FILM AND VISUAL CULTURE

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr K Groo

Pre-requisites

None.

Co-requisites

None.

Notes

This is a compulsory course for entry into the Honours Film and Visual Culture programme.

Overview

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. Rather than offering a survey of film history or a small collection of classics, 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 FS1505 student will have acquired the necessary tools to continue coursework in film studies. Students will be able to recognize and communicate the ways in which meaning is made in cinema.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures, 1 one-hour tutorial per week, and 1 three-hour screening.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 Essay 1,500-2,000 words (40%); 1 two-hour Final Cumulative Exam (40%); Tutorial Assessment (20%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Short writing assignments (including responses papers, shot-by-analyses, and screening reports) will be submitted and discussed in tutorial groups.

Feedback

Written and/or oral feedback will be offered on short tutorial assignments (see above) and essays.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr J Stewart

Pre-requisites

None.

Co-requisites

None.

Notes

This is a compulsory course for entry into the Honours Film and Visual Culture programme.

Overview

What is Visual Culture? Over the last twenty years, the visual landscape has become digital, virtual, viral, and global. The image-as-object has disintegrated. The theatre-as-architecture has collapsed. Visual media have been mixed and re-mixed in the museum and online. In turn, 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 and theories that shape this fluid field. We will engage film, video and mixed media from across the twentieth and twenty-first century, and texts by key theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Frederic Jameson, Donna Haraway and Jean Baudrillard.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture/seminar per week, and 1 one-hour tutorial every three weeks, and a weekly three-hour screening.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Two 1,500-2,000 word essays (80%); Tutorial Assessment (20%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Short writing assignments will be submitted and discussed in tutorial groups.

Feedback

Written and/or oral feedback will be offered on short tutorial assignments (see above) and essays.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Ward

Pre-requisites

FS 1505

Co-requisites

None.

Notes

This is a compulsory course for entry into the Honours Film and Visual Culture programme.

Overview

This survey course introduces students to a selected constellation of significant visual and textual sites from the first fifty years of film practice, including the 'attractions' of early cinema, the rise of Hollywood and the studio star, the kino-eye of city cinema, and the cinematic aftermath of WWII. Each week, we will explore a different historical moment and a set of key film-theoretical concepts, looking at how film intersects with modernity. Students will acquire not only a knowledge of these specific historical sites, but also a facility with critical and comparative thinking. Students will learn to move between film practice, film history, and film theory to analyze the ways in which the moving image makes meaning.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures, 1 one-hour tutorial per week, and 1 three-hour screening.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%). In-course assessment: one 1,500-2,000 word essay (40%) and tutorial assessment (10%).

Resit:1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Short writing assignments (including responses papers, shot-by-shot analyses, and screening reports) will be submitted and discussed in tutorial groups.

Feedback

Written and/or oral feedback will be offered on short tutorial assignments (see above) and essays.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Ward

Pre-requisites

FS 1505, FS 2002

Co-requisites

None.

Notes

This is a compulsory course for entry into the Honours Film and Visual Culture programme.

Overview

This survey course introduces students to a selected constellation of significant visual and textual sites from the second fifty years of film practice. This course examines how cinema has responded to social, political and aesthetic revolutions in the second half of the twentieth century. Examples of the kinds of cinema to be discussed may include New Wave film-making in Europe , New Hollywood, Soviet and Eastern European cinema, national and third cinemas, the growth of new media.

Each week explores a different historical moment and a set of key film-theoretical concepts. Students will acquire not only a knowledge of these specific historical sites, but also a facility with critical and comparative thinking. The course aims to teach the students how to move between film practice, film history, and film theory to analyze the ways in which the moving image makes meaning. We will treat film as a product of the industrial age, as an element of urban culture, and as a means of imaginary transportation.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures, 1 one-hour tutorial per week, and 1 three-hour screening.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%). In-course assessment: one 2,000 word essay (40%) and tutorial assessment (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Short writing assignments (including responses papers) will be submitted and discussed in tutorial groups.

