• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1

Digital media saturates everyday life, re-organises cultural productions of all kinds, and re-mediates the teaching and learning environments which you will inhabit at Sussex. The module aims to examine this digital environment through both practical and theoretical perspectives. It enables you to understand and use digital tools to enhance and explore your study and to take a critically informed stance on your existing practices.

The module examines developments in new media with a particular emphasis on different uses of digital media, enabling you to make distinctions between kinds of material, genres and platforms. Through a practical approach it equips you to use digital media confidently to both enhance study and to understand the digital environment as media and cultural form.

The module covers topics including data visualisation, searching for resources, citation, catalogues, mapping, archiving, using social media, privacy, copyright and surveillance, digital media as a research area (e.g. how to research and ethics of researching Tweets/Wikipedia/social forums) and the politics of software.

The module will draw upon a range of digital research platforms, including those owned and/or subscribed to by the university in order to provide a solid foundation for you to embark on future independent research.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1

This module examines ways of questioning media forms, texts and systems. It explores the breadth of media studies through attention to the ways in which media matter in the formation of individual and collective identities and in the practices of everyday life. In the more public world, to what extent are media key to providing knowledge and enabling the debate necessary to the practices of democracy? The module enables you to build on your own experiences of media as consumers, audiences and users. It encourages critical attention to how the field of media studies has historically been forged through its key figures and to the tools for questioning the media they have developed.

The module ranges across media and genres, engaging with both contemporary and historical material. Topics may include: audience pleasure and identity; representations and power; public knowledge; the social impact of the rise of digital media.

Key terms may include: criticism, critical thinking, identity, textual analysis, representation, semiotics, power, public knowledge, institutions.

Embedded in the module is the development of study skills appropriate to the study of media at undergraduate level, including organising study time, note taking, essay writing and referencing, with particular attention being paid to constructing arguments and being critical.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1

Explore 'doing culture' in everyday life.

If the 'everyday' refers to the mundane, the unremarkable – to the forms of life routinely taken for granted – it is also through the practices of everyday life that we experience who we are, how our lives are invested with meanings, and how we engage with change.

In the modern world (especially in the developed north), it's difficult to think about cultures of everyday life without also considering the media and its contribution to the structuring of daily life, its varied use in daily life, and its discursive construction and engagement with aspects of everyday life. We introduce you to critical approaches to everyday life, including those engaging with media, before concentrating on a series of case studies.

Topics are likely to be organised around 'embodiment' and 'mobility' and could include getting dressed, meal times, time for love, driving and shopping. We provide historical and cross-cultural material and encourage study of other cultures. You'll also have the opportunity to reflect on your own experiences.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1

Throughout this module, you'll encounter some of the most well-known and widely regarded theoretical and critical approaches used in the study of media today. It will help you to identify and analyse the debates circulating around those approaches. In asking ‘what is the subject of media’ and ‘how should we study it?’, different approaches come up with very different answers. Media can be approached as ritual, (global) industry, meaning-maker, technology, dreamworld, everyday life, work place and sensual pleasure machine. Focus can switch from media production and organisation to analysis of media output, from exploration of consumption and use to the bigger issue of media in society.

In carving a way through this complexity, the module will introduce you to a few key frameworks – for example ‘political economy’, ‘critical race studies’, ‘psychoanalysis’, ‘feminist media theory’ – and alert you to how differences of approach have emerged depending on the specific medium or cultural form (radio, TV, cinema, internet, newspaper, advertising, music etc). However, a repeated reference point for the module is the cultural output of media and methods analysis, especially modes of textual analysis.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to using desktop publishing and interactive media applications whilst also encouraging critical reflection on issues of form and representation in relation to the work they produce. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in the production of digital media:

• research
• development
• image editing
• composition and manipulation
• information and communication
• layout design and presentation.

You will work individually to realise set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed set of digital artefacts to a project brief.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to narrative using the moving image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in video production: research, scripting, camera, sound and editing. You will work in a team to complete set exercises both in and out of class and produce a video project to a set brief.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to the still image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in digital imaging: research, composition, exposure, and editing. You will work individually to complete set exercises both in and out of class, and produce a series of images to a set brief.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to sound production, and will encourage you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your and others' work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in sound design, such as research, acoustics, voice recording and editing. You will undertake exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed sound design piece to a set brief.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1

This module explores the diverse ways that filmmakers use key techniques of cinematic expression, such as narrative, cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound, performance and special effects.

You explore how such techniques are accomplished (i.e. the creative choices available to filmmakers) but also the potential they have for generating meaning and pleasure when combined together to produce filmic texts.

The module is based around a series of reading assignments, which will be discussed in seminars along with the week's set film and extracts from other films. In particular, we examine one of the most influential and most pervasive models of cinema: the classical narrative film produced during the era of the Hollywood studio system (from approximately 1915 to 1960).

You will consider several films from this era, as well as films produced subsequently, in the light of influential propositions by David Bordwell and other film scholars regarding the systematic organisation of stylistic and narrative norms within classical Hollywood storytelling.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1

This module will provide you with an introduction to the critical discourses regarding jazz and popular music. This module will broaden your historical awareness and critical understanding of different traditions in jazz and popular music, although it is not designed to be a historical overview.

Likewise, while some technical understanding is required, the primary focus is not on minute analytical distinctions between different styles or practical instruction in song-writing, production or performance. Rather, we will concentrate on the social and cultural functions and meanings of the popular music cultures studied and the reasons why they exert such a powerful hold on audiences and practitioners alike.

