Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

The history of the cinema is a rich, rewarding and dynamic area of study. Cinema, because it is both an art form and an industrial product, can be studied from several different historical perspectives. These have included investigations into the history of technological development associated with cinema’s origins and its subsequent development, but historians have also explored its evolution into an art form. They have written about important individual figures or influential groups and have examined specific films in great detail. Historians have also examined the national, cultural, political and social contexts that might offer insight into the cinema at a given historical moment. They have examined the changing demographic and viewing habits of spectators and explored the mutability of cinemas themselves. With so much to consider and so many different approaches to take, the history of cinema continues to evolve. As such this advanced level film studies course will explore what it means to study film history, examine the various methodologies that one might take, while at the same time looking at relevant filmic and cinematic examples.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami became celebrated and championed internationally, at film festivals, by film critics, on the arthouse cinema circuits. He came to be seen as a director who had revitalised international cinema – Jean-Luc Godard famously quipped that “cinema began with D.W. Griffith and ends with Kiarostami.” Yet, despite all this international acclaim, the deep Iranian roots of Kiarostami remain often misunderstood or even ignored. This course shall cover the long and rich career of Kiarostami, one inevitably formed by an Iranian context and set of cultural references, and closely examine the different phases of his work, the recurring stylistic and thematic concerns, and his trajectory from little-known Iranian filmmaker to global auteur director.

Why assume a false identity? What could be the risks and rewards of pretending to be someone else? And what can fictions about ‘faking it’ tell us about ourselves, what we believe, and why? This literature course takes a deep dive into remarkable stories of impersonation and identity: psychiatric intrigue in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study; Patricia Highsmith’s classic thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley; a New York art controversy in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World; and a notorious Victorian trial in Zadie Smith’s The Fraud.

On this in-college literature course we will study the growing genre of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’) through three powerful recent examples: Jessie Greengrass’ apocalyptic family drama The High House, Richard Flanagan’s magic realist allegory The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative political fiction The Ministry for the Future.