHY Instructor: Jane Gaines

Okay, the reviews on this site are ridiculous and slanted toward individuals' negative viewpoints. So, let me balance this out with fairness, as someone who's taken undergraduate and graduate-level courses with her. Jane Gaines is a unique professor with unorthodox methods. I'm not going to pretend that she's for everyone, but for people like me who adjust to her style, I've learned more from her than anyone in the film department. Professor Gaines is a film studies savant and can cite authors, texts, and history like a walking encyclopedia. If you sit down and have office hours with her, you'll see what I mean. It's easy to forget that when she presents herself with such an eccentric lecture style, where she's conversational with students, improvises, and says weird things to get laughs out of people. With that, let me address the elephant in the room: yes, she has an interesting fascination with Chinese culture. For clarification, since I gather no one on this site understands this, Gaines does much work in China and often travels there for conferences. She's built a strong connection with Chinese students, which is why many of them join the graduate program to work closely with her. Her constant references to Chinese students, their culture, and Mandarin language are one of those things you either get, or you don't; but once you're in on the joke, she's genuinely hilarious.…

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS! Unless you enjoy spending four hours, once a week, hearing one ignorant and racist comment after another avoid taking this class at all cost. Not only has she proven incredibly ignorant in a number of situations, the actual lectures are convoluted and confusing at best, at worst she makes up her own terms for things and seems to even confuse herself, often changing what she's saying in the middle of a sentence and rambling on about irrelevant things that not even the TAs seem to comprehend. She often neglects to speak in proper, coherent sentences. I learned more from the TA lead discussion sections than from the actual lecture. The essays are all graded by the TAs so it really depends on who you get.

Jane Gaines is certainly one of the more insane teachers in the film department (she's visiting from Duke—though unknown for how long), but her lectures were the best out of any professor in the department I've had so far. She's willing to go there and in terms of being frank about sex and what not. And she was always making off-hand ridiculous comments, which were always gold. She chose an extremely curious line-up of films looking at the studio history, sometimes which felt really didn't fit with the point of her lectures though. They were often great films though. But while Gaines was a fun lecturer, her class workload was demanding for a 3000 level class. She put the midterm the week AFTER spring break, and included many subtle questions about who said what in what reading, most of which I totally blew. Additionally, she had a second midterm right in the middle of our final research papers, which was a take home, of which she wanted to be 10 pages long in responses to questions. Our TA lowered the amount, but it was still very ridiculous. Take Gaines at face value—or pass/fail the class and skip the unnecessary course load.

Readings, 4 essays, and a midterm with the most horribly hard to understand, misspelled, grammatically incoherent questions you will ever see.