Film & Media Studies

This course looks at relationship between experimental film-making, documentary and interactive technology, in a rapidly expanding mediascape. This course will explore the history of non-linear storytelling approaches, within the realm of film, video, digital, interactive media and VR, guiding the students through a path that will bring them to design a first experimental interactive project of their own. Experimental films have challenged linear storytelling in a wide range of artistic, poetic, humorous, political and highly creative ways, always distinguishing themselves by a non-linear and non-narrative movement of thought that draws on many different sources of knowledge. Digital media, immersed in a cross- and trans-media landscape, are now embracing a stronger focus on non-linearity and the redefinition of the relationship between story and audience. Through embodiment, haptic enablers and 360° immersive storytelling, digital storytellers are exploring new and innovative applications that may well become part of the conventions of the future.

This course introduces key theoretical approaches to media as technologies and cultural forms. It first explores the media's relation to two ongoing processes underlying contemporary society and culture: globalization and digitization. It then discusses how media globalization and digitization have shaped our daily experiences; and been associated with critical issues concerning the construction of our identities and societies. Topics include an examination of the production, consumption, circulation and regulation of a wide range of media texts and cultural artifacts (e.g., magazines, television programs, music, fashion), and how they resonate in everyday life on the individual, local, national, and global levels; the audiences and their consumption of media and cultural texts; how the notion of audiences has evolved in the changing global media landscape; and how consumption of media and cultural texts (as a form of everyday practice) is concerned with various forms of cultural politics and power. Other course topics include: media globalization and spaces of identity, media convergence: towards digital cultures; the Japanese Craze; the Korean Wave; from Reality TV to YouTube: A democratic or demotic turn; fan cultures and use-led transnationalism.

This seminar addresses the possibly complicated relationships between war and cinema: films used as a means to prepare war and then to wage it; warlike phenomenon as it is actually described (or not) in movies; cinema used to (try to) tell about what war is for the combatants and for the civilians who endure it, and/or on the home front; relationships between films and the memory(ies) of war. Whilst wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are the primary focus of the seminar, incursions in a wider chronology occur occasionally in the course. The work is based on the study of movies: screenplays, directors, and actors; context of production and of financing; nature (fiction or documentary); content (plot, main characters, stylistic choices, possible messages); reception; situation in the history and the memory of the warlike phenomenon. Some more in-depth and more critical analyses of specific scenes are strongly encouraged. The course occasionally uses series and also relies on the books from which some of the films were made. For example: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, CAPITAINE CONAN, LA CHAMBRE DES OFFICIERS, ARMY OF SHADOWS, THE RAILWAY MAN, THE SILENCE OF THE SEA, SUITE FRANCAISE, HEART OF DARKNESS (FOR APOCALYPSE NOW).

This course provides an introduction to genre studies for screen texts. This investigation of genre is supported by a sampling of film and television genre texts. The concept of genre provides a lens for considering the industrial, historical and sociopolitical factors which shape screen media. While drawing from a range of global examples, this course will also pay particular attention to the ways genre has been adapted for African audiences and South African audiences, in particular. The course explores a number of key questions related to genre: (1) What is genre and how are genres defined? (2) How do industries influence and shape genre texts? (3) What role do audiences play in making meaning and how do genres determine the practices and expectations of audiences? (4) How do we account for generic change and hybridity over time and in response to new technologies; and (5)What are politics of genres which travel across different national and economic contexts? The core course will be accompanied by a seminar series in which students may select a more focussed path of study examining a genre of interest to them. DP requirements: All written work must be submitted by the stipulated dates. Students who miss more than two seminars will lose their DPs. Assessment: Assessment for the lecture series will be based on classwork (30%) plus one two-hour examination (20%). The lecture series counts 50% and the seminar 50% of the final mark for the course.