Feedback

Written and/or oral feedback will be offered on short tutorial assignments (see above) and essays.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Ward

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above. Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Notes

This course may not be included as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 40FA. It will be available in session 2010/11 and in alternate sessions thereafter

Overview

The course will focus on the representation of key 'cinematic cities' such as New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin, examining the relationship between the cinema and the urban environment and focusing on specific thematic issues. These include: the city and cinematic visions of utopia/dystopia; the city and the figure of the detective/flâneur/flâneuse; the city as site of cultural encounter and social conflict; the city as a site of globalisation; the city and consumption; the city and the development/reworking of cinematic tradition.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 one-hour seminar per week plus 2 three-hour film screenings per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%) and in-course assessment: one 2,000-2,500 word essay (40%) and seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Marcus

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above. Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Co-requisites

Passes in Film Studies courses at level 1 and 2, or equivalent.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will examine and analyse key technical developments, narrative strategies, and salient methodologies in a selection of documentary films and docu-dramas from 1895 to the present day. The case studies discussed will be primarily French, British and American films made for the cinema and television. Issues of representation and realism will be analysed. When considering the narrative topics of the case studies, students will analyse the social, cultural, and political issues the films raise. The course will encourage students to engage with appropriate theoretical, methodological and textual analyses towards an understanding of the popularity and complexitites of documentary film and the docu-drama genre.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week plus 2 three-hour film screening per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%) and in-course assessment: one 2,000-2,500 word essay (40%), and seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Marcus

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course cannot be taken as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 30Ix: On Documentary: History, Theory and Practice.

Overview

This course will investigate different forms of image making, including paintings, photographs and films by different artists from a range of historical periods. We will be considering narrative form and content as shaped by subject selection, composition, use of colour or black and white, lighting, framing and use of symbolism. These themes will be considered from aesthetic, historical and theoretical perspectives. Through a series of seminars and workshops, students will learn approaches to still and moving image making that will culminate in two practice-based creative projects including an individually-produced photographic visual essay and a group video installation.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar, or the equivalent of post-production instruction per week, and screening sessions as needed.

Assessment

1st attempt: 1 photographic visual essay project (30%), 1 video installation project (30%), a 2,000-2,500 word critical essay (30%) and SAM (10%).

Resit: 6,000-word essay including a photographic visual essay (100%)

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Marcus & Dr M Young

Pre-requisites

Available only to film and visual culture students in Programme Year 3 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will allow students to engage in video production work with special emphasis on the relationship between sound and image, putting into practice methodologies they have studied through a series of screenings, workshops and seminar discussions. Working with composition students on the partnered Music course, film students will research a topic and consider the appropriate use of music and sound, film it on digital video and complete the project through post-production in collaboration with the Music students.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week plus 1 three-hour film screening per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 1st project assessment (20%), 2nd project assessment (30%), reflective logbook (40%), seminar work (10%)

Resit: One 5,000 word essay (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr K Groo

Pre-requisites

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

Co-requisites

FS 1504, FS 2002, FS 2505.

Notes

This course may not be taken as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 40MA: Bodies on Screen B. This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will trace the visual and theoretical encounters between the human body and the cinematic machine. What is the body? What becomes of the body on screen? What does the cinematic body mean? How do these meanings change across time and geography? We will consider a number of bodily representations and transformations, including the malleable body of early cinema, the industrialized/politicized body of the “kino-eye,” the bodily excesses of horror and dance, and the digital body of the twenty-first century. Through writings on spectatorship, we will likewise consider the actual bodies that gather to consume these images.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and one two-hour seminar per week, and a weekly screening.

Assessment

1st attempt: Essay (40%)(2,500-3,000 words), Project (40%), in-course assessment 10%, Seminar Assessment (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr K Groo

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 and above, or by permission of the
Head of School.

Co-requisites

Passes in Film Studies courses at level 1 and 2, or equivalent.

Notes

This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

Beneath the surface of major films and film histories, one finds a vast network of underground, experimental, and uncategorizable alternatives. These are not the films that find you (in the cinemaplex or on television); these are ones that you go searching for (underground and online).

