Undergraduate Film And Visual Culture 2020-2021

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. 

For much of the twentieth century, the cinema has provided mass audiences with a powerful and accessible source of images and ideas about many aspects of science, medicine and healthcare, including the notion of scientific evidence and objectivity, laboratory experimentation, science and human rights, the relationship between doctor and patient, the public image of scientists, the encounter between human and non-human animals. This course seeks to understand the complex relations between cinema and science, by critically examining a diverse body of works coming from different filmic traditions, genres and periods, challenging the cliché of the mad scientist often represented in mainstream Hollywood cinema.

This course will focus on the theory and the practical techniques of writing screenplays for cinema and for television. It will encourage students to put together the tool kit of skills which they will require to write effective screenplays based on both adapted source material and on original material. The course will survey the established skills of creating effective narrative screenplays across genres, with an emphasis on contemporary dramatic cinema. The course will provide students with a versatile, practical skill-set of screenwriting abilities set within realistic industry expectations.

Medical images and illustrations are important in medical research, clinical practice, and public communication. This course employs the tools and insights of the humanities (e.g. history and philosophy of science, visual culture) to explore questions such as: What makes medical images so important? What roles do they play? How do images inform and provide evidence? How do images depict what they are about? How are images produced and why does it matter? Do image-makers follow pictorial traditions? How do medical images travel between research communities and the public? 

 The process of confronting the crimes and legacy of the Third Reich in Germany and Austria has been a long and difficult one. In West Germany this process began in earnest following the 1968 student revolution, with a younger generation questioning the role that their parents had played in the Second World War. In Austria, the process of coming to terms with the Nazi legacy took substantially longer to get underway, and it is only over the past thirty years that the country's view of its role during the Third Reich has shifted decisively from that of victimhood to complicity. The discussion about the Nazi past in Germany has further evolved following German re-unification in 1990. This course will look at a number of key films and directors from the past seven decades to examine the changing discourse and shifts in representation of the Nazi legacy in Germany and Austria. The course will proceed chronologically, encompassing both fiction and documentary film, offering the opportunity to compare and draw connections between films from different periods and of diverse genres.

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.

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 will invite students to explore the ways films engage with and represent a variety of landscapes, and how, in turn, landscape can influence both the production and the creation of meaning in mainstream, underground and art films of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will study films from around the world alongside theoretical and critical writing on film, landscape, space and place.

Filmmakers to be studied may include, among others: Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Joel and Ethan Coen, John Curran, Tacita Dean, Werner Herzog, Im Kwon-taek, Abbas Kiarostami, Ang Lee, Terrence Malick, Philip Noyce, Lynne Ramsay, Andrei Tarkovsky, Agnes Varda and Andrey Zvyagintsev.

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

For much of the twentieth century, the cinema has provided mass audiences with a powerful and accessible source of images and ideas about many aspects of science, medicine and healthcare, including the notion of scientific evidence and objectivity, laboratory experimentation, science and human rights, the relationship between doctor and patient, the public image of scientists, the encounter between human and non-human animals. This course seeks to understand the complex relations between cinema and science, by critically examining a diverse body of works coming from different filmic traditions, genres and periods, challenging the cliché of the mad scientist often represented in mainstream Hollywood cinema.

This course will focus on the theory and the practical techniques of writing screenplays for cinema and for television. It will encourage students to put together the tool kit of skills which they will require to write effective screenplays based on both adapted source material and on original material. The course will survey the established skills of creating effective narrative screenplays across genres, with an emphasis on contemporary dramatic cinema. The course will provide students with a versatile, practical skill-set of screenwriting abilities set within realistic industry expectations.

The process of confronting the crimes and legacy of the Third Reich in Germany and Austria has been a long and difficult one. In West Germany this process began in earnest following the 1968 student revolution, with a younger generation questioning the role that their parents had played in the Second World War. In Austria, the process of coming to terms with the Nazi legacy took substantially longer to get underway, and it is only over the past thirty years that the country's view of its role during the Third Reich has shifted decisively from that of victimhood to complicity. The discussion about the Nazi past in Germany has further evolved following German re-unification in 1990. This course will look at a number of key films and directors from the past seven decades to examine the changing discourse and shifts in representation of the Nazi legacy in Germany and Austria. The course will proceed chronologically, encompassing both fiction and documentary film, offering the opportunity to compare and draw connections between films from different periods and of diverse genres.

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

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.

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 will invite students to explore the ways in which films engage with and represent a variety of landscapes, and how, in turn, landscape can influence both the production and the creation of meaning in mainstream, underground and art films of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will study films from around the world alongside theoretical and critical writing on film, landscape, space and place.

Filmmakers to be studied may include, among others: Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Joel and Ethan Coen, John Curran, Tacita Dean, Werner Herzog, Im Kwon-taek, Abbas Kiarostami, Ang Lee, Terrence Malick, Philip Noyce, Lynne Ramsay, Andrei Tarkovsky, Agnes Varda and Andrey Zvyagintsev.