Film Analysis: Hollywood Narrative and Style

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Film Analysis 1 explores the diverse uses to which filmmakers put such key techniques of cinematic expression as narrative, cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound, performance and special effects. You will explore not simply how such techniques are accomplished (ie the creative choices available to filmmakers) but also the potential they have for generating meaning and pleasure when combined together to produce filmic texts. The module is based around a series of reading assignments, which will be discussed in seminars along with the week's set film and extracts from other films. In particular, Film Analysis 1 examines one of the most influential and most pervasive models of cinema: the classical narrative film produced during the era of the Hollywood studio system (from approximately 1915 to 1960). You will consider several films from this era, as well as films produced subsequently, in the light of influential propositions by David Bordwell and other film scholars regarding the systematic organisation of stylistic and narrative norms within classical Hollywood storytelling.

Issues in Film Studies 1: European Film Cultures

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module is an introduction to the history and study of film and cinema. Through lectures, seminars and screenings, you will explore silent and sound cinema, cinematic practices in different countries, and the aesthetic and institutional procedures of various film industries.

Issues in Film Studies 2: Global Film Cultures

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Building on Issues in Film Studies 2, this module continues to examine modes of film making and cinematic contexts from a range of national settings and historical moments. You will both expand your knowledge of different cinematic practices, and deepen your skills of textual and contextual analysis.

Working with Film

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module is designed to help you to develop your study skills in preparation for working with film in more advanced ways in years 2 and 3 of your degree. The skills we will work on in particular include those of detailed, scholarly, film analysis and interpretation, critically, historically and theoretically informed film studies research, and multimedia forms of academic presentation and writing.

By focusing on a single set film [in 2012-13, this is intended to be Los olvidados/The Young and the Damned (Luis Bunuel, Mexico, 1950)], the module will offer the space and guidance to enable you to develop your own critical case study. Weekly lectures will introduce you to the film, its production and reception contexts, as well as to a wide range of potentially relevant issues to consider when establishing how you will go on to work with it. The lectures will also introduce you to a range of film studies skills and methods, including ways of conducting and presenting film research afforded by multimedia technology. In seminars you will analyse the set film, and its possible connections with other films, and explore your ideas and research methods under the close supervision of a tutor, as well as present your work in progress.

Creative Production: Digital Media

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module will introduce you to using a range of desktop publishing tools in the creation of visual information design. You will learn, and critically reflect upon, key processes and techniques involved with visual research, page layout and composition incorporating the use of graphics and text. You will also work individually to produce a series of digital artefacts to a set brief.

Creative Production: Digital Media

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's course will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to interactive media and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You learn key processes and techniques involved in producing a simple web project. You will work individually to realise set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed website to a specified brief.

Creative Production: Photography

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to the still image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in digital imaging: research, composition, exposure, and editing. You will work individually to complete set exercises both in and out of class, and produce a series of images to a set brief.

Creative Production: Photography

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to using the still image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in digital imaging: research, composition, exposure, editing. You will work individually to on set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed series of images to a set brief.

Creative Production: Sound

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to sound production and will encourage you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your and others' work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in sound design, such as research, acoustics, voice recording and editing. You will undertake exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed sound design piece to a set brief.

Creative Production: Sound

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to sound production, and will encourage you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your and others' work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in sound design, such as research, acoustics, voice recording and editing. You will undertake exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed sound design piece to a set brief.

Creative Production: Video

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to narrative using the moving image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in video production: research, scripting, camera, sound and editing. You will work in a team to complete set exercises both in and out of class and produce a video project to a set brief.

Creative Production: Video

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will introduce you to using a range of desktop publishing tools in the creation of visual information design. You will learn, and critically reflect upon, key processes and techniques involved with visual research, page layout and composition incorporating the use of graphics and text. You will have the chance to work individually to produce a series of digital artefacts to a set brief.

