Film and Screen Studies: Current Undergraduate Modules

Year 1

Introduction to Film

This module introduces you to a variety of ways of approaching the study of film. It looks at a broad range of critical perspectives - including cultural, historic, artistic and economic - in order to explore the social significance and impact of the world's most popular form of entertainment.

Silent Cinema: Stars, Industry and Audiences

This module introduces students to the cultural and aesthetic significance of silent film from its early inception in the late 1890s to the late 1920s. Cited as a form of "universal language" the silent movie has rarely been studied as anything other than a primitive "mute" product, devoid, not only of sound, but of artistic and cultural significance. With recent restoration efforts and re-issues of some of the major silent classics, however, film scholars have begun to gain access to increasing numbers of films and have subsequently begun to reassess their previously held views.

Introduction to Popular Culture

This module will introduce students to the ways in which a wide range of debates and theories about popular culture have informed the study of popular film and screen texts. Through an investigation of mass culture theory and the Frankfurt School through structuralism to postmodernism and cultural populism students will be asked to consider several key questions that have guided these theories: what is 'popular'? How can we judge when popular culture is good or bad? What is the place and function of popular culture in modern society?

Introduction to Television

This module provides students with the opportunity to study key debates in the new and growing discipline of television studies. The module will introduce students to relevant work on genre, representation, the public service tradition and realism in relation to popular contemporary programming.

World Cinema

World cinema is a term which has gained currency in recent years - reflecting an increasing interest in, and awareness of 'other' cinematic traditions - although its meaning is relatively unstable. This module introduces students to a range of 'world' cinemas, focussing on 'national' film, whilst acknowledging the importance of considering the 'local' in relation to the regional, cross cultural and global. It provides an overview of cinemas such as those of Europe, Scandinavia, Iran, India, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and new American cinema.

New Media Project

This is a project-based research module. Working in teams, students will carry out self-directed research into a specific area of new media production or practice. Project topics include, but are not limited to: areas of digital media production (such as CGI, digital radio, digital television, digital film production, gaming etc). Areas of digital media practice, such as online news production, blogging, podcasting, or p2p filesharing). project on music looking at both digital music technologies and file-sharing.

Applied Film Studies

This module introduces film studies in two forms: storyboarding and shooting a short film, and the analysis of film techniques. Students watch and discuss a selection of films and are introduced to the vocabulary of film analysis and to the history of two genres. Students are formed into groups, each of which design and make a short film, using 'storyboarding' and other techniques

Year 2

Understanding Hollywood: Film Theory and Practice

This module will enable student to develop an advanced understanding of the ways in which 'film' as an academic discipline, is approached from a Film Studies perspective. This module uses Hollywood as a paradigm in order to introduce the advanced study of film as a commercial, cultural and aesthetic institution. The dominance of Hollywood cinema has meant that its particular formal and thematic paradigms are commonly accepted as the norm in commercial filmmaking. This module will critically examine those paradigms as they operated in the classical period, and on through the post-classical Hollywood of the late 1960s to the present day.

Planning A Film

This module will introduce film-making in both theoretical and practical forms: It will cover the pre-production, production and post-production techniques of filmmaking. It will also facilitate the writing, producing, shooting and editing of a short film.

Television, Representation and Gender

This module provides students with the opportunity to study key debates surrounding the representation of gender on the small screen. The module identifies a range of gender roles as they appear in contemporary popular programming and ask students to consider the ways in which they can be understood in relation to wider debates about feminism, femininity and the much touted crisis of masculinity.

Film and British National Identity

This module explores British National Identity/Identities through an examination of 'British Cinema'. Combining the study of film and cultural identity allows not only an in-depth investigation of the history, aesthetics and structures of British cinema, but also allows for an understanding of the growing importance of the diversity of British identities and of film as a site for the negotiation of Britishness in the 20th century and beyond.

Popular Cinema and Culture

This module analyses the various places from which we experience contemporary film cultures, whether as spectators, consumers, collectors or "connoisseurs". It begins from the premise that "film" is not a separate and distinct entity, but is embedded within a realm of products - magazines, reviews, toys, games, music, fashions, and "tie-ins". Drawing on key strands of cultural and film theories, we examine contemporary popular cinema as both a social and an aesthetic practice, with particular emphasis on the formation of "taste" cultures across fields of cinematic production, distribution and consumption.

