Undergraduate Film And Visual Culture 2019-2020

What is Visual Culture? Over the last twenty years, the visual landscape has become digital, virtual, viral, and global. A vibrant cross-section of scholars and practitioners from Art History, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Film Studies have responded, not only engaging contemporary image production and consumption, but also the foundations of visual knowledge: What is an image? What is vision? How and why do we look, gaze, and spectate? From the nomadic pathways of the digital archive to the embodied look that looks back, this course will introduce students to the key concepts that shape this fluid field.

This course offers an introduction to the language and practice of formal film analysis. Each week we will explore a different element of film form and analyze the ways in which it shapes the moving image. This course invites students to think about formal elements within and across a wide range of genres, styles, historical moments, and national contexts. By the end of this course, the successful FS1508 student will be able to recognize and communicate the ways in which meaning is made in cinema.

The first half of a film history sequence at the second year level, Visualising Modernity focuses on crucial moments, concepts and cinematic works from the period 1895 to 1945. Students will be marked according to a mid-term essay, a final exam, short assignments on Blackboard, and attendance in lectures and tutorials.

The second half of a film history sequence at the second year level, Cinema & Revolution focuses on crucial moments, concepts and cinematic works from the period between 1945 and the present. Students will be marked according to a mid-term essay, a final exam, short assignments on Blackboard, and participation and attendance in lectures and tutorials. 

This course, which includes both fiction and documentary film, considers the strong political dimension of 21st-century German and Austrian filmmaking, as contemporary German and Austrian filmmakers not only engage with societal and historical issues in their home countries, but also turn their attention to global problems such as modern-day food production, the refugee crisis, and the global economy. The course will include films by Fatih Akin, Ruth Beckermann, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Valeska Grisebach, Michael Haneke, Carmen Losmann, Christian Petzold, and Hans Weingartner.

This practice-based course will explore the role of panoptic observation within film and the arts, and in contemporary society and trace its historical roots. Students will work in production teams to complete two films through which they will examine the way in which our society has embraced a public surveillance application of CCTV and web cam culture, augmented by digital cameras, and the mobile phone camera.

The course will invite comparisons between key critical texts and themes that focus on variants of entrapment as presented in a range of feature films. Film adaptation, analysing narrative form and constructions of place and the production of space will inform our investigations, in addition to considering the linkage between films and their social and historical contexts within popular culture.

This course will examine the development of the genre of performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, through to the present day. The focus will be on performance art in Eastern Europe, where experimental art practices offered a zone of freedom for artists to develop. We will examine a range of issues, including the materiality of the body, gender, institutional critique, political art, as well as issues surrounding documentation, liveness, and re-performance.

This course focuses on a range of ways that cinema and dream relate to one another. It explores how leading filmmakers have found creative inspiration in dream and depicted dream sequences, dream states, dream logics and dreamworlds, and the ways in which oneiric film technique has been discussed by scholars. This historically contextualised survey includes early film theory, Freudian and Jungian dream analysis, psychoanalytic film theory, film semiotics, and recent developments in cognitive film theory and neurocinema. Students will examine themes of memory, childhood, the unconscious, the uncanny, symbolism, fantasy, daydreaming, creativity, autobiography, trauma, exile, folklore, the Gothic, enigma and lucid dreaming.

The course will focus on the relationship between the cinema and the urban environment, focusing on specific thematic issues. These include: the city and cinematic visions of utopia/dystopia; the city and the figure of the detective/flaneur/flaneuse; the city as site of cultural encounter and social conflict; the city as a site of globalisation; the city and production and consumption; the city and the development/reworking of cinematic tradition. The course will also explore the relationship between the experience of cinematic space and urban space, and how they have been interconnected throughout the history of cinema.

This course will allow students to engage in documentary production by putting into practice methodologies they have studied through a series of seminar discussions, workshops and screenings. Students will research two topics (one assessed and one non-assessed) and work in teams to film them and utilize the Media Lab's facilities to complete the projects through post-production.