Culture and the Everyday

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module explores 'doing culture' in everyday life. If the 'everyday' refers to the mundane, the unremarkable - to the forms of life routinely taken for granted - it is also through the practices of everyday life that we experience who we are, how our lives are invested with meanings and we engage with change. In the modern world (especially in the developed north), it is difficult to think about cultures of everyday life without also considering the media: its contribution to the structuring of daily life; its varied use in daily life; and its discursive construction and engagement with aspects of everyday life. The module introduces critical approaches to everyday life, including those engaging with media, before concentrating on a series of case studies. Topics are likely to be organised around the twin foci of 'embodiment' and 'mobility' and include, for example: getting dressed, meal times, time for love, driving and shopping. You will have the opportunity to reflect on your own experiences and to consider, where appropriate, media in relation to everyday life. In addition to this the module will also provide historical and cross-cultural material and encourage study of other cultures.

Media, Music, Performance, Location: Making Site-Specific Artworks

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This is a practice-based module that will engage you in the making of site-specific performance in public spaces. You will explore through lectures and practical workshops the relation of space, place and sound, and the social meanings of specific locations. The module will examine a range of contemporary artistic approaches and theoretical ideas, as well as introducing you to practical methods for making site-specific work with music.

Popular Music Cultures

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will provide you with an introduction to the critical discourses regarding jazz and popular music. This module will broaden your historical awareness and critical understanding of different traditions in jazz and popular music, although it is not designed to be a historical overview.

Likewise, while some technical understanding is required, the primary focus is not on minute analytical distinctions between different styles or practical instruction in song-writing, production or performance. Rather, we will concentrate on the social and cultural functions and meanings of the popular music cultures studied and the reasons why they exert such a powerful hold on audiences and practitioners alike.

Every week we will focus on a critical issue that has been central in discussions about popular and jazz music. Deliberately, these issues transcend the boundaries of style (or 'genre') and historical period. Thus, rather than honing in on the minutiae of individual styles, we will seek to contextualise them more broadly and see what, perhaps surprisingly, they have in common and what historical lineages connect them. It is the intention that this wider awareness of historical, social and cultural contexts will also enable those of you who are musicians to reflect more critically on their own artistic practice, thus enriching their work.

Practising Cultural Studies 1b

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to the ways in which cultural studies as a theoretical approach can be used to explore aspects of life in the 'globalised world' of the 21st century. The first weeks are devoted to mapping and debating some of the terms cultural studies draws on. In the second half of the term you will try out cultural studies approaches in cross-cultural contexts through the exploration of three selected areas. These may include a social issue (eg migration or 'culture on the move'), a topic engaging with personal experience (eg 'passionate attachments' whether for people, things or ideas), or a topic engaging with cultural objects (eg focusing on the competition in relation to culture – the Turner prize, Booker or Young Musician of the Year on the one hand, Strictly Come Dancing or Master Chef on the other). You will undertake focused cross-disciplinary study through carefully directed research tasks and reading on these topics. Teaching and learning will involve a mix of lectures, seminars, workshops, screenings, individual and group work. Assessment is by submission of an exercise, essay, and group presentation.

Film Theory

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines a range of different approaches to film studies including semiotics, narratology,psychoanalysis, reception studies in debate with spectatorship theory, post-modern theory and postcolonial theory.

Advertising and Social Change B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The module engages with the historical development of advertising and opens up a critical understanding of its contemporary place within media economies, culture and society. In the 21st century, advertising has been transformed by the rise of branding, the maturing of the internet and the emergence of new media forms like social media. Traditional advertising forms and the funding model for media which advertising has provided are under threat.

It asks questions about advertising in relation to (social) change, considering whether it is quite the conservative force it is sometimes believed to be reproducing 'dominant ideologies', trading in 'stereotypes', blocking or hiding change, and whether it is perhaps scapegoated when blamed for causing undesirable social changes, such as obesity. To think of advertising in another way, we explore how advertising as an institution and commercial tool is tied into the dynamics of capitalist modernity so that it also trades in the 'new': forever trying to capture the 'mood' of the moment or articulate the current 'state of play'. We consider how some scholars argue that advertising can be therapeutic, managing change and resolving the tensions of modern life rather than simply inciting anxieties for which capitalism has the remedy: go shopping.