Taking Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “minoration” as a starting point, this course explores the minor/minority across a wide range of visual forms and formats. What is minor cinema? Who makes it and where does it place? To what “majors” does it respond? In recent years, these questions have become all the more urgent, as cinema has moved out of the hands of so-called “professionals” and into entirely new circuits of production, distribution, and spectatorship. The archive of minor cinema threatens to overwhelm the major with amateur abundance. In this course, we will likewise consider the canon of majors and the disciplinary exclusion of minor films. What “majors” matter (to Film Studies and film studios) and why?

Structure

1 one hour lecture and 1 two hour seminar per week

Assessment

1st attempt: WebCT response submissions (10%); 1 essay 2,000-2,500 words (40%); 1 research essay 2,500-3,000 words (40%); seminar assessment (10%).

Resit: Resit: 1 two hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Ward

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 and above, or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

Satisfactory performance in Film Studies courses at level 1 and 2, or equivalent.

Notes

This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

This course offers an introduction to the diverse explorations in film and video that have made been in the past twenty years in the Arab Middle East. This has been a time of extraordinary turbulence and strife politically, socially, and economically, and also of huge growth in the infrastructures and institutions of an ‘art world’ that includes the art of the moving image. Students will have the opportunity to see the fruits of artistic conceptualism in visual representations from the Arab world, while learning how dramatic tropes and plays of fictional and documentary forms take on a special character in work originating from the region. The screenings reflect the pre-eminence in cinematic work in the area of experimental video and short film, and the importance of music and of conceptual and post-conceptual art practices. They also draw on an often powerful if too often unreported cinematic tradition.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and 2 two-hour seminars per week; 1 three-hour screening per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One essay of 2,000-2,500 words (45%); one research essay of 2,500-3,000 words (45%); seminar assessment (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Ward

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

Passes in Film Studies courses at level 1 and 2 or equivalent.

Overview

This course examines the relationship between two modern technologies for transporting the human subject 'elsewhere', the cinema and the motor vehicle. Cinema is derived from the Greek, kinema, implying both motion and emotion, and the course begins with preliminary considerations on the affective power of the 'trip'. The course then focuses on films since the 1960s that not only critically address the road movie's narrative structure, its ideologies of race, gender and capital, and its relationship to the American and non-American cultural imaginary, but that also re-engage the affective potential of cinematic motion.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week plus 2 three-hour film screenings per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%) and in-course assessment: one 2,000-2,500 word essay (40%), and seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Marcus

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course cannot be taken as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 45GF Panoptic Digital Culture B. This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

This course will explore the role of panoptic observation within contemporary society and its historical roots. The course will examine the way in which our society has embraced a public surveillance application of CCTV and web cam culture, augmented by digital
cameras, the mobile phone camera and use of home web cams. Through a series of seminars and screenings, the course will study how this use of technology has impacted on social life and our sense of personal and collective identity. Students will investigate this cultural practice by creating a personal web site that maps an interpretative panoptic vision though a series of short films and associated web content, and edit a longer film for mounting a video installation. Technical tuition in web site creation and filming will be provided.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar and a screening session per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1st Attempt: 1 video installation project (50%), a 2,000-2,500 word essay (40%) and SAM (10%).
Resit: 5,000 word essay (100%)

Resit: web-based project with essay of 5,000 words (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Marcus

Pre-requisites

Available only to film studies and film and visual culture students in Programme Year 3 or above or b permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will allow students to engage in documentary production exercises, putting into practice methodologies they have studied through a series of screenings, workshops and seminar discussions. Students will research a topic, film it on digital video and complete the project through post-production.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week plus 1 three-hour film screening per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1st project assessment (20%), 2nd project assessment (30%), reflective logbook (40%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: One 5,000 word essay (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr J Stewart

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course may not be included as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 45KA (The Politicisation of the Aesthetic: Film, Visual Culture and Social Change)B, GM 3554 (Wozu Kunst? Art and Activism in the German-Speaking Countries A) or GM 4554 (Wozu Kunst? Art and Activism in the German-Speaking Countries B). It will be available in 2010/11 and in alternate sessions thereafter.

