Film & Media Studies

The course presents the image of Scandinavia and Europe and its culture and history in television series and films. The examples range from German historical drama and British literary adaptations to current representatives of Scandinavian television drama. Furthermore, the course presents and uses theories that highlight the phenomena discussed in the course.

This interdisciplinary course examines the representation of London in a variety of cultural outputs from the Victorian to the contemporary period. In particular, it analyzes how writers and artists have expressed their perception of the city as a dark site of social tensions, mystery, crime, and detective work. Alongside representative literary texts (from Dickens and Conan Doyle to Ackroyd), the course makes room for a significant amount of visual material such as illustrations (Doré, Cruikshank), films (Hitchcock, Reed), television dramas (Ripper Street, Sherlock), and documentaries (Keiller, Ackroyd). It is also supplemented by visits to UCL Collections and other London Museums.

This course offers a theoretical and practice-based approach to exploring the nature of digital gaming. It is eclectic in scope and students are guided to make their own digital games and to critically reflect upon what their games are able to achieve. Students then explore the relationship between games, narratives, and stories, including the famous ludology versus narratology debate that characterized the birth pangs of game studies as a field. Can games tell stories? If so, what kind of stories are they most suited to telling? Next, students consider the distinctive but also varied practices that characterize gaming. These include counterplay, transgressive play, casual play, competitive play, speedruns, etc. Games are also considered as philosophical texts that can prompt us to rethink and question reality, agency, time, and our relationships with our in-game avatars. 

The course provides a critical understanding of the medium of film. It covers basic cinematic and literary terms and perspectives for film analysis and analyzes and discusses a variety of English-language films from diverse perspectives.

This course explores the dynamic and complex intersection of media, culture and the city in global metropolises. The course provides students with a comprehensive introduction to key theoretical issues on digital screen, media, spectacle, urban experience, popular culture, and globalization in global cities. It also critically discusses methodological issues on the analytical framework and knowledge-forms in media and cultural research for local contexts. Students are encouraged to engage with current debates on epistemological and methodological questions in the fields of media and communication studies as well as urban and visual cultural studies and to enrich their knowledge of urban culture and politics in a systematic way. In doing so, the course helps students to grasp the complexity of media culture and to analyze creatively and critically a broad range of media products and cultural materials.