We also explore the contradictions of advertising, as both commercial tool for capitalism helping to sustain consumer expansion and a cultural communicative artefact, offering pleasures and irritations, provoking memories, constructing multiple identities and like other cultural output contributing to how we feel, think, talk and culturally connect and disconnect from others.

Through lectures and seminars, group work and independent study, the module engages with these questions and issues through the study of historical and contemporary ad examples, scrutinising both commercial ads and those geared to social marketing, eg. charity ads. It equips you with the tools of analysis to engage with the 'work' of ad campaigns and the broader phenomenon of branding and promotion. But it also provides you with knowledge of the ad industry and the work that ad agencies do. Through engagement with a wide scholarship, you will be introduced to theorisations which give you ways to understand why and how advertising has changed and how it can be thought about in relation to broader developments in society.

American Cinema A

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

An awareness of how Hollywood cinema was shaped, how it acquired its position of dominance, and the forms and aesthetic conventions that characterise it is essential to an understanding of cinema more generally. Accordingly, this module will focus on the formation of Hollywood in the 1910s through to the post-World War II era, with particular emphasis placed on the development of the 'studio system' and Hollywood's 'golden age' of the 1920s to 1950.

You will view a range of representative Hollywood films made during the period and analyse them in relation to the industry and its practices. You will also situate Hollywood cinema within the political and social life of the United States in the period.

American Cinema B

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

An awareness of how Hollywood cinema was shaped, how it acquired its position of dominance, and the forms and aesthetic conventions that characterise it, is essential to an understanding of cinema more generally. Accordingly, this module will focus on the formation of Hollywood in the 1910s through to the post-World War 2 era, with particular emphasis placed on the development of the 'studio system' and Hollywood's 'golden age' of the 1920s to 1950. You will view a range of representative Hollywood films made during the period and analyse them in relation to the industry and its practices. You will also situate Hollywood cinema within the political and social life of the United States in the period.

Creative Media: Animation 2

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It allows you to focus on the creation of an animation. You will also expand your knowledge of the theories and practices employed when using digital media to develop animations.

Creative Media: Digital Media

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It allows you to focus on the creation of an animation or piece of interactive media while expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices common to digital media.

Creative Media: Documentary Video

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It enables you to create a video, while continuing to expand your knowledge of the concepts and approaches common to documentary film forms.

Creative Media: Photography

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. You will focus on a photographic project of your own, while expanding your knowledge of theories and practices central to photography.

Creative Media: Script Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module enables you to focus on the production of a script, while expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices central
to scriptwriting

Creative Media: Sound

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module enables you to focus on the creation of a radio piece, while expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices central to radio.

Culture, Race and Ethnicity

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the relationship between ideas of culture, race and ethnicity both historically and in contemporary society. You will examine a range of empirical examples that demonstrate how the concepts have been used – sometimes separately, sometimes in interlocking ways – in political projects or movements. There will be particular focus on contructions of 'whiteness'. Examples may include the use of race in 19th-century colonial administration, the politics of ethnicity in postwar London or the rise of the new right in contemporary Europe.

Digital Cultures B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module examines interactive leisure forms and practices based on digital technologies. It understands digital media as a significant and expanding new media formation; one that is transforming both the content and economics of the culture industries. The module will consider the cultural, political and social implications of new forms of interactive media designed for leisure and entertainment. Areas covered will include computer gaming, networked new media such as networked games, networked social spaces, pornography and other on-line entertainment. In addition the module will consider new forms of convergence between previously discrete media forms - for instance Net-TV collaboration and net-served films.

Gender, Space and Culture

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Why is space important to our understanding of communication? How do subjects travel through space in order to construct narratives of identity? How are spaces moralised, sexed and gendered? How do they accrue significance or symbolism?

In the last decade there has been a convergence across many academic disciplines to comprehend spatiality. Social spaces are never empty or static, they are full of the shifting dynamics of power and politics. On this module you will study to what extent gender is articulated in public and private spaces, so that they may be considered to be predominantly feminine, masculine, queer or transgendered. You will also examine how spaces and places are dynamic, unstable and mutable in relation to competing social differences. We will look at a variety of sites of the everyday, from the domestic to the visual, from bodies to landscape and virtual realities using key theoretical concepts such as 'performativity', 'representation' and 'transectionality' to interpret how our culture is thoroughly imbued with gendered and spatialized assumptions.

