Explore History, Culture & Writing

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club, where once a week, for 12 weeks, 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.

Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session on Friday 29 September with suggestions (English-language contemporary fiction in paperback) and having read 'Unsettled Ground', by Clare Fuller. Meetings take place on 29 September, 10 November, 2 February, 1 March, 10 May and 14 June.

On this course we shall explore and examine the considerable, and significant, contributions of women painters and sculptors to the avant-garde art world during the first half of the 20th century.



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

Costume from the past rarely survives, except in the depiction of it in paintings. Explore 500 years of costume in European art across a range of subject matter and decode the socio-political contexts and cultural identities contained within the choice of dress.

This online course considers the relationship between walking and writing in three innovative works of literary non-fiction: Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting’ (1927), Nan Shepherd’s ‘The Living Mountain’ (written c. 1945, first pub. 1977), and Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ (2006).



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