Film & Media Studies

The cinema of action and adventure encompasses a range of genres and incorporates the output and influences of a number of national traditions and industries. Writings about action and adventure likewise address theoretical frames as varied as gender and power, vengeance and manifest destiny, the philosophies of life and death, psychological trauma, and the socio-political positioning of discourses of cinema itself in both the popular and the scholarly context. This course addresses this range of topics examining films and writings from several analytical perspectives under the general banner of film genre and genre theory.

This course provides students with benchmarks to understand the French media system. It also studies the history of the press, the status of journalists, press groups, and press politics. Lastly, it helps students understand the specificities of the media in France in order to be able to make reasoned international comparisons.

This course is an introduction to the central art form in the global media culture of film. This medium has dominated popular culture during the last century and continues to function as a historical frame of reference for understanding the development of other audiovisual media. In this course, the film medium is approached analytically from an interdisciplinary perspective and students are introduced to its many functions as art, documentation, entertainment, political propaganda, and anthropological resource. This international aspect of film is emphasized in this course, where students develop a critical understanding of a range of (trans)national film contexts from Europe, East and Southeast Asia, Hollywood, North Africa, and the Middle East. Film culture aims at engaging the students in several ways. In part, the course focuses on the current historical and political meaning of film and its position as a globalized mass media. In addition, students develop film analytical skills through critical discussions of selected works and the contexts surrounding their production and exhibition. Film culture is developed as an elective that combines the research-based approach of different teachers to create a nuanced overview of the medium's history. Through different subjects, this course develops students' analytical and cultural-historical understanding of diverse film genres like feature film, documentary, and experimental film. The course is structured as traditional university lectures combined with film screenings, student presentations, and a research writing workshop that guides the students through the process of producing a research paper of high quality. The course may include an excursion to a film festival or other film-cultural event.

This course gives students keys to understand the contemporary international pop-culture, its sources, stereotypes, typical scenarios, stories, characters and the role of Europe, USA, and Japan in shaping it. It focuses on the mutual influences between video games, comics, animation, movies, TV shows, and novels. The conceptual background is pragmatic sociology and ethnology. The ethnological conception of culture is key, though the class does not focus on theory. The class first presents a typology of medias and imaginaries of pop-culture. In the second part, it offers a selective history of pop-culture focusing on the emergence of the elements that now form the mainstream pop-culture.

This course is a practical workshop where students create a methodological reading grid to allow them to decode with certainty what news is factual and what can sometimes be used for propaganda purposes. The course covers how to review images, sources, publication dates, itineraries, virality, and context to authenticate the veracity of content.

 

This course explores the theories and methodologies that are used to analyze and understand cinema from an academic perspective. It examines the film industry, film as a discipline, genres of film (documentary, experimental, and fiction), semiotics and structuralism of cinema, reception of films and the culture of fans, realism, Russian formalism, feminism and gender studies.

This course provides the tools for textual analysis and provides a foundation for future work in the Film and TV program at the University of Glasgow. The course is based on an open-minded approach to medium specificity introducing the study of film and television as audio-visual languages with their own common, and specific, codes and conventions.

This course focuses on the creation of an original script for screen. It builds upon skills learned in the second year Creative Writing subject Writing for Screen. Through practical workshops screenwriting techniques are practiced in three areas: Film, TV and new media forms. Students develop a creative project comprising a concept and script excerpts from either: A feature length film, a TV pilot, or a new media project such as a website, blog or digital artwork. Advanced Screenwriting draws upon a wide range of examples and contemporary applications of screenwriting, including fictional and documentary forms, along with interdisciplinary web-based innovations. As a result, on completion of the subject students should have an understanding of how screenwriting history, common techniques, and new advances in the form relate to current practice.

Historical films are one of the principal means through which the public engages with history, yet they are also a continuous source of controversy. This QMUL Model course offers an introduction to the historical film genre by examining American, British, European and Japanese films made during the past 20 years. It considers the debates surrounding the representation of history on film, and the influence and impact that historical films have on the public imagination and understanding of history. Throughout, we will explore the aesthetic pleasures that historical films offer to audiences, as well as the wider public discussion and debate that historical films provoke among scholars, critics and journalists in print and online.