Every week we will focus on a critical issue that has been central in discussions about popular and jazz music. Deliberately, these issues transcend the boundaries of style (or 'genre') and historical period. Thus, rather than honing in on the minutiae of individual styles, we will seek to contextualise them more broadly and see what, perhaps surprisingly, they have in common and what historical lineages connect them. It is the intention that this wider awareness of historical, social and cultural contexts will also enable those of you who are musicians to reflect more critically on their own artistic practice, thus enriching their work.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to using desktop publishing and interactive media applications whilst also encouraging critical reflection on issues of form and representation in relation to the work they produce. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in the production of digital media:

• research
• development
• image editing
• composition and manipulation
• information and communication
• layout design and presentation.

You will work individually to realise set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed set of digital artefacts to a project brief.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to narrative using the moving image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in video production: research, scripting, camera, sound and editing. You will work in a team to complete set exercises both in and out of class and produce a video project to a set brief.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to using the still image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in digital imaging: research, composition, exposure, editing. You will work individually to on set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed series of images to a set brief.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to sound production and will encourage you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your and others' work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in sound design, such as research, acoustics, voice recording and editing. You will undertake exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed sound design piece to a set brief.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1

This is a practice-based module that will engage you in the making of site-specific performance in public spaces. You will explore through lectures and practical workshops the relation of space, place and sound, and the social meanings of specific locations. The module will examine a range of contemporary artistic approaches and theoretical ideas, as well as introducing you to practical methods for making site-specific work with music.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1

This module is designed to help you to develop your study skills in preparation for working with film in more advanced ways in years 2 and 3 of your degree. The skills we will work on in particular include those of detailed, scholarly, film analysis and interpretation, critically, historically and theoretically informed film studies research, and multimedia forms of academic presentation and writing.

By focusing on a single set film [in 2012-13, this is intended to be Los olvidados/The Young and the Damned (Luis Bunuel, Mexico, 1950)], the module will offer the space and guidance to enable you to develop your own critical case study. Weekly lectures will introduce you to the film, its production and reception contexts, as well as to a wide range of potentially relevant issues to consider when establishing how you will go on to work with it. The lectures will also introduce you to a range of film studies skills and methods, including ways of conducting and presenting film research afforded by multimedia technology. In seminars you will analyse the set film, and its possible connections with other films, and explore your ideas and research methods under the close supervision of a tutor, as well as present your work in progress.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module explores media and politics and, more broadly, the media and questions of power. It focuses on current affairs with a stress on news; although other forms of factual content (for instance TV docudrama, web blogs, broadsheet lifestyle spin-offs) are also covered. This module considers the role media can play in producing our understanding of the globalizing world in which we live. It asks how media frames, organises, and contextualises events, both as they take place, and in relation to the collective memories that emerge after the event. It also asks how the media themselves are managed, manipulated, and influenced – variously by governments, media owners, professional newsrooms codes, and/or by public pressure.

You will examine the role the media play in relation to the citizen and the state. It is through the optic of citizenship, particularly in relation to the public sphere, that questions concerning the power of the media are addressed. You will also explore how a wide range of media contribute to the maintenance or erosion of a democratic society and an informed citizenship.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module introduces you to the importance of studying research methods, enabling you to critically evaluate the work of researchers – and your own. It will also enable students to reflect on the issue of research ethics.

The module is taught through a lecture series plus seminars. The lectures cover quantitative and qualitative approaches commonly used in media and communications, such as questionnaires, content analysis, textual and visual analysis, interviewing, and ethnographic approaches.

The seminars provide you with a general training in these research methods, including research design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

An awareness of how Hollywood cinema was shaped, how it acquired its position of dominance, and the forms and aesthetic conventions that characterise it, is essential to an understanding of cinema more generally. Accordingly, this module will focus on the formation of Hollywood in the 1910s through to the post-World War 2 era, with particular emphasis placed on the development of the 'studio system' and Hollywood's 'golden age' of the 1920s to 1950. You will view a range of representative Hollywood films made during the period and analyse them in relation to the industry and its practices. You will also situate Hollywood cinema within the political and social life of the United States in the period.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It allows you to focus on the creation of an animation. You will also expand your knowledge of the theories and practices employed when using digital media to develop animations.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. You will create your own video, while continuing to expand your knowledge of the concepts and approaches common to documentary film forms.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It allows you to focus on the creation of an animation or piece of interactive media while expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices common to digital media.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's course will be considered for a place on these modules, and always subject to availability.

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in Approaches to Media Practice: Photography, which is a pre-requisite. You develop and produce a photographic project, making use of photographic documentary theory and history, as well as enhancing your knowledge of research methods, production techniques and processes. You will reflect critically on your project, drawing on your critical and practical study of relevant genres. You will work to realize set exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed project to a set brief.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It allows you to focus on the creation of a sound design piece, while expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices common to sound design.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module is split into two five-week units and will examine the history of musical narrative from classical opera to film music. Its focus will be the audio-visual study of musical 'texts', uncovering the technical means by which music creates metaphors of linear plot and development. The module concentrates on opera and film, although it also considers some more abstract instrumental music, such as the symphonic poem.

The work of Richard Strauss, for example, occupies a space between the language of late romantic opera and 20th century film music, made more explicit in the work of Eric Korngold, whose operas lead directly into his film scores of the 1930s and 1940s.

You will also consider post-war scores in which the role of music is more complex than the mere ghosting of visual action. The 'psychological' music motifs in Hermann's scores for Hitchcock's Psycho and Vertigo are cases in point; these works have operatic links, with the 'irrational' music of Schoenberg's Erwartung and Berg's Lulu. Essays are balanced with regular aural analysis training in opera and film music. No prior technical knowledge of music is needed to study this module, nor an ability to read music; the objects of study are audio-visual, not written scores.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module examines the relationship between history, memory and media. Its starting points are; (i) The media are historical artifacts, forged and developed in historical contexts that they also influence. (ii) Access to history is mediated through various technical and cultural systems e.g. television, print, and networked and mobile media. Media systems capture, store, and re-disseminate material that may be returned to us as collective or individual memories for instance through family photographs, or through the annual collective commemoration of official memorial days. The relationship between history and memory is thus bound up with how media systems become embedded cultures. (iii) New media in particular, produce new kinds of artificial memory and thus may intervene in new ways in the making of history.

