Film Studies Courses
Study online & in London

This 6-week evening course will take learners on a cinematic journey through China’s “reform and opening up” era, from the end of the Cultural Revolution through to the mid-2000s.
“Opening up” involved a series of economic and societal reforms to rebuild the country after the tumultuous Mao years. Each week will explore different generations of China’s cinema - beginning by setting the context with the Golden Age and Model Revolutionary Operas, then deep diving into the reform era of the 1980s - 2000s spotlighting Fifth Generation films such as Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984), Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and Sixth Generation films such as Jia Zhangke's Still Life (2006), and films of the more recent 'urban generation' and new documentary movements.
Each session will map China's evolving cinematic journey against the nation’s local and global progression into the modern super-power that it is today. 

In the 1960s European cinema invariably suggested an art cinema characterised by formal innovation, thematic and psychological complexity, and a bold approach to sex. This course explores a decade of European cinema through a range of groundbreaking films, key directors and their approach to film style and the human condition, film movements, key concepts and critical accounts of the period.

Marking Refugee Week, this one-off screening and discussion focuses on Tawfik Saleh’s landmark Arab film The Dupes/Al-Makhdu’un (1972). Adapted from Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun, the film follows three Palestinian refugees attempting to cross the border from Iraq into Kuwait, in search of work, dignity, and a better future after dispossession. Through an introduced screening and post-film discussion, we will examine how The Dupes represents exile, borders, failed leadership, survival, and the human cost of displacement. We will also consider how courage (the theme of this year’s Refugee Week) appears in the film as endurance, risk, memory, refusal, and the difficult act of bearing witness.

Celebrated within international film culture and renowned for a willingness to experiment formally, French cinema has long sought to challenge and delight audiences, but it has also always pushed the boundaries of the permissible and the acceptable. From the violent eye-slice in Un Chien Andalou/An Andalusian Dog (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali 1929), to the darkly satirical Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard 1969), cinema in France has continued a long tradition of artistic and social dissent that can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, the Comte de Lautréamont and Georges Bataille. In the late 1990s and early 2000s a series of films appeared in France that the critic James Quandt famously labelled the ‘New French Extremity’. This one-day course will explore some of these provocative films, directed by filmmakers such as Gaspar Noé, Virginie Despentes, Catherine Breillat and Marina de Van, among others. It will consider the historical, cultural, social and political context for this phenomenon and seek to examine a number of these films in detail.

Please note that some of the films studied on this course contain explicit sexual content and depict graphic violence. While care will be taken in the presentation of sequences from these films and in the discussions around them, please be aware that some of the material will be challenging and difficult.

Neurosis may have disappeared from psychiatry, but in cinema, it thrives. This course explores how film portrays anxious, obsessive, and self-sabotaging characters grappling with repression and existential doubt. Through Freud’s psychoanalytic lens, we’ll explore some of cinema’s most fascinating neurotics.

Mary Wild is a film lecturer and podcaster with an academic background in psychoanalytic theory. Her research interests include cinematic representation of the unconscious, surrealism, mental illness, feminine subjectivity, the horror genre, and auteur studies.

Marking South Asian Heritage Month, this one-off screening and discussion focuses on Ritwik Ghatak’s landmark Bengali film The Cloud-Capped Star / Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960). Set in a refugee colony in post-Partition Bengal, the film follows Nita, a young woman whose labour and self-sacrifice sustain her displaced family, even as her own hopes, desires, and health are gradually consumed by their demands. Through an introduced screening and post-film discussion, we will examine how The Cloud-Capped Star represents displacement, Partition, family obligation, and sacrifice.

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.

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.

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!