FILM STUDIES

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

To be arranged

Pre-requisites

None

Notes

Not available to those who have passed any other level 1 Film Studies course.

Overview

An introduction to the history of American cinema, covering films from the inception of cinema, the era of Classic Hollywood and late twentieth century ‘post-classical’ cinema. The course introduces students to a wide range of genres, including melodrama, screwball comedy, the gangster movie, science fiction and the Western, and to the work of such directors as Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg among others. Lectures will place the films in the context of the film industry and the social and historical context of America.
3 one-hour lectures; 1 one-hour tutorial and 2 three-hour film screenings per week.
1 two-hour examination (40%) and continuous assessment: 1 essay (35%), 1 exercise (15%), tutorial assessment mark (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P Coates

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above who have passed FS 1004 or FS 1005.

Overview

The course will provide an introduction to the study of European cinema, an area that may be unfamiliar to many students. Since the unfamiliar is best approached through the familiar, the course will begin by discussing European cinema’s interaction with the dominant American mode. It will then review the major aesthetic debates generated by Soviet montage, German expressionism and Italian neo-realism, and the work of several major sixties and post-sixties figures (including those of the French New Wave). The course will emphasise European cinema’s distinct institutional and aesthetic qualities as an ‘art cinema’ in which poetic, political and philosophical impulses are present to a degree not generally found in American cinema, and will also raise the question of what is ‘European’, a pressing concern with the current stress on the EU state and supra-state structures.
A study pack will be provided and film-texts to be studied will normally include Shoot the Pianist (Truffaut), The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice), Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Wiene), Bicycle Thieves (De Sica), La Dolce Vita (Fellini), The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky) and Three Colours: White (Kieslowski) (all subject to availability).
3 one-hour lectures per week; 1 one-hour tutorial and 2 three-hour film screenings per week.
1 two-hour examination (40%) and continuous assessment: 1 essay (30%), 1 exercise (10%), tutorial assessment mark (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Wood

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed FS 2502.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by Head of School.
THIS COURSE IS COMPULSORY FOR THOSE INTENDING TO TAKE FILM STUDIES AS A JOINT HONOURS OPTION.

Overview

‘Film Theory’ often serves as shorthand for the fusion of poststructuralist, feminist, Marxist and post-colonial forms of analysis that occurred in the late nineteen sixties. While paying due attention to this important development, this course will view film theory as an object of greater longevity and variety, arguing that an exclusive focus on post-‘68 perspectives is excessively limited. It will track the unfolding of film’s theorisation across this century, from the ‘twenties texts of Eisenstein, Arnheim and Kracauer, through the theories of Bazin and the structuralist and post-structuralist reaction to them, up to the recent attempts to inaugurate a ‘post-theoretical’ era. The theories in question will be considered both as an expressions of philosophical positions and in terms of their capacity to illuminate - and interrogate - film texts.
1 two-hour lecture per week; 1 two-hour seminar per week; and 2 three-hour film screenings per week.
1 two-hour examination (50%) and continuous assessment: essay (30%), exercise (10%), seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr P Coates

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above.

Notes

This is a 6 week course. Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

Many of the most successful recent films have been adaptations of classic literary texts. What occurs - what is gained and lost - in the process of adaptation? Does a text’s classic status fatally limit the filmmaker’s liberty? Is the ‘good’ adaptation by definition a critique of its source? This course will examine these and related issues through the confrontation of major texts and major filmmakers, conceptualising film and literature as equally valid, overlapping yet contrasting forms of signification. Authors to be studied will include Diderot, Tolstoy, Henry James and Borges. Film versions of the texts by directors such as Bertolucci, Bresson and Keslowski.
2 two-hour seminars per week; and 2 three-hour film screenings per week.
Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Mr M Brownrigg

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

This course examines the influence of the “film school generation” of contemporary Hollywood. Through a detailed study of texts, it considers the impact of the French New Wave and U.S. independent filmmakers on key 1970s directors including Scorsese and Coppola. The continuing interplay between “studio” and “independent” filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s is addressed through an in depth study of the work of Altman, Lynch, Joel Coen, Lee and Bigelow, amongst others. The critical focus of the course is on authorship, modernism/postmodernism, and postclassical Hollywood. Films studied include: The Conversation, Blue Velvet, Fight Club and Clockers (subject to availability).
2 two-hour seminars, plus 2 three-hour screenings per week.
1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: essay (30%), exercise (10%), seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Mr M Fradley

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 3 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course

Overview

Examining the popular notion that masculinity - and, in particular, white masculinity - in contemporary American culture is in a state of 'crisis', this course interrogates representations of normative - white, heterosexual and middle-class - men in recent Hollywood cinema. Looking in detail at key film texts of the last fifteen years, students will be encouraged to consider the political investments in rhetorically potent narratives and images of beleaguered white males. The films' complex negotiations with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality will be explored in depth from a variety of theoretical standpoints as the course works through the output of iconic male stars such as Clint Eastwood, Michael Douglas, Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks and films including "Die Hard", "Falling Down", Forrest Gump" and "Fight Club".
2 two-hour seminars per week and 2 three-hour screenings per week.
Continuous assessment: 1 essay (2500-3000 words) 80% and seminar assessment mark (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Wood

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours Film Studies students or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6 week course.

Overview

Following the shift in perspective from modernist to postmodernist views of the subject, the course will draw on science fiction films made since the 1970s to explore: firstly, the ways in which being human has been understood in terms of an opposition to technology; and secondly, the ways in which technology has been humanised, thus blurring the opposition. The course will draw on technoscience and cyberspace studies which will be used in conjunction with classical and post-classical film theories of the narrative subject, mobilising questions of gender, sexuality and race. Films to be studied:- Westworld, Alien, Terminator 2, RoboCop, Twelve Monkeys, Ghost in the Shell, eXistenZ and The Matrix (subject to availability).
2 two-hour seminars per week; and 2 three-hour film screenings per week.
Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr P Coates

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours Film Studies students or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6 week course.

Overview

This course will examine some of the paradoxes involved in the theory and practice of documentary, with particular reference to questions of documentary ethics, epistemology and the controversies surrounding the variously-motivated ‘staging’ of reality. Issues connected with the representation of the Holocaust will constitute the course’s main case study. Subject to availability, films to be studied will include Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin.
2 two-hour seminars per week; and 2 three-hour film screenings per week.
Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Mr M Brownrigg

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours Film Studies students or by permission of Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6 week course.

Overview

This course examines the historical development of film music through in-depth analysis of its formal, functional, industrial, economic and ideological influences, covering Silent Cinema, the Studio Era’s Classic scores, Hollywood’s subsequent importation of jazz/pop influences, the renaissance of the orchestral score in the late 1970s and the recent post-modern development of the Digital score. It will furnish non-specialist students with ways of thinking, talking and writing critically about film and music.
Students will undertake detailed analysis of ten films including King Kong, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Poltergeist, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
2 two-hour seminars.
Essay (80%) and Seminar Assessment Mark (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P Coates

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours students in Joint Honours Film Studies.

Notes

The field work aspects of this course may pose difficulties to some students with disabilities. If this arises, alternative arrangements will be made available. Any student wishing to discuss this further should contact the School Disability Co-ordinator.

Overview

This course will provide students with guidance on writing a dissertation on a topic approved by a the Head of School.
Required field work: visits to other libraries by individual students.
Dissertation (100%).