Film Studies Courses
Study online & in London
Enjoy a fresh look at big screen classics, ground-breaking titles and cult favourites featuring a cast of iconic names, former stars and the men and women who called the shots.
Check out our blog post on our Ciné-Club, where once a week, for 12 weeks (and throughout the academic year in terms 2 and 3), we will watch and discuss film.
Study in-person, or online from the comfort of home, with classes that allow you to participate in discussions with fellow adult students and share your passion for Film as part of a learning community. We offer daytime, evening and weekend courses, both short and long. Our tutors are experts in their fields and experienced educators. Tutors share their knowledge and passion for Film through presentations, screenings, interactive discussion, analysis, and other activities.
Many students return to take more courses, telling us they enjoy being part of our City Lit literary community. Our popular courses often sell out quickly, so we invite you to browse and book your place now.
102 courses available
Film studies tasterLearn 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 (September - December 2026).
Full fee £19.00 Senior fee £15.00 Concession £12.00- Cult TV: Twin Peaks - The Return
When Twin Peaks ended in 1991, audiences were left with a warning: ‘I’ll see you again in 25 years’. Much of the show’s surrealism wasn’t to be taken literally, but this time showrunners David Lynch and Mark Frost made good on their word, releasing Twin Peaks: The Return a quarter century later to rapturous acclaim. This course will explore how The Return both built upon and shattered much of what the series established through contexts like reboots, streaming, and Lynch’s wider oeuvre.
Online
Mon 14 Sep 2026Zoe CrombieFull fee £189.00 Senior fee £189.00 Concession £123.00 - How to read a film: a beginners' guide to cinemaThis 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.Full fee £189.00 Senior fee £151.00 Concession £123.00
- Tolkien on Screen
In his literary essay On Fairy Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote that “in human art, fantasy is a thing best left to words”. Despite this claim, The Lord of the Rings is arguably one of the most profitable media franchises of the 21st century. It has inspired academy-award winning films and record-breaking TV series, and continues to generate material that resonates with new generations of fans to explore. This course will explore the history of adapting Tolkien to the cinema, considering not only what was altered or left behind in attempts to turn Tolkien’s vast mythology into the stuff of popular cinema, but what might also have been enhanced as a result.
(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.
Online
Mon 14 Sep 2026Alex SergeantFull fee £189.00 Senior fee £189.00 Concession £123.00 - The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema: Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi
This course examines the transformative period of Japanese cinema during its so-called Golden Age (from late 1940s to early 1960s), a time when Japan’s traditional film studio system was at its peak, and several iconic directors, including Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi, were making their most iconic films. We will discuss, analyse, and contextualise several of these directors’ films, as well as look at films by other directors of that period, such as Mikio Naruse and Masaki Kobayashi, and more. We will consider the socio-political and film industry contexts which shaped the films, including the cultural meanings behind the samurai genre, the post-war Occupation of Japan by Allied Forces, and the international impact of Japanese cinema on global filmmaking.
Online
Tue 15 Sep 2026Jean-Baptiste de VaulxFull fee £239.00 Senior fee £239.00 Concession £155.00 - Art history and cinemaSince cinema's earliest days, literature has provided movies with stories. But there is another way of looking at film: through its relationship with painting, the oldest of the art forms.
We’ll look at paintings by Friedrich, Titian, Hopper, Bacon, Delaroche and many more. We’ll view Red Desert, Pan’s Labyrinth, Easy Rider - looking at realism, surrealism and more.
As you can see, all of these are quite different! Let’s see how movies connect us to art history.Online
Tue 15 Sep 2026Gillian McIverFull fee £189.00 Senior fee £189.00 Concession £123.00 - Cultureplex Ciné-Club: women behind the lens
In this Ciné Club we will watch the films of pioneering women directors and discuss how their work stands to enrich the established conventions of cinema as well as our approaches to the world beyond the screen.
The selection of films reflects both canonical classics from film history and innovative new voices from around the globe. For those who have taken the course before, the selection of films will be different every time it runs - meaning that students can re-enrol and continue to expand their cinematic horizons.
Keeley Street
Tue 15 Sep 2026Katie GossFull fee £259.00 Senior fee £259.00 Concession £168.00 - Exploring British cinemaDefining itself around themes such as realism, class and national identity, and differentiating itself from Hollywood and other national cinemas, British cinema has found critical and popular acclaim both domestically and internationally. This course explores key themes and developments in British cinema, past and present, through a range of films, filmmakers and critical concepts and responses.
Online
Wed 16 Sep 2026Jon WisbeyFull fee £149.00 Senior fee £149.00 Concession £97.00 - Comedy, Crime and the Documentary: British Cinema in the 1930s
Explore British cinema of the 1930s, a decade that reflects the first instance of an industry in which film production of all kinds was able to flourish. From cheap 'quota quickies' to lavish prestige productions and genres including comedy and crime, a British national cinema began to emerge, its critical reputation bolstered by a series of striking documentaries and the Hitchcock thriller.