The module will address some of the questions arising around media, history and memory through sessions including explorations of prosthetic memory, war memories and memorials, the history of the invention of the media, memory damage and the politics of omission, family histories and migration patterns as photographic record, race and mediated memory, and questions of the convergence of the archive and the network which mean media records of events are simultaneously stored and represented.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module is organised around a work placement in the creative sector. The placement will normally be arranged by yourself and will usually be approximately 20 hours in duration. The aim is to use the experience as an opportunity to develop and reflect upon your personal and social skills in the work place; the demands of time management; technical, organisational and/or creative achievement as appropriate.

The module will enable you to compile necessary documentation in relation to work, such as a portfolio containing CVs and development plans, as well as help you to assess your skills and perform SWOT analyses and a Key Skills Audit.

On this module you will also be encouraged to reflect upon your work experience through an online journal and a synthesis paper which will draw both on the 'hands on' knowledge gained during the placement and, where appropriate, your academic study.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module develops your understanding of the art and craft of screenwriting.

Your group will undertake a thorough investigation of plot structure, and develop a sophisticated understanding of character development and theme. You also consider other screenwriting concepts including subtext, scene design and cinematic juxtaposition.

The practical dimension of the module involves you writing a script for an 8-10 minute short film. Through guided writing exercises and viewings, you will work through a script development process that guides you from initial conception to the completion of a fully revised draft.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module introduces you to the role of sound in human culture and society. It seeks to foster an understanding of aurality in the past and present and the relationship of sound to various modern media. It provides you with interests in film, television, radio, music and journalism with a solid and wide-ranging introduction of the main historical, theoretical and practical thinking around the subject of sound. It encompasses music and speech but places them in the context of sound and listening more broadly. The approach is global and interdisciplinary combining historical perspectives with textual analysis of contemporary films, programmes and soundscapes with emerging work on auditory cultures and online media in both 'Western' and 'non-Western' parts of the world.

Subjects covered would include:

• Hearing and the senses (including perception, mood, and memory)
• The concept and history of the 'soundscape'
• Sound before and after modernity (including the concept of 'oral culture', the role of sound in political and social struggles through history, the electrification and recording of sound)
• Sound and ethnography (eg sound in everyday life in varous cultures)
• The voice (including styles of speech and the ways in which 'personality' is supposedly revealed through voice and gender)
• Cinema and sound (including film sound design in the past and present)
• Music and new media (including new forms of music production and reception, and the production of taste).

You will also be introduced to some of the key terms and concepts used in analysing sound, both in the study of soundscapes and in the study of soundtracks.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 2

This module aims to introduce students to two related issues, namely:
a) a historically-rooted account of how the study of popular culture came to be established in British higher education and of some of the key theoretical approaches that helped to shape those studies
b) an exploration of how the bringing together of popular culture and ‘the academy’ has and continues to pose intriguing problems around hierarchies of taste, questions of value, and definitions of educational worth.

A series of lectures will offer students both a historical overview of those issues and an introduction to the influence of key writers, theorists and approaches, while the module seminars would help students to engage with particularly significant and talismanic texts (from writers such as Hall, Bourdieu and Bakhtin) in the field and also to test out the interpretive frameworks they offer by undertaking some case study analyses of contemporary popular cultural texts and practices (in fields such as television, popular music, the leisure industries and youth culture).

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

In the context of the rise of consumer culture and the expansion and proliferation of media systems, this module addresses the historical development of advertising. A key theoretical framing is provided by debates about the shift from modernity/fordism to post-modernity/post-fordism, about 'knowledge' industries and the emergence of a 'risk' society.

Themes explored include advertising's relation to social change and its exploration and contribution to social identities. Engaging with contemporary practices, the module also balances attention to how the industry perceives itself with critical perspectives of its place in society. Through case studies and examples, the module offers ways of approaching ad texts and the consumption of advertising as well as ways to understand the changing industry of the 21st century. It offers opportunity to address advertising in the UK and elsewhere.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

The module engages with the historical development of advertising and opens up a critical understanding of its contemporary place within media economies, culture and society. In the 21st century, advertising has been transformed by the rise of branding, the maturing of the internet and the emergence of new media forms like social media. Traditional advertising forms and the funding model for media which advertising has provided are under threat.

It asks questions about advertising in relation to (social) change, considering whether it is quite the conservative force it is sometimes believed to be reproducing 'dominant ideologies', trading in 'stereotypes', blocking or hiding change, and whether it is perhaps scapegoated when blamed for causing undesirable social changes, such as obesity. To think of advertising in another way, we explore how advertising as an institution and commercial tool is tied into the dynamics of capitalist modernity so that it also trades in the 'new': forever trying to capture the 'mood' of the moment or articulate the current 'state of play'. We consider how some scholars argue that advertising can be therapeutic, managing change and resolving the tensions of modern life rather than simply inciting anxieties for which capitalism has the remedy: go shopping.

We also explore the contradictions of advertising, as both commercial tool for capitalism helping to sustain consumer expansion and a cultural communicative artefact, offering pleasures and irritations, provoking memories, constructing multiple identities and like other cultural output contributing to how we feel, think, talk and culturally connect and disconnect from others.

Through lectures and seminars, group work and independent study, the module engages with these questions and issues through the study of historical and contemporary ad examples, scrutinising both commercial ads and those geared to social marketing, eg. charity ads. It equips you with the tools of analysis to engage with the 'work' of ad campaigns and the broader phenomenon of branding and promotion. But it also provides you with knowledge of the ad industry and the work that ad agencies do. Through engagement with a wide scholarship, you will be introduced to theorisations which give you ways to understand why and how advertising has changed and how it can be thought about in relation to broader developments in society.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module examines the historical, social and cultural contexts of American popular music, focussing predominantly on the USA. Emphasis is placed on popular genres and styles of the twentieth century, the period in which the USA took on a dominant role in the creation and spread of popular culture across the globe.