Through the effects of technological progress, industrialisation, deforestation, mining, our dependence on fossil fuels and plastics, and the testing of nuclear weapons, humans have become geological agents – radically transforming the Earth System in ways that will leave a trace for millions of years to come. This realisation has come to be known as the ‘Anthropocene’ – the time of humans. The implications – materially, emotionally and intellectually – are vast and complex. How do writers and artists respond to this complexity? What role can literature, film and visual art play in our understanding of it? This course addresses these and other questions. By studying select works of literature, film and visual art from the last sixty years alongside critical, theoretical and scientific writing on the Anthropocene, can we identify those images that might be thought adequate to our predicament?

This course will provide students with guidance on writing a dissertation on a topic approved by the programme co-ordinator for the Head of School.

This course, which includes both fiction and documentary film, considers the strong political dimension of 21st-century German and Austrian filmmaking, as contemporary German and Austrian filmmakers not only engage with societal and historical issues in their home countries, but also turn their attention to global problems such as modern-day food production, the refugee crisis, and the global economy. The course will include films by Fatih Akin, Ruth Beckermann, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Valeska Grisebach, Michael Haneke, Carmen Losmann, Christian Petzold, and Hans Weingartner.

This practice-based course will explore the role of panoptic observation within film and the arts, and in contemporary society and trace its historical roots. Students will work in production teams to complete two films through which they will examine ways our society has embraced a public surveillance application of CCTV and web cam culture, augmented by digital cameras and the mobile phone camera.

The course will invite comparisons between key critical texts and themes that focus on variants of entrapment as presented in a range of feature films. Film adaptation, analysing narrative form and constructions of place and the production of space will inform our investigations, in addition to considering the linkage between films and their social and historical contexts within popular culture.

This course will examine the development of the genre of performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, through to the present day. The focus will be on performance art in Eastern Europe, where experimental art practices offered a zone of freedom for artists to develop. We will examine a range of issues, including the materiality of the body, gender, institutional critique, political art, as well as issues surrounding documentation, liveness, and re-performance.

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within Film and Visual Culture.

This course focuses on a range of ways that cinema and dream relate to one another. It explores how leading filmmakers have found creative inspiration in dream and depicted dream sequences, dream states, dream logics and dreamworlds, and the ways in which oneiric film technique has been discussed by scholars. This historically contextualised survey includes early film theory, Freudian and Jungian dream analysis, psychoanalytic film theory, film semiotics, and recent developments in cognitive film theory and neurocinema. Students will examine themes of memory, childhood, the unconscious, the uncanny, symbolism, fantasy, daydreaming, creativity, autobiography, trauma, exile, folklore, the Gothic, enigma and lucid dreaming.

The course will focus on the relationship between the cinema and the urban environment, focusing on specific thematic issues. These include: the city and cinematic visions of utopia/dystopia; the city and the figure of the detective/fl-neur/fl-neuse; the city as site of cultural encounter and social conflict; the city as a site of globalisation; the city and production and consumption; the city and the development/reworking of cinematic tradition. The course will also explore the relationship between the experience of cinematic space and urban space, and how they have been interconnected throughout the history of cinema.

Through the effects of technological progress, industrialisation, deforestation, mining, our dependence on fossil fuels and plastics, and the testing of nuclear weapons, humans have become geological agents – radically transforming the Earth System in ways that will leave a trace for millions of years to come. This realisation has come to be known as the ‘Anthropocene’ – the time of humans. The implications – materially, emotionally and intellectually – are vast and complex. How do writers and artists respond to this complexity? What role can literature, film and visual art play in our understanding of it? This course addresses these and other questions. By studying select works of literature, film and visual art from the last sixty years alongside critical, theoretical and scientific writing on the Anthropocene, can we identify those images that might be thought adequate to our predicament?