Film Studies Courses
Study online & in London

Two French film noirs from two masters of the style - and the most acclaimed films of each director's body of work: Henri- Georges Clouzot's mystery thriller, Les Diaboliques (1955), and Claude Chabrol's icy, intense psychological drama, Le Boucher (1970). Explore the contrasting styles of Clouzot's genre movie and Chabrol's art film, their critical reputations and enduring appeal for audiences.



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

In this course, we will investigate the feminine discursive position in 21st century horror cinema through the framework of psychoanalytic theory. It is sometimes claimed that the portrayal of women in such films is misogynistic, but here the proposition is that the horror genre affords us an indispensable language for approaching complex elements of feminine subjectivity.

In this course, we’ll chart the history of drag in film, from Hollywood classics like Some Like It Hot to its cult film presence in John Waters movies like Hairspray and documentaries like Paris is Burning. As well as discussing significant drag films, this course will provide insight into LGBTQ+ cinema, and how film became an outlet for unconventional forms of gender expression.



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

When it hit UK TV screens in October 1990, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was more than just another US television series, it was as one critic describes it, ‘a seismic event in popular culture’ (Tobias 2020). In an era when TV aired live it was a must-see series with fevered pre-episode speculation and critical post-broadcast discussion characterising viewers’ engagement with this cult phenomenon. The mystery over who killed Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) preoccupied TV viewers across the autumn and winter of 1990. For me it was the first live series that I watched from start to finish.

During this course, we will discuss the development of women’s cinematic modes of representation and expression, and the place of women in the film industry within the current social, political and cultural climate, from the question of gender representation to the so called ‘female gaze’. We will refer to key pioneers as well as to contemporary female filmmakers with a strong focus on cultural creative diversity.







Dr Karine Chevalier is a lecturer in Film studies. She is also a filmmaker. Her main research interests lie in the field of Transnational Cinema, French and Francophone Cinema, Visual Arts and Aesthetics, Postcolonial Studies, Intermediality, as well as Screenwriting and Filmmaking, with a specific focus on Violence and Resilience, Creative Voices, Digital Storytelling and Multiscreens, Alterities and Minorities, Moving (auto)Portraits and Masks.



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

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club 2, where once a week, for 10 weeks (and throughout the academic



year), we will watch and discuss film. Taking its cue from the famous Parisian ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, ‘the single thinker most responsible for bestowing on cinema the prestige both of an artform and of an object of knowledge’, and the man who foresaw the emergence of film studies as a legitimate discipline of academic study, our contemporary incarnation of the film club will offer a curated series of films for detailed study, discussion and debate. Each film will be introduced, placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context. 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.







Please note that this course will screen a new and different set of films to HF211 Cultureplex Cine-Club, which will run with the same films screened last year. If you took the Cultureplex Cine-Club course last year (2023-4), please ensure that you take the Cultureplex Cine-Club 2 courses this year.

“We made films at Ealing that were good, bad and indifferent, but they were indisputably British. They were rooted in the soil of the country.” Under the stewardship of Michael Balcon, Ealing Studios created a national cinema through drama, documentary and comedy producing a body of work portraying realistic British life.



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