As well as charting this growth in dominance, the module analyses popular music as representative ‘people’s music’. Genres and styles – including the blues, jazz, country, soul, funk, punk, disco, hip hop and grunge – are used to read aspects of change and continuity in the American twentieth century. Rather than providing a simple chronological history of musical styles in the USA, the module uses the music to examine concepts of race, place, tradition, commerce and authenticity. The music industry is analysed in terms of American business models, and recording and revival are explored as ways of thinking about representation, commercialization and exceptionalism.

Vital socio-historical moments, such as the emergence of rock and roll and the use of music in the civil rights era, are studied alongside the ‘invention’ of the teenager and the rise of a counterculture. The module concludes with a series of reflections on the various soundscapes associated with America and with the notion of multiple Americas audible through the myriad of non-Anglophone genres that exist within North America.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

The module begins by examining critical approaches to a history of British cinema and the dominant ways this cinema and its characteristics have been understood. We then examine British cinema from the 1920s to the contemporary era beginning with the factors which shaped it, in particular the debates about the social and cultural importance of a specific British cinema against the background of the massive influence of Hollywood, and the representations of ‘Britishness’ this produced. The later weeks of the module examine in more detail British cinema’s attempts to deal with the various forms of ‘otherness’, which it has sought both to define and to contain in the changing cultural and political climate of the post-war years and with the different ‘British cinemas’ this produced.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module looks at Chinese-language film from the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan and beyond. Since 1949, China has been divided between two competing centres of ideological and cultural legitimation: the People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of China on Taiwan. This division, combined with the influence of Hong Kong and diaspora cultural production, means that Chinese-language cinema is an excellent case study through which to explore the limits of the ‘national cinema’ model of Film Studies.

This module does so by considering how Chinese cinemas have responded to social, political and industrial change across and between their three key sites of production, in ways that both intersect with, and often complicate, the concerns of ‘national cinema’ studies. A variety of material will be covered, both historical and contemporary, potentially touching on issues of representation, genre, form and style, and industrial and policy challenges.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module explores the relationship between ideas of culture, race and ethnicity both historically and in contemporary society. You will examine a range of empirical examples that demonstrate how the concepts have been used – sometimes separately, sometimes in interlocking ways – in political projects or movements. There will be particular focus on contructions of 'whiteness'. Examples may include the use of race in 19th-century colonial administration, the politics of ethnicity in postwar London or the rise of the new right in contemporary Europe.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce you to the major debates in documentary film studies, a burgeoning field within the discipline of film studies. The documentary is notoriously difficult to categorize or define, but John Grierson’s provisional definition as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ is as good a place as any to start the investigation of this shapeshifting form.

Gaining in popularity and expanding in form well beyond its traditional televisual format, documentary studies has become an exciting area of research with a literature that is expanding exponentially. A survey of the field will include (but is not limited to) interrogations into questions of:

• representation of reality
• documentary authorship
• objectivity and subjectivity
• the essayistic and experimental modes
• other key themes.

Movements and trends in documentary will be covered including a range of practices that have spurred heated debate, such as the mockumentary, the interactive documentary, and the incursion of documentary into the art world. Case studies from international documentary will be integrated into the module, depending on the specialism of the convenor.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module examines interactive leisure forms and practices based on digital technologies. It understands digital media as a significant and expanding new media formation; one that is transforming both the content and economics of the culture industries. The module will consider the cultural, political and social implications of new forms of interactive media designed for leisure and entertainment. Areas covered will include computer gaming, networked new media such as networked games, networked social spaces, pornography and other on-line entertainment. In addition the module will consider new forms of convergence between previously discrete media forms - for instance Net-TV collaboration and net-served films.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module examines issues relating to how music is used on stage and screen and other theatre environments. It complements material studied in the autumn term ‘Music, Stage and Screen 1’ in such a way that the module is free-standing. (MSS1 is not a pre-requisite to MSS2). The module is divided into 2 Units.

1. Opera on Stage after WW2
2. Film Music: Beyond the Hollywood Model

Unit 1 : Opera on Stage after WW2

This unit looks at one aspect of music for the stage in a particular context – opera as theatre in Europe from 1945 to 2000. This focuses on the dynamic northern European opera scene, and the German-speaking world in particular, through the remarkable reconstruction of opera after the European cataclysm of the war, through some of its creative practice on stage.
Firstly, it looks at the immediate post-WW2 scene, to consider how key interpretive artists (stage directors and designers) brought new perception and new readings of existing canonical work to mainstream opera platforms. Secondly, it reviews some creative responses by post-war composers across Europe to the same context. It also considers a small sample of avant-garde opera and looks briefly at some instances of translation of opera into another key medium during this period, such as Felsenstein's/Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann; and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's/Wagner's Parsifal.

Unit 2 Film Music: Beyond the Hollywood Model

The second unit in this module explores alternative and non-narrative solutions developed in examples taken from European and contemporary cinema. The module examines how the music relates to the visual action and what this conveys about the works' cultural, gender and socio-historical identities. We round off the unit by looking at Lost Highway, a film by David Lynch, which was made into an opera by composer Olga Neuwirth, allowing us to reconsider the relationship between film and opera. In this regard we will also briefly examine the phenomenon of using video in live multi-media stage productions.

