Film Studies Courses
Study online & in London

London is one of the world’s great cinematic cities. It is a city that has been captured on film since the advent of moving pictures. It is also a city whose own story has been profoundly shaped by film. This course will tell the history of London’s depiction onscreen, and how that depiction has impacted on the city itself over the course of twentieth and twenty-first centuries.







Dr Alexander Sergeant is an award-winning film historian and theorist. His varied research interests include the history of popular culture, particularly within the US, and the intersection between film and philosophy. He is the author of Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (2021), and co-editor ofFantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums & Genres (2018). He is the co-founder of the popular website Fantasy-Animation.org and co-host of the Fantasy/Animation podcast.

This course examines the rich and prolific cinema of Hong Kong. From martial arts superstars like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, to gangster films of directors John Woo and Johnnie To, via the more personal visions of ‘new wave’ filmmakers like Ann Hui and Wong Kar-wai, the cinema of Hong Kong is hybrid and multifaceted. We will consider the momentous historical events as well as the industrial context out of which Hong Kong’s cinema grew, while looking at a range of film genres and directors from across several eras. We will consider also how Hong Kong cinema has reflected Hong Kong’s colonisation and decolonisation, leading up to the historical turning points of the 21st century such as the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 mass pro-democracy protests.

Is The Matrix a science-fiction movie starring Keanu Reeves, or the most influential work of philosophy of the last fifty years? Who is more nihilistic, Humphrey Bogart or Frederic Nietszche? In this course, we will examine the relationship between film and philosophy, engaging with current debates in film theory and in wider society. We will consider whether it is appropriate to label film as a form of philosophy, how film acts as philosophy, and the ways in which our experiences of watching film helps up to think through ideas about the human experience that have received attention amongst centuries of philosophical literature. Is film merely entertainment, or is it our most important form of philosophy?

What do The Apartment, The Great Escape, West Side Story, In the Heat of the Night, The Pink Panther, The Magnificent Seven, Fiddler on the Roof and Some Like it Hot have in common? They were all produced by one small production company, run by three brothers, as the studio system was replaced by the new independent producers. Most Hollywood history fetishizes the 1970s as the decade in which the movies finally came of age. But this course looks back to the late ‘50s and ‘60s and zooms in on a single independent production company, the Mirisch Company, to understand the seismic shift that transformed Hollywood – not only in how films were produced but also in terms of the subjects and styles of the films themselves.