Introductory & General Film Studies Courses

In the 1930s, audiences were introduced to a new type of comedy style blending Hollywood social commentary with a battle-of-the-sexes. What was new? Eccentric romance, rapid-fire dialogue, gender relations as near combat, and farcical slapstick-a cycle of films known as screwball comedies, a distinct time capsule of the decade and one of the most transcendent genres of the classical Hollywood period. More modern films like the homage of What’s Up Doc? (1972 Peter Bogdanovich) or Silver Linings Playbook (2012 David O. Russell) attempted the speed & spirit of films like Bringing Up Baby (1938 Howard Hawks) or The Lady Eve (1941 Preston Sturges) but screwball’s effervescence is difficult to recapture. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) the Coen Brothers attempted a sequel to Preston Sturges’ great Hollywood satire, Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but screwball is tied to a time and a place. The time was the Great Depression, when audiences needed escapism. The place was Hollywood and an industry making full use of talking pictures, finding writers from the New York stage (or Dorothy Parker’s Round Table) who would seize the opportunity to get smart talk into the films. But over and above all that I think the real reason for screwball was Hollywood’s need to fast-talk its way around the new Production Code censorship of 1934. No coincidence then that in that same year Frank Capra made It Happened One Night (1934) and Howard Hawks directed Twentieth Century (1934). Both shared an unorthodox portrayal of romance and cynicism. A new genre was off and running.

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…

The horror film has a lengthy history with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) generally acknowledged as one of the all-time greats of cinema, expressing as one critic describes it, the ‘poetry of fear’. As one of the first feature length vampire films it’s influence, and legacy has been widely felt. Film remakes also have a history that goes back to cinema’s origins with filmmakers copying films made by others almost from the outset. This course will explore this phenomenon but through the specific genre of the horror film, focussing on films that feature vampires and werewolves (and other assorted ‘monsters’). Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) comes just over one hundred years after its silent progenitor and marks one of the most recent instalments in a genre that continues to renew itself for each generation of film viewers. Exploring a range of key vampire and werewolf films from across this century of cinema, this course will explore why these films remain such a popular sub-genre of the horror film and it will consider why they continue to exercise such power over its spectators.

Every October brings a flourish of interest in older women in the media, now that it has become Menopause Awareness Month. This November there is a chance to keep that conversation going in this one-day course exploring the work of older women on-screen and behind the camera with the Women Over Fifty Film Festival (WOFFF).
Older women are notoriously under-represented in the film industry, both within film production itself, and in the lack of roles open to them on-screen. WOFFF challenges this by promoting and celebrating short films from international filmmakers which are all either made by or about women over 50. On this course we will explore how the amplified ageism women experience in society parallels how the film industry commonly works - but also how WOFFF films are changing that script by putting the experiences of and about older women at their centre. By the end, you may sign up to be a WOFFF 2027 Film Selector.

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…

Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is a staple of the holiday season, but beneath its "feel-good" reputation lies a complex, dark, and masterfully constructed piece of cinema.
In this one-day workshop, we will watch It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) together, but with a crucial difference. Instead of viewing the film simply from start to finish, students will be given the power to pause the film at will, and discuss whatever they want. Guided by an expert on the film’s themes, ideas and production history, we will subject the film to extensive debate and analysis, discussing its visual language and hidden depths whilst reflecting on its universal themes.
By getting to “freeze” the film at key moments, we can look past the familiar story and investigate how the movie actually works. We will treat the film as a living document, pausing to unpack a specific camera angle, a lighting choice, or a piece of dialogue, allowing for a deep-dive analysis that is impossible during a standard screening.
This is an invitation to stop being a passive viewer and start being a cinematic detective.

This crucial course on contemporary cinema coincides with the sheer variety of films released immediately before BAFTA /Academy Awards season. Join a community of cinephiles to discuss and debate your favourite films of the past year and compile a list-The List of Best Films-added to and modified as new films are released each week. Students become critics in an ongoing class conversation, some even sharing their inner-geek in a guilt-free environment. As we meet on Mondays, some students extend the day by going to the special price Monday Matinees at several neighbourhood cinemas. Whether you call it homework or dedication, that’s entertainment!

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.

Please note that this is a repeat of the course delivered on Thursdays last year with the tutor Dr Paul Sutton. For those who took that class please see HF324 which runs on a Tuesday afternoon.

On this course 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.

Film has always provided a fascinating and illuminating window to the past. Historical films like Lawrence of Arabia, Schindler’s List and Gladiator have done more than most to shape our collective imagination about what the past looks and feels like, whilst documentaries continue to capture stories from our past and present for the interest of future generations. But does film provide a useful way of accessing history, or is it always a lesser cousin to the traditional academic analysis of the past? Can a fictional period drama tell us more about “the truth” of an event or period than a dry textbook?

America has gone dark again. Whoever went to the movies in 1946 was caught in the middle of Hollywood’s profound post-war production of ‘morbid drama’ (Life magazine). Before that, during the dark days of the Depression a new form of hard-boiled fiction was popular and available because printed on cheap pulp paper. This pulp fiction was about people on the other side of the tracks. James M.Cain’s working class characters in Mildred Pierce, or The Postman Always Rings Twice were considered too-hot-to-handle in Hollywood until Billy Wilder’s wild success with Double Indemnity (1944) and Otto Preminger’s with Laura (1944) in the same year brought a new look of German expressionism into Hollywood movies, turning the American Dream into nightmare. The Western’s moral primitivism and the Gangster’s Horatio Alger values were considered more American than Film Noir’s emphasis on corruption and despair. And now America has gone dark again.

Are cinemas churches, and are films gospels? Does the act of sitting in the dark, watching light flicker on a screen, mirror the experience of religious ritual, or is it offensive to even ask such a question? From the literal depictions of prophets and deities to the secular parables offered in the works of some of global cinema’s great directors, film has always been obsessed with the divine, the sacred, and the profane.