Approaches to Film Noir

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

Re-examining and questioning orthodox arguments about film noir, this module focuses on a range of Hollywood films from the 1940s and early 1950s alongside key critical readings and approaches. We consider debates on gender representation, the social, cultural and political contexts of the US, Hollywood's industrial and institutional operations, and the aesthetic and ideological consequences of film style, narrative and narration.

Cultural Identities: Social Practices

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

How do our beliefs create material realities? This module examines discourses: fields of meaning within culture that produce and reinforce identity, subculture, community, and everyday social practises. Using a range of critical approaches from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, Beverley Skeggs and Sara Ahmed, you will study key social paradigms such as space, gender and sexuality, habitus, emotion, politics and protest, religion and spirituality.

You look at contemporary subjectivities and everyday life, thinking about the social effects of cultural narratives embodied within (for example) emotions such as shame, new spiritualities and paranormal culture/occultures, global/local political resistances, contemporary relations of power and their social embodiments, and queer activisms and utopias. You will consider how such discourses carve out meanings and behaviours in individuals, and how they are contested, resisted, and redefined.

Using material drawn from cultural politics and social change, you will explore how people perform, and/or are performed by, cultural narratives, and how the politics of representation can be challenged by cultural activisms.

Expanded Media: Forms and Practices

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module looks at what happens when media forms overlap and interact. What new forms are created? What histories can be drawn upon? How does collaboration inform creative practice?

Through the exploration of global concepts such as (but not limited to) narrative (and anti-narrative),  time and space,  dreams, and  memory, you  will experiment and collaborate in ways that reflect the formal and thematic implications of the concepts discussed. Topics may include: theorisations on hybrid forms; expanded cinema; history of collaborative practice and experimentation; interactivity; notions of the avant-garde; synesthesia; site-specific media installations; and immersive technology.

Film Studies: Theories and Methods

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module presents you with a mapping of the intellectual histories, key approaches and theoretical debates within the field of film studies. You will begin with early debates around realism and auteurism, moving to genre theory and ideological and structuralist approaches. Later sessions deal with psychoanalytic and feminist approaches. The module finishes with contemporary critiques of both the textual focus of traditional film studies and the concept of representation itself. Throughout, the concern is to link theoretical approaches with methodologies inviting you to explore, critique and reflect on the discipline's intellectual history.

Global Cinemas

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

Cinema has always been a global medium, but in recent years its international styles, institutions and cultures have moved to the centre of film culture and scholarship. New waves from Taiwan, Romania, Iran and Argentina have produced some of the most exciting contemporary cinema, and the popularity of these films is linked to broader cultural and political issues around globalisation and its critiques.

This module aims both to examine the forms and cultural contexts of a wide range of post-1945 non-Hollywood films and to provide a critical framework for analysing these films through studying theories of globalisation and world cinema. Key topics may include the development of art cinema, New Waves, Third Cinema, postcolonial and indigenous cinemas; cosmopolitanism; the economics of film festivals; modern film industries; and transnational cinemas. You will study films from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, as well as the flows and relationships between these geopolitical regions and film movements.

Latin American Cinema

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

This module offers a historical, critical, and theoretical survey of the cinemas of Latin America. It also seeks to challenge some of the ideas and paradigms through which Latin American cinema is generally studied. You begin by tracing the history and development of cinema on the continent from the introduction of the technology in 1897 onwards, and go on to explore the classical and national cinemas of Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and Brasil. As well as exploring works central to a Latin American film canon you will also have the opportunity to consider the critically neglected popular exploitation cinemas of 1950s and 1960s. Later sessions deal with the pan national cinema of revolution and protest that blossomed through the continent in the 1960s (the New Latin American Cinema). The module ends with a consideration of contemporary issues and practices in the shadow of profound technological, economic and political changes asking, whither the Latin American cinemas in the era of co-productions, gobalisation and digital filmmaking?

Media Audiences

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

On this module you will explore and evaluate the broad tradition of critical research into media audiences which has developed over the past two decades.  You will consider, through an exploration of this tradition, how we should understand the nature of media texts, and in particular how meanings, uses, (dis)pleasures and responses are produced in the complex interactions between audiences and texts, in specific social settings.  This module gives you the chance - and to develop the skills to be able - to carry out a small piece of original audience research. Key methods encountered on the module include interviews, semi-structured focus group discussions, open-ended questionnaires, respondents' letters, and participant observation.

Media Theory and Research

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

The module offers you the chance to explore at an advanced level a number of principal theories and methods within a cultural studies approach to media studies, and to consider how these shape the ways we might think about and research particular media industries, forms and issues. The theory element aims to introduce you to the key thinkers, traditions and debates in media and cultural studies and contributing disciplines. It investigates media as institutions and systems of representation and explores problems of production and consumption in a variety of social and geo-political contexts. You will be encouraged to prepare informal presentations and to engage in discussion with other members of the seminar group. Each week there will also be a short introduction to the following week’s topic in the lecture given by members of the Media and Film faculty.  The research element aims to develop a systematic and critical understanding of the practical, epistemological and ethical issues involved in conducting different kinds of media and cultural research. It also aims to make you methodologically self-conscious in your own research and written work.

The Cinematic Body

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

This module examines the interplay between body and cinema. This includes not only the representation of the body in films but also how the body of the spectator and cultural formations of the body influence and shape cinema itself. You will draw on a wide range of theoretical frames (including film studies, psychoanalysis, gender studies, philosophy, feminism and cultural theory) to consider a variety of themes including: the body as resistance and force; notions of beauty and the sublime; the hysterical body; discipline and punishment; the body as desire. The module will also consider recent developments in film, including the idea of cyber-cinema and its impact on the body.

Theory and Practice of Interactive Media

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

Digital technologies are re-wiring established media cultures, transforming traditional media systems (television, cinema) and introducing new media networks (internet, mobile devices). This module explores aspects of this techno-cultural transformation, through both a practical exploration of the form and by considering critical debates exploring the power, force, significance and form of a series of new media texts, artefacts and systems. The module situates practices related to these forms in a media studies/cultural studies perspective and with reference to multi-disciplinary debates.

The module consists of a series of theory orientated seminars and project based workshops that are designed to give you a practical introduction to a range of software authoring tools widely used within the media. Early sections of the course are taught through discrete group-based tasks. During the latter stages of the module, you produce your own short terms papers and creative projects investigating an aspect of a new media artefact or system.

The module will equip you with the necessary production skills and theoretical frameworks to schedule and deliver these projects. This grounding will provide you with basic authoring skills, will give you the capacity to develop your skills further through individual study, and will also equip them to think critically about the forms and contents of contemporary media systems.