Topics may include: thinking about gendered journeys such as package holidays or migration; the boundaries and borders of the self; the national and the global; social inclusion and exclusion; and representations of the feminized underclass, or the masculinized professional. We will also consider queer cultural geographies as represented in films; 'freaky bodies' and transexuality online; and the spatial politics of protest on the streets and in the home.

Industry Projects

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module is organised around a live industry project working with partners in the creative sector. The project will normally be a live project with a brief set by the partner/client. The aim is to use the experience from previous placements as an opportunity to develop work of a professional standard in a working environment with real clients.

The module will enable students to further develop their team-working skills as well as their written and verbal communication skills. On this module students will also be required to reflect upon their work experience through an online journal and a reflective statement.

Journalism and Crisis B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Global Journalism in Crisis offers a diversity of approaches for studying journalists and journalism around the world. It charts the opportunities, challenges and crises facing journalism in an increasingly global field. The module examines the impact of developments in journalism that have resulted in it becoming an international phenomenon operating in global networks as opposed to within national or cultural borders. It looks at journalism in crisis (as a practice) and journalism as it responds to and communicates crises in the world. It explores the blurring between entertainment and news, as well as the formerly clear division between journalism, public relations and business communication. The module draws on specific examples of global media events to examine these issues and enables students to creatively and critically explore the challenges of consuming and producing globalised stories.

Locating Cinema: British Cinema A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The module begins by examining critical approaches to a history of British cinema and the dominant ways in which this cinema and its characteristics have been understood. It then moves to an examination of British cinema from the 1920s to 1980, beginning with the factors which shaped it, in particular the debates about the social and cultural importance of a specifically British cinema against the background of the massive influence of Hollywood, and the representations of 'Britishness' that this produced. The later weeks of the module examine in more detail British cinema's attempts to deal with the various forms of 'otherness' that it has sought both to define and to contain in the changing cultural and political climate of the post-war years, and with the different 'British cinemas' that this produced.

Locating Cinema: British Cinema B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Locating Cinema: French Cinema A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will examine a range of films produced in France from World War I to the present day. It will move between popular cinema and the art film and review a number of national styles and genres, such as the moment of the Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave) including Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard; the lyrical social documentary of Jean Vigo; policier detective dramas such as Pepe le Moko, the musical, including Jacque Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and the horror film Les Diaboliques. A series of directors will be studied, including Claude Chabrol, Rene Clair, Alain Resnais, Roger Vadim, Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Jean Luc Godard. There will be close readings of specified films, as well as an examination of them in terms of their larger social and cultural meanings.

Locating Cinema: French Cinema B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module provides a historical, critical, and theoretical survey of developments in French cinema. It focuses on key historical issues (aesthetic, social, political) that have shaped French cinema over the last century, examining the intersections of film with French politics, culture and identities. A range of directors (possible examples: Godard, Franju, Denis) and types of film (popular genres, art cinema, avant-garde) will be studied, with films ranging from the 1920s to the present day. The module will combine close attention to textual analysis with contextual study of the period in which films were produced, and with comparative readings of critical approaches to films.

Locating Cinema: Indian Cinema A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module looks at the cinema of the biggest film-producing country in the world: India. It will introduce you to not only the history and tradition but also the songs and dance, codes and conventions of Indian cinema by examining popular pan-Indian Hindi cinema. We critically examine the ‘Bollywood’ phenomenon followed by a discussion of the regional cinemas of India and the global diasporic Indian cinema.

Locating Cinema: Spanish Cinema B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module provides a historical, critical, and theoretical survey of developments in Spanish Cinema. It looks at the historically specific factors (e.g. aesthetic, economic, and political) that have informed Spanish cinema over the last century. A range of directors (possible examples: Amenabar, Bigas Luna, and Almodovar) and types of film (possible examples: popular genres, neo-realism, melodrama) will be studied from the 1930s to the present day. Textual analysis will be complemented by contextual study of the period in which films were produced, and by comparative readings of critical approaches to films.

