Film Studies Courses
Study online & in London

Marriage has always been fertile ground for filmmakers, and some directors – Rossellini, Bergman, Godard – have gone deeper than most. This course looks at the ways cinema’s greatest filmmakers have approached the subject. It explores original works by artists who have “mined” their own lives for material, while showing how adaptations of literary works can, in the hands of great film-makers, become a kind of veiled autobiography.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

This course explores film adaptations of two great detectives of fiction: Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe. By focusing on one of their most famous novels we will compare the literary and various cinematic versions, analysing themes and characters and discuss how the films adapt the novels to fit the medium of cinema.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Establishing itself in the immediate post-war period, initially in Europe and later in world cinemas, art cinema is characterised by distinctive film styles and narrative structures that set it apart from popular forms of cinematic practice and representation. This course will consider its origins and development, its key films and filmmakers, and critical accounts of the concept art of cinema.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

In the inaugural 1952 Sight and Sound greatest film of all time poll, Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) was voted in first place. Seventy-five years after its initial release, we will celebrate and analyse the film’s enduring popularity with both audiences and critics alike.

Film remakes often get a bad press, but there is frequently more to them than meets the eye. Whether a remake of an older classic, as in the case of Gus van Sant’s reworking of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, for example, or the Hollywood remake of a cherished European film, these types of film reveal a set of complex cultural, national, industrial and perhaps even psychological connections. Join us to explore what makes a remake and to critically analyse some filmic examples.



This session is part of the 2023 Mental Wealth Festival hosted by City Lit and partners.

“Written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger” was a guarantee that you were about to see something amazing, something so different to the British cinema of that time. They were joint creators of Britain's most vivid and imaginative cinema. Their partnership from 1939 to 1956 was one of the most inspired in British cinema. They produced a body of 24 films as startling as they were innovative—unlike anything else produced anywhere. They changed the visual language of British cinema.

There is still a time and place for film noir in David Lynch’s dark films. No filmmaker is more unique. He gets his own adjective, ‘Lynchian’: films of an eerie, surrealist, dreamlike quality. He looks every inch the auteur, working and painting in a studio just above Mulholland Drive, a recluse whose boyhood was in 1950s America, who came of age with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and its co-star, Dennis Hopper, who continued to live as a recluse on the wrong side of town 30 years later in Blue Velvet (1986), a virtual remake. “A film or painting has its own sort of language. It’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The language of film is the language it was put into, and it doesn’t translate. It’s not a word thing. It would reduce it, make it smaller. Film is a magic act, and magicians don’t tell how they did it.” He hates behind-the-scenes footage or making-of films. “People do it for sales, for money, but the film is the thing and should be protected. I never was a movie buff. I like to make movies. I like to work. I don’t really like to go out.” (See separate but related courses on Once Upon a Time in New Hollywood, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and the Coen brothers).

In the 1990s, films by Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf announced Iranian cinema on the global stage as one of the most exciting national cinemas around. But even now, the history and culture behind these films, as well as the many other masterpieces of Iranian cinema, remain too little-known. This course shall give an overview of the wider story of Iranian cinema.

Hitchcock's American period saw his most spectacular work, a body of films that cemented his reputation not only as the 'master of suspense' but as a major filmmaker, one whose work includes some of cinema's most popular and critically admired films. This course explores Hitchcock's Hollywood career, the films, their production and their reception, while also assessing his critical reputation.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Historical drama is one of the most popular movie genres. But how accurate is it, and is that important? We will look at a sample of films and TV shows set in the Tudor era of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, to explore how the depiction of the past is presented on screen. Who are the heroes and villains, and do these depictions affect our understanding of real-life history? We’ll examine Elizabeth, The Other Boleyn Girl, Anonymous, Mary, Queen of Scots, A Man for All Seasons, and more.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Are you a fan of Dracula? Buffy? Blade? Carmilla? Do you like your vampires to be monstrous or romantic? This day event will look at how 21st century film and television has fostered a global fascination with the undead, reinventing the genre for new audiences and in response to changing understandings of life, death, gender, sex, and disease. This day course will unpack these issues and explore the allure of the vampire while also reflecting on its more monstrous qualities.

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club: Jean-Luc Godard, where once a week, for 6 weeks, we will watch and discuss films by this iconic and influential filmmaker. An offshoot of our existing Cultureplex Ciné-Club courses and taking its cue from the famous Parisian ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, this incarnation of the film club will offer a curated series of Jean-Luc Godard’s films for detailed study, discussion and debate. Each film will be introduced, placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context as well as being situated within the Godardian oevure. In sharing our viewing in City Lit’s premier screening room, the Cultureplex, we will approximate the experience of watching film in the cinema, one that is intense and fully focussed in a way that other modes of viewing often are not. After the screening we will devote the rest of the class to a collective exploration of the film, led by the tutor, but involving everyone in a participatory discussion that will allow all to express their responses, their views, their thoughts on the film screened.

André Bazin famously asserted that, ‘the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up with love’. Join us for this one-day course and explore the extent to which Bazin’s remark may be seen to be true. We will look at how love is represented across the history of film and explore the ubiquity of love at first sight in classical Hollywood cinema. We will consider the extent to which romance, primarily heterosexual, has been a structuring narrative device in popular cinema, while also considering films that explore same sex romance. We will look at a range of genres, including, of course, the rom-com, or romantic comedy. We will also think about love of the cinema itself – cinephilia – as a possible reason for our regular and continued return to this frequently most powerful of experiences. We will consider work by directors such as Jean Genet, Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, and others, as well as looking at specific films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Groundhog Day (1993).

Explore cinema before sound, from its beginnings to the late 1920s and its relationship with the spectator. We will view and discuss early, short films, such as A Trip to the Moon (1902) and Rescued by Rover (1905), and later feature films, including The General (1926) and Sunrise (1927), while considering the impact of narrative and the development of cinema during the period more generally.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.