The course examines media and social development in Mainland China since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. Using key concepts and theories from the political economy of media and developmental communication studies, it introduces different periods of media reform and social change from the era of Chairman Mao to the period of harmonious society. Emphasis is attached to post-1989 media regulatory systems, media industrialization, and their influence on accomplishing developmental goals such as poverty alleviation, democratization, and communication empowerment. The course explores Mainland China's key media sectors including the printing press (newspapers and magazines), film, broadcasting media (radio and TV), and new networked communication tools (Internet and mobile phones), as well as alternative social formations through Internet activism, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and transnational developmental projects. Assessment: two essays (50% each).

This course introduces students to German media theory by discussing different historical and contemporary examples where cultural critics, philologists, philosophers, and artists have undertaken research about media and communication in Germany and, more specifically, in Berlin. The focus is on the period from the 1920s through the present. The course builds bridges between historical positions and contemporary ones, providing a sense for continuities and discontinuities in media theoretical positions and formats of media critique. Through the collective experience and critical discussion of texts, films and field trips, students gain a wide understanding of the problems and objects of media-theoretical inquiry and of its historical and geographical context. This course considers the common themes and issues in media theory and media critique and the development of media theories within the context of Berlin. Altogether, this course has three intents: It serves as an introduction to problems in media studies for newcomers; it particularly focuses on media studies in Germany and Berlin for those already more familiar with questions in the field; it enquires about Berlin as both production site and object of media research.

This course introduces key theories in the fields of media, communications, and media industry. This course considers the following three issues: how a range of forms of power are related to communication and media; how these forms of power are constructed and shaped through the use of languages, different forms of communication, and the production and representation of media; how these forms of power are concerned with everyday life on individual, local, national and global scales. Specific emphasis is placed on the growing importance of media institutions (e.g., television networks) and digital platforms (e.g., Google, Apple) in the digital and global age. How media institutions and digital platforms have increasingly functioned as centers of symbolic power in the shaping of our personal and public life is explored.

This course explores the sound track to life in modern Britain. From the concert culture and street ballads of the late eighteenth century to the brass bands and music halls of the Victorians, and from the dawn of the ‘Jazz Age’ to rock ‘n’ roll, punk and beyond, this course focuses on the ways in which music has shaped, and been shaped by, British society. Transformative processes – the Industrial Revolution, democratization, imperial expansion and decline, campaigns for gender, racial and sexual equality, to name a few – have all made their mark on British music, just as British music has played its part in bringing these changes into being. The course revolves around a series of repeating thematic motifs whose development we will track from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. In these years, music became a way of defining class hierarchies, enforcing women’s social marginalization, and projecting British imperial power. And yet it was also a weapon of resistance that offered a sense of solidarity, of identity, of dignity, to those marginalized in British life; the musical lives and struggles of the working classes, of women, and of Black and Asian British communities are central to this history. This is also a course designed by a historian, for historians. While music is our central focus, an ability to read music is not required. Our emphasis will be on the social and cultural meanings of music-making and listening, meanings that are accessible through a wide range of sources, from diaries, memoirs, letters, magazines, newspapers, and official archives to visual images and material culture. That said, we will do plenty of listening to music as we seek to understand how the form that music took – the nature of the sounds being created – reflected and challenged social values and norms. While this course finishes with the sounds of Britpop in the 1990s, poised on the verge of our current internet age which has opened a new chapter in musical life, the implications of our study of music and social change in modern Britain carry important legacies that continue to define the music and society of today.

Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most acclaimed and influential of all filmmakers, and this course employs the methods of the “new film history” to explore the director's work and the debates surrounding it. The course investigates the production and reception of key films, considers aspects of visual style and technique, and examines the representation of nation, class, gender, sexuality, and politics within specific historical contexts. Hitchcock's critical reputation and his influence on contemporary filmmakers are also considered. Students model a holistic approach to film analysis with reference to both textual and contextual factors through the deconstruction, decoding, and interpretation of filmic imagery, sound, dialogue, and story.