Film Studies

Core Modules

Year 1

• Introduction to Media Histories 1

  These companion modules (Introduction to Media Histories 1 and Introduction to Media Histories 2) introduce students to media histories encompassing complementary accounts of film, television, video games, computing, the internet, and social media.

• Critical Theory and Textual Analysis

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the key debates in critical theory. You will look at a range of different methods in studying film, television and digital media, including artistic achievement and critical interpretation, close textual analysis, ideological analysis, national cinema, and psychoanalysis. You will examine the relationship between the intentions of individual film and programme-makers and wider processes. You will consider films and television programmes in close detail, analysing the relationship between how something is achieved and what it means.

• Screen Narrative: Theory and Practice

  This module allows students to apply their critical understanding of screen narratives. They will do this through original creative screenwriting, detailed analysis, and theory. Students have to adapt a story into a 10m screenplay. This could be a short story, an album, or a video game.

• Introduction to Film Form
• International Film 1: Contexts and Practices

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the key tenets of film theory and learn to apply these to a selection of important pre- and post-war European and international films. You will look at aspects of film style, genre and national and international contexts.You will consider canonical works from a century of cinema history by filmmakers such as Joseph von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock and Pedro Almodovar, and examine significant examples of technique and style.

• The Birth of Film

  The purpose of this module is to provide students with an introduction to the early phase of film history. Broadly speaking, the module will be concerned with the period between 1895 and the early 1930s, from the invention of motion pictures to the establishment of sound cinema. During this phase, film-making was largely national but the absence of the spoken word gave film a truly cosmopolitan dimension, with directors, actors and technical personnel moving freely across national boundaries. Nonetheless distinctive national film cultures emerged, with Italy specialising in dramas set in the ancient world, France making ample use of theatre and popular literature, Germany developing the new medium within broader artistic phenomena such as Expressionism, the Soviets pioneering political montage, and, of module, Hollywood, and its studio system, popularising stars and genres across the world.

• Introduction to Media Histories 2

  These companion modules (Introduction to Media Histories 1 and Introduction to Media Histories 2) introduce students to media histories encompassing complementary accounts of film, television, video games, computing, the internet, and social media

• Critical Theory and Creative Practice
• Screen Narrative: Theory and Practice

  This module allows students to apply their critical understanding of screen narratives. They will do this through original creative screenwriting, detailed analysis, and theory. Students have to adapt a story into a 10m screenplay. This could be a short story, an album, or a video game.

Year 2

• All modules are optional

Year 3

• Media Arts Dissertation

  A dissertation can be a sustained piece of writing about a single subject, person, theoretical field, or group of texts The dissertation is based primarily on students’ own course of independent study so will be a product of negotiation between the student and supervisor and will depend on the topic of research.

Optional Modules

Below is a taster of some of the exciting optional modules that students on the course could choose from during this academic year. Please be aware these do change over time, and optional modules may be withdrawn or new ones added.

Year 1

• All modules are core

Year 2

• Film Theory: Hitchcock and Point of View
• Post-Classical Hollywood
• Television Histories
• Modern European Cinema
• Contemporary Chinese Cinemas
• Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference
• Modernism and Avant Garde Film
• Beyond Bollywood: Indian Cinema in a Transitional Frame
• Digital Aesthetics

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the core concepts of the digital age, looking at how today's computer networks, devices and infrastructure underpin nearly all forms of aesthetic, cultural social and political life. You will consider the concepts of technicity, affective turn, digital subjectivity and extended mind, creative expression and participation in the digital era, amateur production, free software, fun and politics, self-organisation, media archaeology and sonic architectures. You will examine the systematic challenges brought about by digital change and critically interpret and analyse digital phenomena.