Media, Memory, History

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines the relationship between history, memory and media. Its starting points are; (i) The media are historical artifacts, forged and developed in historical contexts that they also influence. (ii) Access to history is mediated through various technical and cultural systems e.g. television, print, and networked and mobile media. Media systems capture, store, and re-disseminate material that may be returned to us as collective or individual memories for instance through family photographs, or through the annual collective commemoration of official memorial days. The relationship between history and memory is thus bound up with how media systems become embedded cultures. (iii) New media in particular, produce new kinds of artificial memory and thus may intervene in new ways in the making of history.

The module will address some of the questions arising around media, history and memory through sessions including explorations of prosthetic memory, war memories and memorials, the history of the invention of the media, memory damage and the politics of omission, family histories and migration patterns as photographic record, race and mediated memory, and questions of the convergence of the archive and the network which mean media records of events are simultaneously stored and represented.

Music, Stage and Screen 1: from opera to film

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module is split into two five-week units and will examine the history of musical narrative from classical opera to film music. Its focus will be the audio-visual study of musical 'texts', uncovering the technical means by which music creates metaphors of linear plot and development. The module concentrates on opera and film, although it also considers some more abstract instrumental music, such as the symphonic poem.

The work of Richard Strauss, for example, occupies a space between the language of late romantic opera and 20th century film music, made more explicit in the work of Eric Korngold, whose operas lead directly into his film scores of the 1930s and 1940s.

You will also consider post-war scores in which the role of music is more complex than the mere ghosting of visual action. The 'psychological' music motifs in Hermann's scores for Hitchcock's Psycho and Vertigo are cases in point; these works have operatic links, with the 'irrational' music of Schoenberg's Erwartung and Berg's Lulu. Essays are balanced with regular aural analysis training in opera and film music. No prior technical knowledge of music is needed to study this module, nor an ability to read music; the objects of study are audio-visual, not written scores.

Music, Stage and Screen 2: Film, Musical and Music Theatre

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module examines issues relating to how music is used on stage and screen. The module complements the material studied in the autumn term 'Music, Stage and Screen 1: from opera to film' such that the module is entirely free-standing and MSS1 is not a pre-requisite for MSS2.

The module is divided into two parts exploring European, 'world' and contemporary film music and musicals.

Whereas MSS1 explored how early Hollywood film music (from the silent era through to the Hitchcock films of the 1960s) evolved predominantly from 'narrative' musical models of 19th-and 20th-century opera and symphonic poem, this first part explores alternative and non-narrative solutions developed in examples taken from European, 'world' and contemporary cinema. It examines how the music relates to the visual action and what this conveys about the works' cultural, gender and socio-historical identities.

The second part bridges the gap between stage and screen, exploring the popular musical theatre genre of the musical and film musical. One of the most distinctively American of art forms, developed during the module of the twentieth century from its origins in European operetta, this popular genre brings into sharp focus issues of American national and cultural identity.

Professional Media Practice

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module is organised around a work placement in the creative sector. The placement will normally be arranged by yourself and will usually be approximately 20 hours in duration. The aim is to use the experience as an opportunity to develop and reflect upon your personal and social skills in the work place; the demands of time management; technical, organisational and/or creative achievement as appropriate.

The module will enable you to compile necessary documentation in relation to work, such as a portfolio containing CVs and development plans, as well as help you to assess your skills and perform SWOT analyses and a Key Skills Audit.

On this module you will also be encouraged to reflect upon your work experience through an online journal and a synthesis paper which will draw both on the 'hands on' knowledge gained during the placement and, where appropriate, your academic study.

The Allure of Things

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the circulation of significant objects (material or otherwise) within specific cultural and historical contexts. It analyses the social/cultural/economic relationships which shape and are shaped by the movement of 'things'.  You will gain an understanding of theories of exchange, commoditisation and consumption. These will be set against wider cultural and economic transformations as the result of colonialism, capitalist penetration and globalisation.

