Film studies

“The more beautiful everything is, the more it will hurt without you”—Gene Kelly as An American in Paris (1951) singing to Leslie Caron. Happy endings are hard won in fifties’ musicals and The End is where they were heading. MGM was the studio of musicals in the 1950s. During this decade other studios presented only occasional musicals. The musical was big business for Hollywood in the 1950s and so was the western, so bringing them together made sense. Annie Get Your Gun had been a big success for MGM so Warner Bros. decided to get a piece of the action with Calamity Jane (1953 David Butler with Doris Day). Judy Garland was sacked by MGM in 1951, then followed Joan Crawford to Warner Brothers where she staged a big comeback in, fittingly, A Star is Born (1954 George Cukor). Oklahoma (1955 Fred Zinnemann) and Carousel (1956 Henry King) from 20th Century Fox introduced Shirley Jones. And don’t forget Leonard Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront (1954) that anticipated West Side Story (1961). (See related courses on Fifties Melodrama and Film Noir and 50 Films From the ‘50s: Hollywood’s Last Stand).

This course will develop your critical appreciation of the cinema by teaching you how to read and understand film texts. We will look at the elements that underpin film form – narrative, mise en scène, cinematography, editing and sound – alongside its historical development. We will consider film style by exploring classical, post-classical and art cinema and we will examine influential critical modes of analysis, such as genre, authorship and spectatorship.

Learn how to evaluate and discuss films while enjoying a working example of a City Lit Film Studies class. In this class we will view and explore clips from a number of films, including popular remakes, enabling us to consider and compare themes and techniques from differing filmmaking countries. There will be a chance to review – in brief – film courses at City Lit (January - March 2025).

Experimental film is often non-narrative and avant-garde. It is made to explore the boundaries of film and push the limits of what is considered so-called normal filmmaking. Experimental films often use unconventional techniques such as animation, found footage and non-linear narrative structures to create unique visual experiences. The class will look at early experimental films by Georges Méliès, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Maya Deren, alongside recent digital works.

This comprehensive introductory course provides an overview of the main historical, technical and theoretical aspects of filmmaking and film analysis.

Westerns reinvented themselves in the 1950s, reaching their absolute high point both in the cinema and on television. You couldn’t move for westerns in the fifties. War films and comedies were increasingly anaemic but Westerns had an artistic renaissance as many now-canonic films were released: from Red River (1948 Howard Hawks) to Rio Grande (1950 John Ford) to Rio Bravo (1959 Howard Hawks). Westerns continued to flourish throughout the 50s both in cinemas and then at scale on television: The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Cheyenne, Wagon Train, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke, the first ‘adult western’.

Surprisingly, not every film that features the occult is a horror film. Certainly, many of them are; we will consider classics such as Haxan from 1922, Rosemary’s Baby, The Craft, Angel Heart, The Witch and Hereditary. Other films, such as Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising and A Dark Song, attempt to treat the occult seriously as secret or hidden knowledge. We'll examine the cultural backdrop of occult films and questions of representation, gender relations, and spirituality.