Issues which will be touched upon regarding different roles of music in screen media will include:

• the fragmentation/(de)construction of narrative and identity in contemporary forms
• the creation of meaning using expressive materials involving sound and sight
• different interpretations of the 'real'
• issues to do with 'live' performance and different interpretations of what is 'live'.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module provides a historical, critical, and theoretical survey of developments in French cinema. It focuses on key historical issues (aesthetic, social, political) that have shaped French cinema over the last century, examining the intersections of film with French politics, culture and identities. A range of directors (possible examples: Godard, Franju, Denis) and types of film (popular genres, art cinema, avant-garde) will be studied, with films ranging from the 1920s to the present day. The module will combine close attention to textual analysis with contextual study of the period in which films were produced, and with comparative readings of critical approaches to films.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

Why is space important to our understanding of communication? How do subjects travel through space in order to construct narratives of identity? How are spaces moralised, sexed and gendered? How do they accrue significance or symbolism?

In the last decade there has been a convergence across many academic disciplines to comprehend spatiality. Social spaces are never empty or static, they are full of the shifting dynamics of power and politics. On this module you will study to what extent gender is articulated in public and private spaces, so that they may be considered to be predominantly feminine, masculine, queer or transgendered. You will also examine how spaces and places are dynamic, unstable and mutable in relation to competing social differences. We will look at a variety of sites of the everyday, from the domestic to the visual, from bodies to landscape and virtual realities using key theoretical concepts such as 'performativity', 'representation' and 'transectionality' to interpret how our culture is thoroughly imbued with gendered and spatialized assumptions.

Topics may include: thinking about gendered journeys such as package holidays or migration; the boundaries and borders of the self; the national and the global; social inclusion and exclusion; and representations of the feminized underclass, or the masculinized professional. We will also consider queer cultural geographies as represented in films; 'freaky bodies' and transexuality online; and the spatial politics of protest on the streets and in the home.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module offers a diversity of approaches for studying journalists and journalism around the world, and charts the opportunities, challenges and crises facing journalism in an increasingly global field.

The module examines the impact of developments in journalism that have resulted in it becoming an international phenomenon operating in global networks as opposed to within national or cultural borders. It looks at journalism in crisis (as a practice) and journalism as it responds to and communicates crises in the world. It explores the blurring between entertainment and news, as well as the formerly clear division between journalism, public relations and business communication. The module draws on specific examples of global media events to examine these issues and enables you to creatively and critically explore the challenges of consuming and producing globalised stories.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module develops your understanding of the art and craft of screenwriting. 

Your group will undertake a thorough investigation of plot structure, and develop a sophisticated understanding of character development and theme. You also consider other screenwriting concepts including subtext, scene design and cinematic juxtaposition. 

The practical dimension of the module involves you writing a script for an 8-10 minute short film. Through guided writing exercises and viewings, you will work through a script development process that guides you from initial conception to the completion of a fully revised draft.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module introduces you to the role of sound in human culture and society. We will seek to foster an understanding of aurality in the past and present and the relationship of sound to various modern media. It provides you with interests in film, television, radio, music and journalism with a solid and wide-ranging introduction of the main historical, theoretical and practical thinking around the subject of sound. It encompasses music and speech but places them in the context of sound and listening more broadly. The approach is global and interdisciplinary combining historical perspectives with textual analysis of contemporary films, programmes and soundscapes and with emerging work on auditory cultures and online media in both 'Western' and non-Western parts of the world.

Subjects covered would include:

• Hearing and the senses (including perception, mood, and memory)
• The concept and history of the 'soundscape'
• Sound before and after modernity (including the concept of 'oral culture', the role of sound in political and social struggles through history, the electrification and recording of sound)
• Sound and ethnography (eg sound in everyday life in varous cultures)
• The voice (including styles of speech and the ways in which 'personality' is supposedly revealed through voice, voice and gender)
• Cinema and sound (including film sound design in the past and present)
• Music and new media (including new forms of music production and reception and the production of taste) 

You would also be required to familiarise yourself with a number of research methodologies in which sound is analysed (eg in acoustemological fieldwork and in the analysis of film sound) and with the approriate terminology and concepts of those methodologies (eg in film, the differences between diegetic and non-diegetic uses of sound, etc). You will then be required to apply and critique one or more of these methodological approaches as part of your written assessment.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module focuses on the textual and contextual study of television's key fiction and entertainment genres – soap operas, sitcoms and other styles of comedy, game shows, lifestyle television, daytime television, and music television, among others. You will explore the defining generic characteristics of those televisual categories, their representational strategies, their ideological implications, their particular pleasures and their relationship with audiences. The primary focus will be on British television, although comparative material from other broadcasting contexts will be used where appropriate for comparative purposes. Most of the primary material will be drawn from current or recent television, but you will also investigate the history of popular television genres in order to understand their evolution.

• 15 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 2

This module focuses on the textual and contextual study of television's key fiction and entertainment genres - soap operas, sitcoms and other styles of comedy, game shows, lifestyle television, daytime television, and music television among others. You will be encouraged to explore the defining generic characteristics of these televisual categories, their representational strategies, their ideological implications, their particular pleasures and their relationship with audiences. The primary focus will be on British television, although material from other broadcasting contexts will be used where appropriate for comparative purposes. Most of the primary material will be drawn from current or recent TV, but students will also be required to investigate the history of popular TV genres to understand their evolution over time.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

This dissertation module allows you to draw upon material taught in your third year autumn modules in order to write and research your 8,000 word dissertation.

It is aimed to build upon appropriate critical, theoretical and methodological approaches encountered in those modules. As such the course will enable you to draw together and reflect upon the skills and knowledge acquired not just in Year 3, but throughout your degree course.

The module is largely self-directed permitting them to focus upon their specific and individual  topic of research. Introductory lectures, tutorials both group and individual and research workshops will guide students through the process of planning, researching and writing their dissertation.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

This module examines film adaptations of fiction from the silent period to the present day. A diverse range of film texts will be considered, along with critical and theoretical perspectives on adaptation. You focus on film adaptations of short stories, novels, graphic novels and children's illustrated literature, including picture books. 