Theory Taste and Trash B

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module aims to introduce students to two related issues, namely:
a) a historically-rooted account of how the study of popular culture came to be established in British higher education and of some of the key theoretical approaches that helped to shape those studies
b) an exploration of how the bringing together of popular culture and ‘the academy’ has and continues to pose intriguing problems around hierarchies of taste, questions of value, and definitions of educational worth.

A series of lectures will offer students both a historical overview of those issues and an introduction to the influence of key writers, theorists and approaches, while the module seminars would help students to engage with particularly significant and talismanic texts (from writers such as Hall, Bourdieu and Bakhtin) in the field and also to test out the interpretive frameworks they offer by undertaking some case study analyses of contemporary popular cultural texts and practices (in fields such as television, popular music, the leisure industries and youth culture).

TV: Fictions and Entertainments B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module focuses on the textual and contextual study of television's key fiction and entertainment genres - soap operas, sitcoms and other styles of comedy, game shows, lifestyle television, daytime television, and music television among others. You will be encouraged to explore the defining generic characteristics of these televisual categories, their representational strategies, their ideological implications, their particular pleasures and their relationship with audiences. The primary focus will be on British television, although material from other broadcasting contexts will be used where appropriate for comparative purposes. Most of the primary material will be drawn from current or recent TV, but students will also be required to investigate the history of popular TV genres to understand their evolution over time.

Adaptation: Filming Fiction

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module examines film adaptations of fiction from the silent period to the present day. A diverse range of film texts will be considered, along with critical and theoretical perspectives on adaptation, authorship and intertextuality. The module focuses on film adaptations of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century novels, short stories and picture books, including works by Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Mann, Raymond Carver and Maurice Sendak. We will consider the significance of the idea of fidelity for the reception and theorisation of film adaptation. The module will approach adaptation as both an industrial mode of commercial production and a creative mode of critical interpretation. Cinematic strategies deployed to reproduce literary devices will be analysed in order to think about adaptation's value for theories of medium specificity. The module will also examine the politics of cross-cultural adaptation by looking at Indian and African films based on European source texts. Directors studied during the module include: Roger Corman, David Lean, Max Ophuls, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Claire Denis and Spike Jonze.

Animals in Film and Television

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

There has been an increasing interest in the (non-human) animal within the humanities during recent years: suddenly, the question of the animal has been the focus for a great deal of critical and theoretical work across a range of disciplines, including film, media and cultural studies. You will engage with these debates, examining the presentation and representation of the animal in a wide range of film and television texts. Topics that you will study may include: animals and documentary, including early actualities and avant-garde films, as well as popular documentaries and animal videos on Youtube; animated animals and children's films (including animatronics and CGI); animal performance in live action drama; and animals and stardom

Comedy and Cultural Belonging

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Comedy is, above all, a cultural form that invites its audiences to feel that they belong – to a social community, a class, a locality, a nation, a subculture, a gender, a sexual identity, an ethnic group, a community of interest, or a complex intersection of several of these. This module explores the relationship between comedy and belonging by considering a number of conceptual fields, such as: theories of the comedic; questions of identity formation; notions of representation and stereotyping; structures of power and resistance; the sexual politics of jokes; concepts of carnival and excess; the idea of a 'national sense of humour'; the use of comic strategies by 'minority' groups; the complexities of camp; and the role of class in cultural consumption. The initial focus would be on 20th-century British popular comedy, and the comic texts and practitioners studied might include Alan Bennett, Mike Leigh, Victoria Wood, the music hall tradition, the Ealing comedies, the Carry On films, Morecambe and Wise, The League of Gentlemen and The Royle Family.

Consuming Passions

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module explores consumption practices within specific cultural and historical contexts. It introduces you to processes through which objects are made sense of and appropriated by people in their everyday life. At the same time, the module explores consumption as a basic human activity through which people engage and understand their position in the world. It will locate historical and culture-specific consumption practices within wider processes of identity creation and social differentiation. Finally, consumption will be discussed in the context of the development of consumer cultures and globalisation.

