American Film Studies

Once cinema began to develop, Hollywood began to promote stardom. Starting with Florence Lawrence, the industry began to capitalise on star personalities and encourage fandom. This course will examine how the Hollywood star system began and evolved. The course will begin by examining the ‘picture personality’ in 1912 through to the collapse of the traditional star system in the 1960s.

The name Disney is synonymous with the story of American animation. In this course, we will learn about the history of the Disney Animation Studio during the lifecycle of its founder, Walt Disney. We will explore the origins of the studio within the context of early American animation, and discuss key films from its ‘classic’ era of production, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940) and Bambi (1942).

American crime cinema has been a major area of production, enthralling audiences and critics alike. Explore its history and development in the period 1930 to 1990 through films such as Scarface (1932), Double Indemnity (1944), The Godfather (1972) and many others, while also considering key critical accounts of the genre, the films and their representation of American social and political life.

Drawing on social, political and technological concerns of the period, British and American science fiction cinema of the 1950s and 1960s comprises a rich body of genre cinema with an enduring appeal. Looking at a range of films, this course explores their function as genre cinema through their style and thematic concerns, their production contexts, and a range of critical responses to the films.

Somewhere between the crowd-pleasing spectacle of Hollywood and the esoteric European cinema lies Christopher Nolan, the London-born writer-director who has now become the blockbuster auteur and champion of celluloid cinema as a five-time Academy Award nominee known for his complex narratives, intimate plot twists, and the nature of time and memory. From his made-on-the-cheap indie debut Following (1998) to his most recent blockbuster Odyssey (2025), Nolan views cinema as a magic lantern and a time machine, opting for narratives that shuffle time like a deck of cards. His breakthrough was Memento (2000), an amnesiac thriller using a reverse-order narrative to reflect Guy Pearce’s inability to create and store new memories. Memento’s spiritual successorcame two decades later with Tenet (2020), a head-scrambling big-budget thriller in which contrapuntal time frames form a perfect palindrome.