• The Creative Industries

  In this module you will develop an understanding of how creativity is constrained and enabled by the industrial logics of the creative industries. You will focus on film, television and digital media, exploring issues such as economics and financing, pitching and commissioning, policy and regulation, copyright, formats and global trade, ratings and audience measurement, branding and marketing, digital production logics, and production cultures. You will also consider a number of important industry-oriented research skills, such as interviewing, market/demographic analysis, locating and interpreting legal documents, and archival research.

• International Film 2: Readings and Representations

  The module is divided into two parts, the first exploring crucial issues of filmmaking, film studies and the ‘transnational’ from the perspective of largely contemporary Latin American cinema, the second focusing on a range of European films from the 1970s to the present. The introductory two weeks of the module will introduce students to these concerns; the final two weeks of the module will bring both parts together and establish some conclusions (for example, what, if anything, constitutes a ‘European’ or ‘Latin American’ or ‘transnational’ film).

• Cinema in France

  This year-long module examines key examples of French cinema from its beginnings to the present day, focusing on the avant-garde and surrealist films of the 1920s, social realist films of the 1930s, the New Wave which began in the late 1950s, and its ‘postmodern’ legacy in the 1980s followed by a return to realism in the new millennium. The module entails close, critical analysis of film style, though no prior knowledge of film theory is required.

• Representations of Childhood and Youth in Modern German Culture

  Childhood and youth - the formative periods in our lives - are obviously crucial for individuals, society and culture. They are also contested and controversial concepts. Children and adolescents have long been the subject of social, familial and educational pressures against which they have often rebelled in an attempt to assert their individuality and develop their own identities. This module introduces you to a range of literary and cinematic responses to the lives of children and young people in the context of the German speaking countries from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Drawing on a range of classic and recent texts and films, it explores the historical contexts of the theme and considers the social, political and ethical issues involved in the representation of young people and of institutions such as the school and the military.

• 20th-Century Mexican Visual Arts and Film

  During the module attention will be devoted to analysing samples from early Twentieth century Mexican visual arts. Students will study the Mexican Mural Movement and will analyse the work of its most prominent members. Attention will be paid to the works of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. The first part of this module will also cover the photographic works of Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tina Modotti, Mariana Yampolski, Araceli Herrera and Graciela Iturbide. During the second part of this module students will be introduced to some of the most significant cinematic works from Mexico’s century of filmmaking. Students will analyse some of the most important filmic genres from a wide range of directors and periods in Mexican cinematic history. On this module students will be introduced to some areas of film theory and will learn how to apply theoretical concepts to a reading of Mexican visual arts and films.

• Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spanish Film

  In this module students will study films from the last twenty years in Spain. The films selected will in different ways express representations of identity in Spain. We will explore issues such as national and regional identities, linguistic diversity and national identity, Spanishness, cultural memory, history on screen, urban versus rural experience, cultural diversity, immigration and the portrayal of gender within new family paradigms.

• Rebels, Revolution & Representation in Latin America

  On this module students will examine the ways in which critical historical moments in Latin America have been represented visually in a global context. We will explore how political unrest in Latin America has been memorialised by both filmmakers and photographers, with the aim of re-thinking how global imaginaries concerning the rebel and revolution have been constructed in film and photography.

• Postwar Italian Cinema: the Auteur Tradition

Year 3

• Contemporary British Cinema 1
• Television and Digital Cultures
• Film Aesthetics 1: Issues of Interpretation and Evaluation
• Psychoanalysis and Cinema
• Film, Television and the Holocaust

  In this module you will develop an understanding of how the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 has been represented and responded to across a range of both fictional and non-fictional media. You will look at the specific theoretical debates surrounding how the Holocaust can or should (or should not) be represented in art and popular culture. You will consider the role of mass media in constructing both popular and elite relationships to historical experience, and in documenting history.

• Media Technologies
• See This Sound - Audiovisuology
• Cinephilia
• 360º Cinema
• Political Cinema: From Eisenstein to Youtube
• The Poetics of Contemporary Television
• Contemporary British Cinema 2
• Film Aesthetics 2