Film & Media Studies

This course offers a critical examination of the resurgence of “folk horror cinema” in British cinema since the 2000s. Based on cultural references involving neo-pagan cults, witchcraft, and a largely fantasized rewriting of the national past in terms of pre-Christian heritage, this profoundly ambiguous tradition has variously been re-appropriated by feminist as well as masculinist discourses and has given rise to a range of aesthetic propositions, from exploitation cinema to “elevated horror,” and analyzes how British and American horror cinemas have both developed a subgenre based on stories that resort to some folklore deeply engrained in a country’s traditions. Using recurring themes like religion, hostile landscapes, and supernatural creatures, these films rely on man’s deepest fears, and they may also be a means for some artists to criticize the human tendency to act in some superstitious and harmful ways.

This course considers and seeks to understand contemporary Japanese media culture and urban culture mainly from the perspective of sociology and media theory. Specifically, it examines various cultural texts and phenomena along the themes of "time," "space," and "media." The course aims to enable students to develop the basic ability to examine modern culture.

This course explores the origins of cinema in Japan and its development up to the present day. It investigates cultural influences that shaped approaches to filmmaking as well as narrative conventions and genres. The course also investigates how Japanese films have shaped foreign views of Japan and Japanese culture. Particular attention will be paid to issues and problems of film study in relation to cinema from Japan, including the construction of the “Japaneseness” of Japanese films.

In this course, students study films from the Franco regime in Spain and into the Transition to democracy. The films selected in different ways either express or subvert the ideology and iconography of Francoism. The films offer a combination of commercial and art-house cinema. Students explore issues such as the representation of gender, family, nationhood and religion, issues of censorship, ideology, iconography, and the dynamics of spectatorship. 

This course requires students to put theory into practice by cultivating a sense of the history and theory of documentary alongside the chance to make a short documentary film. The first part of the course requires students to produce a short documentary film. The second part of the course charts the historical development of documentary filmmaking through the examination of a number of case studies ranging from the early 20th century to the present day, giving further opportunity to examine the inter-relatedness of theory and practice in the work of well-known documentarists.

This course develops an intersectional understanding of gender and media research, examining the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Interrogating a broad range of media forms, it introduces key concepts within gender and media scholarship and equips students with the theoretical and methodological tools for undertaking independent research projects. Responding to key debates and events in current popular media culture, topics can include the shifting constructions of femininity, masculinity, transgender, and LGBTIQ+ subjectivities; feminist approaches to media production; industry appropriations of empowerment ideals and "woke capitalism"; and emerging trends of celebrity feminisms. 

This course explores the emergence and transformations of women’s cinema in Britain since the 1950s, with a focus on the contemporary period. It examines the position of women directors within the film industry (mainstream productions and art films) as well as their appropriation of genre and history.

This course surveys realism and formalism in cinema by focusing on key realist and formalist texts; leading formalist and realist filmmakers, and major realist film-making movements. The course introduces film theories and the philosophical debate between realism and formalism. The course focuses on theoretical investigation, but examines realist and formalist theories by closely observing films to which such theories are applied. 

This course looks at some of the varieties of independent cinema that have emerged from America since the early 1980s. Films by directors such as John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Todd Haynes, Lisa Cholodenko, and Richard Linklater, are examined both within the context of their cinematic precursors and influences, and the wider social and institutional circumstances that helped to create audiences for them.

This course focuses on the political aspects of Hollywood cinema by questioning the links that exist between the production of films and the ideological structures hidden behind the images. It discusses how genre cinema appears to be a "dream factory" whose specific economic organization is accompanied by ideological and political schemes that should be identified in the perspective of political and cultural studies. The course demonstrates how much cinema contributes to the diffusion of the traditional values of the American Dream and how the big studios manage to find a balance between submission to the commercial constraints imposed by the market, simplification of political phenomena (whether situational or systemic), and artistic research.