Introductory & General Film Studies Courses

Can a film do good - or harm – in the world? Do filmmakers have a moral duty to their subjects, their audience, or their art? Do film audiences have responsibilities, rights or duties, and what would those be? In this course, we will explore the moral dimensions of the moving image — from the ethics of cinematic representation and spectatorship to the responsibilities of filmmakers and audiences alike.

London is one of the world’s great cinematic cities. It is a city that has been captured on film since the advent of moving pictures. It is also a city whose own story has been profoundly shaped by film. This course will tell the history of London’s depiction onscreen, and how that depiction has impacted on the city itself over the course of twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The title above should read: Powell and Pressburger and Scorsese and Schoonmaker. In the early 1970s the young upstart American indie director Martin Scorsese arrived in England to receive an award. When asked who should present it, he immediately replied “Michael Powell”, but the shocking reply was “Who?” How quickly they had forgotten! Martin then discovered Michael living in penury in a small cottage and rescued him from obscurity, installing him at Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope Studio where his editor Thelma Schoonmaker met him and fell in love with him and… Reader, I Married Him!” I cannot now see the Powell/Pressburger films except through the medium of Scorsese’s glorious evangelism. Their movies and his have virtually become intertextual events. You will see all their films in one glorious day!

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.