The adaptations themselves represent a variety of film modes, from popular mainstream cinema to experimental and avant-garde film. The module approaches adaptation as both an industrial mode of commercial exploitation and a creative mode of critical interpretation. We will consider the significance of the idea of fidelity for the reception of film adaptation.

Students examine adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ Wuthering Heights, The Virgin Suicides, Where the Wild Things Are, Kick Ass, The Borrowers and Under the Skin.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

This module explores consumption practices within specific social, cultural and historical contexts. It will build upon other modules you have undertaken throughout your degree and enable you to draw interim conclusions to processes through which people make sense of objects – and other culturally significant things – and how they are appropriated into everyday life. It also explores consumption as a basic human activity through which people engage with and understand their position in the world. It will locate social, historical and culturally specific consumption practices within wider processes of identity-creation and differentiation. Finally, consumption will be discussed in the context of the development of 'consumer cultures' and globalisation.

'Consuming Passions' will take a dynamic and deliberately interdisciplinary approach to a number of key concepts central to the study of 'culture'. It will draw upon and critically examine the variety of ways in which cultural and sub-cultural groups acquire, interpret, use and develop such things as film, music, food, sexuality, fashion, literature and art, and include the study of material and visual cultures.

The weekly topics are related and have been chosen deliberately to interact with one another in intriguing and unexpected ways. You are strongly encouraged to make original and imaginative leaps and connections during seminar discussions and in both your coursework and your extended essays, in which you may also re-examine, in greater depth, some of the topics you may have encountered in earlier modules.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

This module extends the ideas explored during earlier practice courses. Having chosen a practice medium on which to focus in the second year, you will engage in the design, research and production of a practice project in that same medium.

The module provides you with master classes from professionals and faculty in the practice field, offers supervision in designing and researching a project, as well as production tutor-support in tackling technical and production issues associated with producing a project to the set brief. This practice work will be supported by relevant readings in media theory, aesthetics and production techniques which will be discussed in workshops.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

During this documentary module you'll analyse documentary production in its historical and cultural context and focuses on new developments in documentary production, reality TV formats, feature documentary and alternative documentary production. In addition we'll address emerging documentary production in the developing world.

The module covers foundational thinking in documentary; theorisations of different modes of documentary; reality TV; debates over documentary's truth claims; the boundary between documentary and fiction; dramatisation and reconstructions; and international independent documentary production.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

This module studies the role of the media (broadly understood to include all forms of telecommunications, the Internet and computers, print and televisual journalism, the music industry and all forms of visual media) in the era of globalisation. It will begin by investigating various forms of globalisation and by asking how it is explored through various registers.

We will focus on the relations between globalisation and the media regarded through the lens of global political-economies, through culture and its flows, and through the register of the symbolic. We will then address the specific role of the various media forms/formations in initiating, consolidating and sustaining both the idea and the practice of globalisation.

The module will also consider the risks, possibilities, hopes and anxieties circulating around the figure of accelerating globalisation, as it operates in the arena of media culture. This module will deliver the necessary information and theoretical background for you to understand the key processes and dynamics of globalisation. More specifically, you will be asked to come to terms with the meaning of our current historical moment as it is expressed through the use of the term globalisation in a number of disciplinary fields (politics, economics, cultural studies, media studies, etc). The module is designed to encourage you to then relate the general conception of globalisation to particular case studies in media and culture.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

This module examines one of the world's most commercially and culturally significant media institutions. It addresses Hollywood as a set of interconnected practices, industrial and symbolic.

 The module develops points of contact between two ways of envisaging films – as commodities within a moving image economy, and as symbolic forms – by situating film texts in historical contexts. It focuses in particular on the period from the late 1960s to the present day.

 As this is a final year module, you will draw on the range of methods, skills and approaches that you have encountered in your earlier work.

 You will also develop an account of the political economy of Hollywood. You look for ways of understanding why and how films are produced, and how these commercial imperatives shape the form and nature of Hollywood movies. Hollywood will be examined as a system of publicity encompassing marketing procedures, journalistic commentary, etc. 

Of course, you’ll also look at the films themselves. Their narrative structures, systems of representation, cinematographic properties, thematic concerns and the pleasures they offer – all in the specific historical and institutional contexts of the 'heavy industry of dreams’.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

This module explores in depth the complex role of modern media in the conduct and public understanding of contemporary war and conflict. It seeks to foster an understanding of the methods used by militaries, journalists and film makers and in the shaping of discourses around war and conflict in both the past and present.

It will provide you with interests in film, television and journalism with an indepth overview of the main historical and theoretical thinking around the subject of war and media. The approach is global and interdisciplinary, combining historical perspectives with textual analysis of contemporary media including news, documentary, film and emerging online media in both ‘Western’ and non-Western parts of the world.

Subjects covered might include:

• an analysis of the key theoretical perspectives through which the relationship between media and war can be examined
• the history, development and debates around military-media management strategies (for example, official and un-official censorship, access clauses, embedding, public relations and strategic communications) through which the military attempt to manage (predominantly mainstream) media coverage of their activities
• an critical exploration of the ways militaries utilise their own media in the conduct and strategizing of contemporary war and conflict where media (leaflets, radio, social media) is integrated into battlefield strategy, particularly in counter-insurgency warfare. These strategies might include, for example, psychological operations; influencing activities, target audience analysis
• current debates around war (and peace) journalism as a distinct practice (including war journalism and objectivity, peace journalism)
• current theoretical and political understandings of the cumulative effects of military management and journalistic practice on the conduct of war and conflict (including the debates around the CNN effect, media and conflict generation, mediatisation)
• the role of media actors (war correspondents and film makers in particular) in representing war and implications for public understandings
• war, media and memory including ongoing debates and theorization of the relationship between media, memory and history in specific relation to war and conflict.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

Scientific controversy makes for a good story but it is also an important site of enquiry for media and science students. From human cloning to the internet, science and technology make up a central aspect of the form and content of the contemporary media. Science communication, public engagement with science, and scientific imaginaries, are key components of both factual and fictional genres from the press and the cinema, to the arts and science policy. Understanding the media as a central feature of contemporary science and techno cultures, and science and technology as central to media cultures, equips successful students with the ability to evaluate some of the key contemporary issues in society.