Overview

This course sets out to examine what might be called, following Walter Benjamin, the place of the 'politicisation of the aesthetic', in a world increasingly dominated by the cultural economy. The course concentrates on the work of artists who believe that art can and should be used to effect social and political change, looking at how such work can be understood and evaluated. The course provides a series of case studies, drawing on art forms as varied as film and experimental video art, architecture, new media, conceptual art and performance art, and dealing with themes such as urban interventions and regeneration, feminism, community art, art and the environment, anti-globalisation and anti-war protest, and the right to culture. The current practice of socially-engaged art exemplified by collectives such as 'Wochenklausur' and movements such as 'New Genre Public Art' will be contextualised through critical analysis of socially and politically engaged art at key points over the past century, including avant-garde conceptions of engaged art and the activist art of the 1960s (eg Fluxus).

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week, one trip to an Aberdeen gallery or project, film screenings.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%); in-course assessment: 1 written assignment 2,500-3,000 words (40%) and seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr J Stewart

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Level 3 or at the discretion of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

This course may not be included as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 45KB (Vienna 1900: Scandalous Art B), GM 3518 (Vienna 1900 A) or GM 4518 (Vienna 1900 B). It will be available in 2011/12 and in alternate sessions thereafter.

Overview

What is an artworld? What is a filmworld? How do the visual arts engage in world-making? And what happens when filmworlds and artworlds collide? These are questions taken up by a number of film-makers, whose work will be considered on this course, including Jean Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Watkins and Raoul Ruiz. The course centres on Ruiz's Klimt (2006), a filmic reconstruction of a particular artworld (Vienna around 1900 - the 'birthplace of modernism') that also seeks explicitly to explore the effect of the introduction of new film technology on that artworld. The course studies the film in relation to: the cultural history of Klimt's Vienna, including filmic approaches; discourse from around 1900 on the changing nature of vision and visuality; Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema/; the film's relationship to other 'artist biopics' that similarly set out to construct filmic artworlds; and theoretical accounts of the relationship between art and film.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week and 1 one-hour tutorial (to be arranged) per week, film screenings (to be arranged).

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment (100%): 1 project and written report 2,500 words (40%); 1 written essay 3,500 words(50%) and seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Jubb

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

FS 2002 and FS 2505.

Notes

This FS course may be taken only as part of the degree programme of MA with Single Honours in Film and Visual Culture and the MA with Joint or Combined Honours including Film Studies; Designated degree of MA in Film Studies. It may not be taken as part of the degree programme of MA with Single Honours in French Studies; MA with Joint or Combined Honours including French Studies; Designated degree of MA in French.

It may not be included as part of a graduating curriculum with FR 3536 or FR 4536.

It will be available in 2011/12 and in alternate sessions thereafter.

Overview

An introductory overview of the history of the French cinema will be followed by detailed study of a number of films. The introduction will stress the particular status of film as a serious art form in France, and the position of the French cinema in relation to that of the rest of Europe and Hollywood. It will study the cinema's response to and reflection of the major historical events of the twentieth century in France. The detailed study will be organized chronologically from the 1930s up to the 1980s, but will concentrate on the aesthetic and formal aspects of the films to be studied.

Structure

2 one-hour seminars per week plus film screenings of the set films and 2 or 3 (depending upon enrolment) additional two-hour seminars for presentations and discussion of projects.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In course assessment: two written assignments (2,000-2,500 words) 33% each; one project (incorporating a presentation and a written essay of 2,000-2,500 words) 33%.