Online
Sat 19 Sep 2026Jon WisbeyFull fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 - A Taste of Film Studies
What does film studies involve? Learn how to enjoy, discuss and criticise films while being part of a real-time working example of a City Lit film studies class. We will view clips from a wide variety of films, exploring themes and technique in current City Lit courses taking place in autumn 2026.
Keeley Street
Sat 19 Sep 2026John WischmeyerFull fee £19.00 Senior fee £15.00 Concession £12.00 - Film History: Film Genres
When you choose a film to watch you are choosing a genre (if not a star) for an idea of what to expect: Action (Die Hard, F1), Horror (Psycho, Bring Her Back), Sci-Fi (Star Wars, Avatar), Film Noir (Double Indemnity, Destroyer), Westerns (Stagecoach, Eddington), Musicals (Singin' in the Rain, Kneecap), or Fantasy (The Lord of the Rings, Begonia). Genre links storytelling to themes, to style-and to the audience. Genre is the invisible architecture of cinema, shaping audience expectations, guiding narrative choices, and influencing everything from set and costume design to music score. From Hitchcockian suspense to Anderson’s fantasy adventures: cinematic genres define the filmmaking landscape and influence the cultural zeitgeist because genres are never static, having evolved through the history of cinema by pushing boundaries and altering the way stories get told. Genre is used from first ‘pitch’ to final marketing and subsequent film reviews. Genre is the key that unlocks the studio system and fulfils audience desire. Which genres are most popular now? On this course each week we’ll view a different genre-and that’s entertainment!
Full fee £329.00 Senior fee £263.00 Concession £214.00 - Postcolonial Cinemas: Memory, History and Remembrance
This course explores how filmmakers across the world have used cinema to confront, question, and reimagine the legacies of colonialism through memory and history. Focusing on specific films from Lebanon, Palestine, Taiwan, the Philippines, Chile, Africa, and the diasporas, we will examine how cinema has become a crucial medium for addressing historical violence, displacement, silence, and resistance in postcolonial societies. These films span fiction, documentary, essay film, and experimental modes, and they engage with topics including gendered memory, forbidden histories, colonial amnesia, Indigenous erasure, exile, diaspora, and intergenerational trauma. Cinema emerges here as both a site of remembrance and a space of counter-history: a medium through which suppressed stories can be visualised, and emotionally reactivated in the present.
Please note that for those students who have taken previous versions of this course, the selection of films and the topics covered will be different from past iterations of the course.
Online
Mon 21 Sep 2026Jean-Baptiste de VaulxFull fee £189.00 Senior fee £189.00 Concession £123.00 - Cultureplex ciné-club (Autumn)Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club, where once a week, for 10 weeks (and throughout the academic year), 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.
Keeley Street
Tue 22 Sep 2026Paul SuttonFull fee £279.00 Senior fee £223.00 Concession £181.00 - Film Moments 1
We all recognise film as a potentially immensely powerful medium; many of us will have undoubtedly wept in sorrow or trembled in fear when watching films that have moved us or frightened us. There are times when something, a moment or moments from a film stay with us beyond the duration of its screening; it may be that we experience these almost immediately or it might be that this something emerges days later. This course aims to explore the film moment as a particularly powerful effect (and affect) of the film viewing experience by examining a moment or moments from a specific film and exploring it/them in the context of the entire film. We tend to think of a film in terms of its entire narrative, its full running time, but the ‘moment’, the thing that resonates and reverberates afterwards can be just as important, possibly more so as this course aims to consider. Each two hour Film Moments course will explore moments specific to a film or films that will be revealed at the start of each course; there will also be the opportunity to examine and discuss your own film moments…
Keeley Street
Wed 23 Sep 2026Paul SuttonFull fee £29.00 Senior fee £23.00 Concession £19.00 - Cultureplex Ciné-Club: Folk Horror
In this Ciné Club we will delve into unsettling landscape of folk horror films and consider how this genre, which is having a renaissance today, comes to bear on broader questions about human identity and culture.
Through a selection of films that reflect both canonical classics of the genre, and innovative re-tellings, we will the explore th evolution and surging popularity of folk horror in the twenty-first century, focusing on the ways in which filmmakers continue to redefine the genre or and re-invent common archetypes.
Possible films might include:
- The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
- A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, 2013)
- Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)
- You Are Not My Mother (Kate Dolan, 2021)
- Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson 2021)
- Starve Acre (Daniel Kokotajlo, 2023)Perfect for cinephiles, horror fans, and anyone curious about the way that folklore evolves and aquires new forms in the modern world.
Keeley Street
Wed 23 Sep 2026Katie GossFull fee £259.00 Senior fee £259.00 Concession £168.00
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