Creative Project

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module extends the ideas explored during earlier practice courses. Having chosen a practice medium on which to focus in the second year, you will engage in the design, research and production of a practice project in that same medium. The module provides you with master classes from professionals and faculty in the practice field, offers supervision in designing and researching a project, as well as production tutor support in tackling technical and production issues associated with producing a project to the set brief. This practice work will be supported by relevant readings in media theory, aesthetics and production techniques which will be discussed in workshops.

Documentary, Reality TV and 'Real Lives'

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

During this documentary module you'll analyse documentary production in its historical and cultural context and focuses on new developments in documentary production, reality TV formats, feature documentary and alternative documentary production. In addition we'll address emerging documentary production in the developing world.

The module covers foundational thinking in documentary; theorisations of different modes of documentary; reality TV; debates over documentary's truth claims; the boundary between documentary and fiction; dramatisation and reconstructions; and international independent documentary production.

Everyday Life and Technology

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

The module investigates the interlocking technological, cultural and social dimensions of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as they are encountered in everyday life. It explores these issues through an investigation of historical and contemporary examples (the telephone, the radio, the television, the VCR, the personal stereo, the computer and the internet) and discusses how ICTs are socially shaped, reshaped, experienced and consumed. The module considers the major theoretical approaches to the study of ICTs, as well as debates about their consequences and significance.

Globalisation and Communication

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module studies the role of the media (broadly understood to include all forms of telecommunications, the internet and computers, print and televisual journalism, and all forms of visual media) in the era of globalisation. You will investigate what the notion of globalisation actually refers to in various registers of discourse and theory, focusing on the relation between globalisation in the political-economic sense and globalisation in the cultural sense. The module then addresses the specific role of the various media in initiating, consolidating and sustaining both the idea and the practice of globalisation. It concludes by considering the merits and demerits of the process of globalisation in the arena of culture.

Hollywood Comedian Comedy

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Comedian-comedy has been one of the most persistent genres of popular Hollywood cinema since the silent era, but until recently it has received little serious critical attention. This module will consider a range of individual performers and the diverse historical, cinematic and extra-cinematic contexts in which they worked. Drawing upon a range of critical and theoretical paradigms, the module will examine the key fictional and extra-fictional features of the genre; the relations between performance, gags and narrative; the shifting relationships between comedy in film and other media (such as vaudeville and television); and the representation of class, gender, ethnicity and race. Films studied may include comedies featuring such performers as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis, Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy.

Hollywood: Industry and Imaginary

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module looks at one of the world's most commercially and culturally significant media institutions. It addresses Hollywood as a set of interconnected practices, both industrial and symbolic. You will develop points of contact between two ways of envisaging films – as commodities within a moving image economy, and as symbolic forms – by situating film texts in particular historical contexts. The module focuses in particular on the period from the late 1960s to the present day, exploring the relations between Hollywood's conventional modes of narration and representation and their industrial, technological and political conditions of existence.

Image and Reality in Contemporary Cinema

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

From its earliest days, film has compelled audiences with its ability to capture reality, and many film movements have sought new ways to explore, shape and explain the visible world. This module will examine the many and varied relationships between cinema and the real, focusing on fiction films, but considering also documentary and experimental work. We will look at 'realities' both personal and political, from representations of the everyday to encounters with the strange. We might address topics such as Hollywood realism and Italian neo-realism; modernism and postmodernism in cinema; fantastic or deceptive narratives; and global contemporary film movements such as Dogme and new Iranian cinemas.

Media, Publics and Protest

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Social media have been at the heart of recent forms of protest both at home and abroad. This module aims to enable you to develop a critical understanding of the relationship between media, publics and protest. It will provide you with a conceptual framework and historical contextualisation with which to approach a key question in media studies - the construction of publics and counterpublics, and the relationship of media to democracy and democratic practice. The module begins by introducing a set of theoretical approaches to thinking about the public sphere; in the latter part of the course, you will be enabled collectively and independently to identify and research particular case studies, whether that be the role media play in revolution or political transition, in protests, demonstrations, petitions or riots, in hacktivism or culture jamming, or in cultural forms like satire and alternative media.

Music, Media and Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module explores the relationship between music and media of all kinds, and questions the ideological structures underpinning the consumption of music in western society. The module focuses on the relationship between musical production and media technologies (the microphone, phonograph, radio and film), the changing role and place of music in society - understood through an analysis of media technologies, the meaning and nature of music and media reception in society, and the political economy of the music industry.