Using historical and contemporary case studies such as nuclear energy and biotechnology, the module might include any of the following issues:

• fact and fraud
• hypes and hopes
• media publics and science
• science and art
• science communication and public engagement with science
• relationships between science practice and science fiction
• cultures of news production and science reporting
• science as culture

The module considers the relationship between scientific cultures and key institutions in the UK and globally. These include (for example) Hollywood, the Wellcome Trust and the Science Media Centre. The role of science fiction and feminist interventions in science and technology studies also provide cross cutting aspects of the course.

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

Social media has become the way of framing much internet and mobile media and the implications of this turn are important. We use social media platforms in our everyday life and they have become influential in journalism, promotional culture, education and across the media industries. However, their pervasiveness and significance goes unchallenged and largely celebrated through the language of participation, communication and freedom. This module aims to stand back from the everyday ubiquity of these forms to question and analyse them by using them critically and creatively.

The module examines a range of social media platforms by engaging and using them and by equipping students to critically analyse this. We look at the promise and perils of these new forms, the histories of their emergence, their institutional and structural shape and power, and the politics, economics, aesthetics and pleasures attached to them.

You will engage social media platforms to create a small practical project and interrogate this engagement through an extended critique of use and practice.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

• 15 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

The aim of this module is to examine the ways in which representations (in the broadest sense) both orchestrate and animate our social and cultural worlds. By representation we mean the texts, institutions and practices that are circulated via various forms of mediation (mainly through the written, the visual, and the auditory forms that circulate in culture). Identity has been a key issue here and the representation of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, class, age, disability, religion (and so on) will be one theme for investigation.

Similarly the use of representation to articulate political forms of life (for instance neo-liberalism and its associated agendas) will be a key concern. The module will provide a thorough exploration of a number of key approaches to contemporary and historical representational forms and will endeavour to place these approaches within wider political, cultural and social contexts.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 3

Early work on the relation of women to film considered woman's 'to-be-looked-at-ness', examining representations of women as objects of the male gaze, constructions 'cut to the measure of [male] desire' (Laura Mulvey). You will consider the female spectator, positioned by particular film and television genres (melodrama, the 'woman's film', and soap opera). More recently, attention has shifted to women as social audiences and producers of meanings, differing from one another and constructing from texts their own meanings and pleasures. This module traces these developing and interacting strands of research, considering questions around the location of meaning, the relationship between text and context, and the usefulness of different strands of feminist research in enabling us to understand film texts and their representations and positioning of women. It considers a range of popular and feminist film texts and their viewers.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

This module examines film adaptations of fiction from the silent period to the present day. A diverse range of film texts will be considered, along with critical and theoretical perspectives on adaptation, authorship and intertextuality.

The module focuses on film adaptations of 19th-century and 20th-century novels, short stories, picture books and graphic novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Bronte, Raymond Carver, William Trevor and Maurice Sendak, and films by directors such as Roger Corman, Spike Jonze, David Cronenberg and Andrea Arnold. We will consider the significance of the idea of fidelity for the reception and theorisation of film adaptation.

The module will approach adaptation as both an industrial mode of commercial production and a creative mode of critical interpretation. Cinematic strategies deployed to reproduce literary devices will be analysed in order to think about adaptation's value for theories of medium specificity. The module will also examine the politics of crosscultural adaptation.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

Celebrities are an enduring feature of popular culture, from cinema to the news. Spectacular individuals permeate our media landscape via social media, high fashion and internet gossip.

This module encourages you to engage with historical and contemporary cultures of celebrity. It fosters a critical understanding of the construction of stardom, and of the political and cultural climates in which different kinds of celebrities and their fans emerge. In looking across the spectrum of celebrity in transnational and local contexts, you will engage with notions of:

• intimacy and distance
• authenticity and performance
• intertextuality and emotion
• glamour and disgust
• labour and identity.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

Comedy is, above all, a cultural form that invites its audiences to feel that they belong – to a social community, a class, a locality, a nation, a subculture, a gender, a sexual identity, an ethnic group, a community of interest, or a complex intersection of several of these.

This module explores the relationship between comedy and belonging by considering a number of conceptual fields, such as:

• theories of the comedic
• questions of identity formation
• notions of representation and stereotyping
• structures of power and resistance
• the sexual politics of jokes
• concepts of carnival and excess
• the idea of a 'national sense of humour'
• the use of comic strategies by 'minority' groups
• the complexities of camp
• the role of class in cultural consumption.

The initial focus is on 20th-century British popular comedy. The comic texts and practitioners studied might include Alan Bennett, Mike Leigh, Victoria Wood, the music hall tradition, the Ealing comedies, the Carry On films, Morecambe and Wise, The League of Gentlemen and The Royle Family.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

This module enables you to engage with key critical debates, films and historical contexts from the cinemas of Eastern Europe, in both communist and post-communist eras.

Topics of inquiry will consider interfaces between aesthetics, politics and society, and may include such topics as:

• socialist realism, critical realism and antirealism
• popular genres and 'new waves'
• history, memory and narratives of war and nation
• representations of gender, the individual, and the collective
• the work of auteurs (e.g., Tarkovsky, Wajda and Wolf)
• state propaganda and censorship
• filmmaking after the collapse of communism
• methodological implications of a retrospective and Western perspective.

