Undergraduate Film And Visual Culture 2022-2023

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 will examine Latin American Film History, from the 1970s to today, with a feminist perspective, which means not only focusing on female directors but questioning auteurist and director-centric paradigms. We will explore women-led cinematic processes and practices and the emancipatory potential of the moving image. A range of theoretical and methodological approaches will allow us to go beyond what appears on-screen and understand the entire life cycle of the films — from inception to circulation — conceiving the cinematic texts (movies) as material, ideological, emotional and aesthetic testimonies of their practices of production and distribution. Selected case studies will take us on a tour around non-canonical histories of Latin American cinema, from the Caribbean to the Andes, always embedding carefully the cinematic processes in the vibrant social contexts and collective subjectivities from where the images emerge.

A continent of over 50 countries and yet frequently ‘Othered’ and unexplored in mainstream cinematic landscapes. For those that know little about Africa, and some of the key political and social events that have helped to shape the continent, this module seeks to introduce and establish an interest in the modern history and cinematic output of this great land. Beginning with Nollywood and concluding with Wakaliwood, this module explores sub-Saharan African cinema, from older classics such as Mandabi (1968) to exciting new frontiers, typified by the success of District 9 (2009).

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.

The module offers a comprehensive look at how documentary has interrogated, and in some rare cases even influenced, politics, social values, and even popular culture. Students will be expected to look at how documentary filmmakers have built upon the famous Griersonian quote – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ – to evolve the form’s style and scope as well as to challenge the very notion of filmic truth and reality. Attendees to the module will also learn how to identify the key documentary modes and be expected to analyse and understand how the movement’s use of transgressive visual images, no matter how apparently ‘genuine’, is frequently presented through a cinematic perspective that is not always objective. Furthermore, the module will require students to produce a short documentary or individual video essay (in documentary form) and, in doing so, explore the challenges of objective presentations.

This course will invite students to explore the ways film and literature can engage with and represent a variety of landscapes, and how, in turn, landscape can influence both the production of the work and the creation of meaning. We will study selected works of film and literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including mainstream and independent cinema, poetry, and fiction and non-fiction literary texts that have been adapted for film. We will look at ways in which various landscapes may have been appropriated for their emotive qualities: to connote feelings of desolation, oppression or plenitude; loneliness, fear or joy. We will also look at landscapes as sites of specific cultural history. As the course progresses, drawing on contemporary research in cultural and human geographies, and elsewhere, we will explore the ways that studying landscapes of film and literature can assist in our ability to conceive landscape not only as a static or symbolic entity, but as a highly mobile, interactive site in which history, experience and materiality converge in the ongoing production of space and meaning. In this way, we will consider how the works studied articulate John Wylie’s provocative claim that ‘landscape is tension’. 

This interdisciplinary course will draw on writings from literary, film and cultural theorists, philosophers, artists and social scientists. 

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

This course will examine Latin American Film History, from the 1970s to today, with a feminist perspective, which means not only focusing on female directors but questioning auteurist and director-centric paradigms. We will explore women-led cinematic processes and practices and the emancipatory potential of the moving image. A range of theoretical and methodological approaches will allow us to go beyond what appears on-screen and understand the entire life cycle of the films — from inception to circulation — conceiving the cinematic texts (movies) as material, ideological, emotional and aesthetic testimonies of their practices of production and distribution. Selected case studies will take us on a tour around non-canonical histories of Latin American cinema, from the Caribbean to the Andes, always embedding carefully the cinematic processes in the vibrant social contexts and collective subjectivities from where the images emerge.

A continent of over 50 countries and yet frequently ‘Othered’ and unexplored in mainstream cinematic landscapes. For those that know little about Africa, and some of the key political and social events that have helped to shape the continent, this module seeks to introduce and establish an interest in the modern history and cinematic output of this great land. Beginning with Nollywood and concluding with Wakaliwood, this module explores sub-Saharan African cinema, from older classics such as Mandabi (1968) to exciting new frontiers, typified by the success of District 9 (2009).

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

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.

The module offers a comprehensive look at how documentary has interrogated, and in some rare cases even influenced, politics, social values, and even popular culture. Students will be expected to look at how documentary filmmakers have built upon the famous Griersonian quote – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ – to evolve the form’s style and scope as well as to challenge the very notion of filmic truth and reality. Attendees to the module will also learn how to identify the key documentary modes and be expected to analyse and understand how the movement’s use of transgressive visual images, no matter how apparently ‘genuine’, is frequently presented through a cinematic perspective that is not always objective. Furthermore, the module will require students to produce a short documentary or individual video essay (in documentary form) and, in doing so, explore the challenges of objective presentations.

This course will invite students to explore the ways film and literature can engage with and represent a variety of landscapes, and how, in turn, landscape can influence both the production of the work and the creation of meaning. We will study selected works of film and literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including mainstream and independent cinema, poetry, and fiction and non-fiction literary texts that have been adapted for film. We will look at ways in which various landscapes may have been appropriated for their emotive qualities: to connote feelings of desolation, oppression or plenitude; loneliness, fear or joy. We will also look at landscapes as sites of specific cultural history. As the course progresses, drawing on contemporary research in cultural and human geographies, and elsewhere, we will explore the ways that studying landscapes of film and literature can assist in our ability to conceive landscape not only as a static or symbolic entity, but as a highly mobile, interactive site in which history, experience and materiality converge in the ongoing production of space and meaning. In this way, we will consider how the works studied articulate John Wylie’s provocative claim that ‘landscape is tension’. 

This interdisciplinary course will draw on writings from literary, film and cultural theorists, philosophers, artists and social scientists.