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Ward

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4. Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Co-requisites

This course may not be included as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 30FA. It will be available in session 2010/11 and in alternate sessions thereafter

Overview

The course will focus on the representation of key 'cinematic cities' such as New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin, examining the relationship between the cinema and the urban environment and focusing on specific thematic issues. These include; the city and cinematic visions of utopia/dystopia; the city and the figure of the detective/flâneur/flâneuse; the city as site of cultural encounter and social conflict; the city as site of globalisation; the city and consumption; the city and the development/reworking of cinematic tradition. Both the essay component and the examination component of the course specifically require students to engage with conceptual issues surrounding the representation of the urban environment on film.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 one-hour seminar per week plus 1 three-hour film screening per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%) and in-course assessment: one 2,500-3,000 word essay (40%), and seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to senior honours Film Studies students or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will allow students to engage in filmed dramatic scenarios, putting into practice methodologies they have studied through a series of screenings, workshops and seminar discussions. Students will research a topic, cast and film it on digital video and complete the project through post-production.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week plus 1 three-hour film screening per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One project assessment (40%), one logbook assessment (50%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr K Groo

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

FS 1503, FS 2002, FS 2505

Notes

This course may not be taken as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 30MA: Bodies on Screen A. This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will trace the visual and theoretical encounters between the human body and the cinematic machine. What is the body? What becomes of the body on screen? What does the cinematic body mean? How do these meanings change across time and geography? We will consider a number of bodily representations and transformations, including the malleable body of early cinema, the industrialized/politicized body of the “kino-eye,” the bodily excesses of horror and dance, and the digital body of the twenty-first century. Through writings on spectatorship, we will likewise consider the actual bodies that gather to consume these images.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week, and a weekly screening.

Assessment

1st attempt: Essay (2,500-3000 words) (40%), Project (40%), in-course assessment (10%), Seminar Assessment (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr K Groo

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 and above, or by permission of the
Head of School.

Co-requisites

Passes in Film Studies courses at level 1 and 2, or equivalent.

Notes

This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

Beneath the surface of major films and film histories, one finds a vast network of underground, experimental, and uncategorizable alternatives. These are not the films that find you (in the cinemaplex or on television); these are ones that you go searching for (underground and online).

Taking Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “minoration” as a starting point, this course explores the minor/minority across a wide range of visual forms and formats. What is minor cinema? Who makes it and where does it place? To what “majors” does it respond? In recent years, these questions have become all the more urgent, as cinema has moved out of the hands of so-called “professionals” and into entirely new circuits of production, distribution, and spectatorship. The archive of minor cinema threatens to overwhelm the major with amateur abundance. In this course, we will likewise consider the canon of majors and the disciplinary exclusion of minor films. What “majors” matter (to Film Studies and film studios) and why?

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: WebCT response submissions (10%); 1 essay 2,000-2,500 words (40%); 1 research essay 3,000-3,500 (40%); seminar assessment 10%).

Resit: Resit: 1 two hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Ward

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

The course follows Wenders's career as a director from his early films (Alice in the Cities and Wrong Movement) through to his later more 'mainstream' success (Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club), investigating his place within New German Cinema, his ambivalent attitude towards America and Germany, his presentation of masculinity, as well as his relationship and the cinematic tradition and more generally to the history of visual culture (not just film, but also photography and architecture).

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week and 2 three-hour film screenings per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment: 1 essay 2,500-3,000 words (80%), and seminar assessment mark (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Marcus

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. This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will allow students to engage in documentary production exercises, putting into practice methodologies they have studied through a series of screenings, workshops and seminar discussions. Students will research a topic, film it and complete the project through post-production.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week plus 1 three-hour film screening per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One project assessment (40%), one logbook assessment (50%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr K Groo

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours students in Film & Visual Culture.

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 the Head of School.

Structure

Required field work: visits to other libraries by individual students.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Dissertation (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Marcus

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 of the programme or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course cannot be taken as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 35GF Panoptic Digital Culture A. The course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will explore the role of panoptic observation within contemporary society and its historical roots. The course will examine the way in which our society has embraced a public surveillance application of CCTV and web cam culture, augmented by digital cameras, the mobile phone camera and use of home web cams. Through a series of seminars and screenings, the course will study how this use of technology has impacted on social life and our sense of personal and collective identity. Students will investigate this cultural practice by creating a video installation that maps an interpretative panoptic vision.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar, or the equivalent of post-production instruction, and a screening session per week

Assessment

1st attempt: 1 video installation project (50%), a 2,500-3,000 word critical essay (40%) and SAM (10%).