Race and Ethnicity in Popular Cinema 2

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Whilst acknowledging the socially constructed status of the terms 'race' and 'ethnicity', it is also important to appreciate the very real consequences of such categorisations for human existence. On this module, we will be exploring the position of popular and counter cinema within this process, examining the way in which it produces particular constructions of race and ethnicity whilst also considering some of the wider implications of these representations. We will consider the representation of a range of racial/ethnic groups across history and across diverse cinemas, which may include the United States, Britain and France. In doing so, we will examine the various social, cultural, political, economic, aesthetic and historical contexts in which representations of race and ethnicity have been situated, exploring the ways in which these contexts have shaped and been shaped by such representations.

Sexualities and the Cinema

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module centres on the critical study of sexualities and how they are represented in a range of film texts. Through screenings, seminars and self directed study, you will consider in detail and depth, the ways in which sexualities have been both theorised and represented in film. Debates considered in the module may include: the politics of sexual identification; the idea of sexual 'perversity'; sexual stereotyping (especially of lesbians and gays); and the critical concept of 'queer' in theory, identity politics and cinematic genre (queer cinema).

Social Media and Critical Practice

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Social media has become the way of framing much internet and mobile media and the implications of this turn are important. We use social media platforms in our everyday life and they have become influential in journalism, promotional culture, education and across the media industries. However, their pervasiveness and significance goes unchallenged and largely celebrated through the language of participation, communication and freedom. This module aims to stand back from the everyday ubiquity of these forms to question and analyse them by using them critically and creatively.

The module examines a range of social media platforms by engaging and using them and by equipping students to critically analyse this. We look at the promise and perils of these new forms, the histories of their emergence, their institutional and structural shape and power, and the politics, economics, aesthetics and pleasures attached to them.

Students will engage social media platforms to create a small practical project and interrogate this engagement through an extended critique of use and practice.

The Musical

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will examine the musical, tracing the hegemonic Hollywood genre to its roots in European vaudeville, cabaret culture, stage musicals and operas. It will also explore musicals that may seek to defy or respond to Hollywoodcentric, Eurocentric and heterosexist conceptions of genre. The module is divided into two sections. The first section will analyse the Hollywood musical of the studio era, by examining both the stylistic features and historical context of some of its different sub-genres; the show/backstage musical, the fairy tale musical and the folk musical. It may also explore the diverse ways in which the studio era musical as entertainment may work ideologically in relation to issues of race, ethnicity and sexuality.

The second section of the module will focus on the musical as it has developed beyond Hollywood (and beyond the conceptual framework of Hollywood). Topics may include; the subcultural musical, the animated musical (arguably, the most common form of the contemporary musical in both its mainstream (Disney) and counter mainstream forms (South Park)) and may conclude with a consideration of the future of the musical in terms of gender, age and physicality.

The Politics of Representation

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module considers the political implications of the ways in which media texts, institutions and practices represent social and cultural identities, such as gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, age, nationality, regionality and (dis)ability.It does so through examining both fiction (eg popular TV genres, feature films) and non-fiction (TV news, current affairs, press reporting) media genres in order to explore the power-relations of media representation.In addition to scrutinising popular mainstream texts, the module also investigates the viability and validity of media interventions made by 'minorities' in an attempt to counter prevailing stereotypes.

Viewing Women

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Early work on the relation of women to film considered woman's 'to-be-looked-at-ness', examining representations of women as objects of the male gaze, constructions 'cut to the measure of [male] desire' (Laura Mulvey). You will consider the female spectator, positioned by particular film and television genres (melodrama, the 'woman's film', and soap opera). More recently, attention has shifted to women as social audiences and producers of meanings, differing from one another and constructing from texts their own meanings and pleasures. This module traces these developing and interacting strands of research, considering questions around the location of meaning, the relationship between text and context, and the usefulness of different strands of feminist research in enabling us to understand film texts and their representations and positioning of women. It considers a range of popular and feminist film texts and their viewers.