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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.

This unique and wide-ranging course provides a broad introduction to the three major languages of the Ancient Near East, which together traverse a vast history of four millennia. In them were written some of the great landmarks of world literature, such as the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Sumerian Descent of Inanna.

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.