Stardom and Celebrity

This module provide students with the opportunity to study key debates in the field of star studies and celebrity culture. The module will enable students to look at the emergence of the star system, the production and circulation of star images in the studio period and the idea of the celebrity as commodity in contemporary culture. The module will look at a range of celebrity documentaries and encourage students to identify the ways in which notions of cultural value, performance and privacy make meaning for stardom and celebrity in particular sexual, social and historical contexts.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen

This module provides students with an in depth introduction and understanding of the highly stylized movies featuring sinister plots, shady characters, sexual tension, chaos and confusion that were dubbed 'Film Noir' by film critics in the 1970s. Students will be introduced to a range of critical perspectives that investigate the often ambiguous nature of Film Noir through 'Classic Noir' to more contemporary films dubbed neo-noir.

Making a Film

This module introduces film-making in both theoretical and practical forms. It covers the pre-production, production and post-production techniques of filmmaking. It will also facilitate the writing, producing, shooting and editing of a short film. Through lectures and seminars, students look at the full range of production techniques and processes. Areas covered include not only the aesthetic requirements of writing, directing and editing, but also the practical considerations of setting up a production company, budgeting, fundraising, promotion and distribution.

Young People and the New Media

Taking as its starting point the rejection of the idea of direct causal links between the media and children's behaviour and beliefs, this module aims to explore the ways in which recent work in the field has generated new insights into young people's interactions with new media forms. By examining a range of new media, including mobile phones, the Internet , computer and videogames alongside television, this module explores the ways in which young people utilize and appropriate new technologies.

Year 3

Film Audiences

Using Hollywood as a paradigm, this module investigates the relationship between films and their audiences by exploring key theoretical concepts in audience and reception studies. Themes which the module explores will include international audiences' responses to Hollywood films, and issues in 'gendered' reception. The course enables students to see that through analysing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history we can see how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity are vital to an understanding of film audiences' reception and consumption.

European Cinema

European cinema has had an extraordinarily rich and varied history. This module offers students an opportunity to study some of its key movements and moments. Themes such as national identity, aesthetics and politics, the avant-garde, modernism and post-modernism, are explored in relation to French, Italian, Danish, German and Russian film. European cinema's origins and subsequent development - often as the self-conscious antithesis of the 'Hollywood' style - is considered, as is its current status within an increasingly globalised cultural arena.

Power, Pleasure and Feminist Film Criticism

This module provide students with the opportunity to study the key debates in feminist film theory and encourage them to consider the significance of the gendered gaze in mainstream Hollywood film. The module enables students to look at the representations of sexuality and gender in the cinema and allow them to identify the ways in which a range of films from the pseudo soft-core text to the shopping film create meaning and ideological significance for the spectator.

Psychos, Killers and Voyeurs: the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

This module provides students with the opportunity to concentrate exclusively on one director. The module enables students to study the development and main themes of Hitchcock's work in depth. It approaches this in several inter-related ways. Firstly, it traces the development of Hitchcock's career, paying attention to the changes and shifts within his work. Secondly, it considers a range of theoretical approaches to Hitchcock and examine his films within these contexts.

Black American Film and Popular Culture

This interdisciplinary module investigates three, specific but interconnected, forms of black American popular cultural expression within the central framework of "Cultural Icons and Cultural Identity". The three sections of the course allow for an examination of African American popular culture, an investigation of the contributions of the black creative icon/artist to that culture and the formation of black cultural identity throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The three units of the module are: African American Writing and Film - Adapting the Image: from Script to Screen; Black American Film - Cultural Identity and the Black Film Aesthetic; Black Popular Music and Film - From Blues to Hip-Hop Culture.

Film and Screen Studies Dissertation

The dissertation allows final year students to investigate a research question that they have themselves proposed. The independent research will be supervised by a member of the Film and Screen Studies staff, through a regular series of tutorials and meetings. The dissertation is a chance for final year students to really show what they can do with the range of skills and knowledge they have acquired during their studies and translate this into an extended piece of assessed work.

Cartoon Time: Thinking Through Animation

What is animation? This module explores this deceptively simple question by studying the historical developments of animated film-making: from the origins of early animation in 'trick films' and the mass popularisation of animation through the cartoon 'short' to the computer-based feature films and effects technologies.

Computer and Videogames

Computer and videogames are a central element of the contemporary media landscape and it is essential to study them both on their own terms and in the context of the wider media environment. This module encourages students to unpack what they, the contemporary audience, and the community of scholars of game studies understands by 'interactive entertainment' and 'computer and videogames'.

Creative and Cultural Industries Project

This module allows you to extend you knowledge of your subject area by taking your interests out into the 'real' world via negotiated project work. The module is project based and these can take and variety of forms. All projects are shaped by in-depth negotiation of methods and aims between students and tutors. Skills, workshops, master classes and technical support will be provided via Arts Work's Creative Writing Lab.

All projects will involve taking some aspect of your subject and exploring it in the context of current market forces/demands/needs. Your project may entail a placement and will almost certainly involve some contact with a creative industry.