In addition to exploring such issues, you will deepen your skills in independent research and higher-level contextual and textual analysis.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

The module investigates the overlapping technological, cultural and social dimensions of technology (particularly communication technologies, but also other domestic technologies) as they are encountered in everyday life. It explores these issues through an investigation of historical and contemporary examples (the telephone, the radio, the television, the mp3 player, the fridge, the computer and the internet) and discusses how domestic technologies are socially shaped, re-shaped, experienced and consumed. During the module you will consider major theoretical approaches to the study of everyday technologies as well as debates about their consequences and significance.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

Comedian-comedy has been one of the most persistent genres of popular Hollywood cinema since the silent era, but until recently it has received little serious critical attention. This module will consider a range of individual performers and the diverse historical, cinematic and extra-cinematic contexts in which they worked. Drawing upon a range of critical and theoretical paradigms, the module will examine the key fictional and extra-fictional features of the genre; the relations between performance, gags and narrative; the shifting relationships between comedy in film and other media (such as vaudeville and television); and the representation of class, gender, ethnicity and race. Films studied may include comedies featuring such performers as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis, Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

Performance cultures provide a unique insight into urban and social transformation. Addressing urban dance, music and language scenes, among other things, this module opens up a range of debates on the relationship between performance cultures and the urban. This in-depth exploration engages critically with theoretical perspectives on performance and and addresses the main frames through which performing the urban can be understood. You will, for example, consider the history of urban performance cultures and how they are made in different places. Developing these intellectual tools, you will enter into a series of applied discussions on performance culture’s relation to youth politics, multiculture and cosmopolitanism, and cultural technologies whilst considering the intersection of these topics with race, class and gender. You will consider how we might understand contemporary urban politics and perhaps even counter stories of its demise. You will discuss the multicultural and diasporic formation of urban performances, and how the use of YouTube by urban musicians might be similar or different to the use of sound systems or pirate radio. In the final session, you will look out to consider the future of performance cultures in the context of the urban, and indeed how the weeks’ prevision discussions prefigure different futurities.

This module will engage with a range of materials of interest to UK, EU and international students. Discussions on the relation of time to performance culture will draw on examples of changing language use in urban places. Analyses of space will engage with performances of the ‘hood, ghetto and post-code. The evaluation of struggle will consider the politics of riots/uprisings in addition to more mundane expressions of racialised, classed and gendered resistance drawn form urban ethnographies. The analysis of multiculture and cosmopolitanism will engage with the biographies of singer songwriters such as Prince, MIA and Wiley in addition to South Asian dance music. The analysis of transforming relationships between performance culture and technology will include a comparative exploration of sound systems, pirate radio and online music videos.

The module’s engagement with music, digital media, film, and everyday cultural practices, will be of interest to undergraduate students in cultural studies, media and communications, and music and film, in addition to students from wider social science and humanities disciplines. In particular it will build on MFM second year modules on ‘culture, race and ethnicity’, ‘digital cultures’, ‘gender, space and culture’, ‘media, memory, history’ and ‘sound culture and society’; and joint second-year cultural studies modules such as ‘cities and urban lives’ and ‘culture and performance’.

Overall, the module will provide you with the substantive, historical and theoretical means to analyse and engage with the complexities inherent in performing urban culture.

Subjects covered include:

1. An introduction to urban performance culture, including an outline of foundational studies on urban culture.
2. Key theoretical perspectives through which urban performance culture has been addressed, in particular focusing on ‘performativity’, vernacular and dialogue.
3. A discussion of performance cultures in time, their relation to the past and the creative transformations they undergo.
4. An evaluation of how performance culture is constituted in space (in particular urban space).
5. An critical discussion of performance culture as a site of political struggle and how this intersects with class, race and gender.
6. An analysis of performance culture as a manifestation of multiculture and cosmopolitanism.
7. An analysis of the transforming relationships between urban culture and technology.
8. An evaluation of the future of urban culture.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

This module will present a critical review of key aspects of contemporary theory, research and practice in political communications. It will allow you to explore how these may be challenged by and transformed by new technologies and by sophisticated methods for shaping personalised messages. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, you will examine the key theoretical concepts pertaining to political communication as normally understood in the West, then pose normative and empirical questions on how they can be assessed outside those contexts.

The module will provide you with the ability to assess the role and function of communication in the public sphere and to evaluate the management and practice of communication within the political process. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to consider and reflect on political communication within and across different national and regional contexts.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

This module centres on the critical study of sexualities and how they are represented in a range of film texts. Through screenings, lectures, seminars and self-directed study, you will be introduced to the various ways in which sexualities have been both theorised and represented in a range of film texts.

Debates considered in the module may include:

• the politics of sexual identification
• the idea of sexual ‘perversity’
• sexual stereotyping (especially of lesbians and gays)
• and the critical concept of ‘queer’ in theory
• identity politics and cinematic genre (queer cinema).

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 3

This module examines the multifaceted relationships between cinema and the city as they have developed over the 20th century and beyond. Since the emergence of cinema in the 1890s, the city has been a persistent onscreen presence as setting and backdrop, subject and theme. Cities have also continuously played a central role in the production, circulation and exhibition of films. Urban centres such as Paris and Berlin, New York and Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Mumbai have operated as bases for film studios and location shoots, as sites of spectatorship and consumption, and as key nodes of film culture. Moreover, the dynamic interplay between city and film has also been the subject of theoretical enquiry as far back as the 1920s, when the correlations between the modern metropolis and cinematic spectator were first analysed in depth.

On this module, you will examine these interrelated issues across a range of cinematic and theoretical texts. Paying attention to style, narrative and ideology, we will investigate how films have represented cities as both real and imaginary spaces of excitement, pleasure, creativity and revolution, as well as poverty, crime, alienation and control. With reference to specific historical and geographical contexts, we will consider how films have engaged with and participated in processes of urban growth, decline and redevelopment, and examine issues of space, politics and identity with reference to race, gender and sexuality. Throughout, you will engage with an interdisciplinary body of critical literature on cinema and the city in film studies, urban geography, architecture and visual culture and place films within analytical frameworks such as ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’.