Resit: 6,000 word essay (100%)

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr J Stewart

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programm year four or at the discretion of the Head of Department.

Co-requisites

This course may not be included as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 35KA (The Politicisation of the Aesthetic: Film, Visual Culture and Social Change), GM 3554 (Wozu Kunst? Art and Activism in the German-Speaking Countries A) or GM 4554 (Wozu Kunst? Art and Activism in the German-Speaking Countries B). It will be available in 2010/11 and in alternate sessions thereafter.

Overview

This course sets out to examine what might be called, following Walter Benjamin, the place of the 'politicisation of the aesthetic', in a world increasingly dominated by the cultural economy. The course concentrates on the work of artists who believe that art can and should be used to effect social and political change, looking at how such work can be understood and evaluated. The course provides a series of case studies, drawing on arts forms as varied as film and experimental video art, architecture, new media, conceptual art and performance art, and dealing with themes such as urban inventions and regeneration, feminism, community art, art and the environment, anti-globalisation and anti-war protest, and the right to culture. The current practice of socially-engaged art exemplified by collectives such as 'Wochenklausar' and movements such as 'New Genre Public Art' will be contextualised through critical analysis of socially and politically engaged art at key points over the past century, including avant-garde conceptions of engaged art and the activist art of the 1960s (e.g. Fluxus).

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week, one trip to a gallery or project, film screenings (to be arranged).

Assessment

1st attempt: In-course assessment (100%): 1 project and written report 3,000 words (40%); 1 written assignment 3,500-4,000 words (50%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr J Stewart

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Level 4 or at the discretion of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

This course may not be included as part of a graduating curriculum with FS 45XX (Vienna 1900: Scandalous Art B), GM 3518 (Vienna 1900 A) or GM 4518 (Vienna 1900 B). It will be available in 2009/10 and in alternate sessions thereafter.

Overview

What is an artworld? What is a filmworld? How do the visual arts engage in world-making? And what happens when filmworlds and artworlds collide? These are questions taken up by a number of film-makers, whose work will be considered on this course, including Jean Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Watkins and Raoul Ruiz. The course centres on Ruiz's Klimt (2006), a filmic reconstruction of a particular artworld (Vienna around 1900 - the 'birthplace of modernism') that also seeks explicitly to explore the effect of the introduction of new film technology on that artworld. The course studies the film in relation to: the cultural history of Klimt's Vienna, including filmic approaches; discourse from around 1900 on the changing nature of vision and visuality; Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema; the film's relationship to other 'artist biopics' that similarly set out to construct filmic artworlds; and theoretical accounts of the relationship between art and film.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week and 1 one-hour tutorial (to be arranged) per week, film screenings (to be arranged).

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment (100%): 1 project and written report 3000 words (40%); 1 written essay 4000 words (50%) and seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Ward

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 and above, or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

Satisfactory performance in Film Studies courses at level 1, 2 and 3, or equivalent.

Overview

This course offers an introduction to the diverse explorations in film and video that have made been in the past twenty years in the Arab Middle East. This has been a time of extraordinary turbulence and strife politically, socially, and economically, and also of huge growth in the infrastructures and institutions of an ‘art world’ that includes the art of the moving image. Students will have the opportunity to see the fruits of artistic conceptualism in visual representations from the Arab world, while learning how dramatic tropes and plays of fictional and documentary forms take on a special character in work originating from the region. The screenings reflect the pre-eminence in cinematic work in the area of experimental video and short film, and the importance of music and of conceptual and post-conceptual art practices. They also draw on an often powerful if too often unreported cinematic tradition.

Structure

One 1-hour lecture and two 2-hour seminars per week; one three-hour screening per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: One essay of 2,500-3,000 words (45%); one research essay of 3,000-3,500 words (45%); seminar assessment (10%).

Formative Assessment

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