Undergraduate Film And Visual Culture 2021-2022

What is Visual Culture? Over the last twenty years, the visual landscape has become digital, virtual, viral, and global. A vibrant cross-section of scholars and practitioners from Art History, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Film Studies have responded, not only engaging contemporary image production and consumption, but also the foundations of visual knowledge: What is an image? What is vision? How and why do we look, gaze, and spectate? From the nomadic pathways of the digital archive to the embodied look that looks back, this course will introduce students to the key concepts that shape this fluid field.

This course offers an introduction to the language and practice of formal film analysis. Each week we will explore a different element of film form and analyze the ways in which it shapes the moving image. This course invites students to think about formal elements within and across a wide range of genres, styles, historical moments, and national contexts. By the end of this course, the successful FS1508 student will be able to recognize and communicate the ways in which meaning is made in cinema.

The first half of a film history sequence at the second year level, Visualising Modernity focuses on crucial moments, concepts and cinematic works from the period 1895 to 1945. Students will be marked according to a mid-term essay, a final exam, short assignments on Blackboard, and attendance in lectures and tutorials.

The second half of a film history sequence at the second year level, Cinema & Revolution focuses on crucial moments, concepts and cinematic works from the period between 1945 and the present. Students will be marked according to a mid-term essay, a final exam, short assignments on Blackboard, and participation and attendance in lectures and tutorials. 

This course explores how cinema has interacted with war, beginning with Kracauer's theory of the collective unconscious during the post-World War 1 period of Germany before discussing Bazin's approach to Italian neorealism and its provocative post-fascist landscapes. Since the genesis of cinema, armed conflict has been a recurring topic for fiction filmmakers and this module will question how and why key representations have emerged. This approach will include challenging the presentation of European Empires, the frequent jingoism and Orientalism of Hollywood's Vietnam War, China's contemporary "Wolf Warrior" blockbusters and the more recent attempts to readdress colonial or military presence in Africa. Contextualising the study of film with a concurrent understanding of geopolitics and cultural changes, this module will also offer students a study in past and present as well in formative, historical, psychological and realist approaches to cinema.

Medical images and illustrations are important in medical research, clinical practice, and public communication. This course employs the tools and insights of the humanities (e.g. history and philosophy of science, visual culture) to explore questions such as: What makes medical images so important? What roles do they play? How do images inform and provide evidence? How do images depict what they are about? How are images produced and why does it matter? Do image-makers follow pictorial traditions? How do medical images travel between research communities and the public? 

The course will focus on the relationship between the cinema and the urban environment, focusing on specific thematic issues. These include: the city and cinematic visions of utopia/dystopia; the city and the figure of the detective/flaneur/flaneuse; the city as site of cultural encounter and social conflict; the city as a site of globalisation; the city and production and consumption; the city and the development/reworking of cinematic tradition. The course will also explore the relationship between the experience of cinematic space and urban space, and how they have been interconnected throughout the history of cinema.

This course will allow students to engage in documentary production by putting into practice methodologies they have studied through a series of seminar discussions, workshops and screenings. Students will research two topics (one assessed and one non-assessed) and work in teams to film them and utilize the Media Lab's facilities to complete the projects through post-production.

Through the effects of technological progress, industrialisation, deforestation, mining, our dependence on fossil fuels and plastics, and the testing of nuclear weapons, humans have become geological agents – radically transforming the Earth System in ways that will leave a trace for millions of years to come. This realisation has come to be known as the ‘Anthropocene’ – the time of humans. The implications – materially, emotionally and intellectually – are vast and complex. How do writers and artists respond to this complexity? What role can literature, film and visual art play in our understanding of it? This course addresses these and other questions. By studying select works of literature, film and visual art from the last sixty years alongside critical, theoretical and scientific writing on the Anthropocene, can we identify those images that might be thought adequate to our predicament?

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within Film and Visual Culture.

This course explores how cinema has interacted with war, beginning with Kracauer's theory of the collective unconscious during the post-World War 1 period of Germany before discussing Bazin's approach to Italian neorealism and its provocative post-fascist landscapes. Since the genesis of cinema, armed conflict has been a recurring topic for fiction filmmakers and this module will question how and why key representations have emerged. This approach will include challenging the presentation of European Empires, the frequent jingoism and Orientalism of Hollywood's Vietnam War, China's contemporary "Wolf Warrior" blockbusters and the more recent attempts to readdress colonial or military presence in Africa. Contextualising the study of film with a concurrent understanding of geopolitics and cultural changes, this module will also offer students a study in past and present as well in formative, historical, psychological and realist approaches to cinema.

The course will focus on the relationship between the cinema and the urban environment, focusing on specific thematic issues. These include: the city and cinematic visions of utopia/dystopia; the city and the figure of the detective/fl-neur/fl-neuse; the city as site of cultural encounter and social conflict; the city as a site of globalisation; the city and production and consumption; the city and the development/reworking of cinematic tradition. The course will also explore the relationship between the experience of cinematic space and urban space, and how they have been interconnected throughout the history of cinema.

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within Film and Visual Culture.

This course will allow students to engage in documentary production by putting into practice methodologies they have studied through a series of seminar discussions, workshops and screenings. Students will research two topics (one assessed and one non-assessed) and work in teams to film them and utilize the Media Lab's facilities to complete the projects through post-production.

Through the effects of technological progress, industrialisation, deforestation, mining, our dependence on fossil fuels and plastics, and the testing of nuclear weapons, humans have become geological agents – radically transforming the Earth System in ways that will leave a trace for millions of years to come. This realisation has come to be known as the ‘Anthropocene’ – the time of humans. The implications – materially, emotionally and intellectually – are vast and complex. How do writers and artists respond to this complexity? What role can literature, film and visual art play in our understanding of it? This course addresses these and other questions. By studying select works of literature, film and visual art from the last sixty years alongside critical, theoretical and scientific writing on the Anthropocene, can we identify those images that might be thought adequate to our predicament?