Online Film Studies Courses

This course explores how horror films stage unconscious conflict, desire, fear, and transformation. Drawing on Freud, Lacan, and Jung, we will examine key films across six subgenres-Mind, Body, Nature, Aliens, Vampires, and Home Invasion. Through close readings of titles including Donnie Darko, Carrie, Cujo, Predator, Twilight, and Misery, participants will engage with horror as a psychological text that reveals what culture represses, disavows, and returns through fear.

Mary Wild is a writer, lecturer, and podcaster with an academic background in psychoanalytic theory. She is the author of Psychoanalysing Horror Cinema (2025, Routledge).

Hitchcock established his reputation early on in his British career, particularly with a series of thrillers that showcased his distinctive style. This course explores his British films and the factors that helped to shape his filmmaking and, subsequently, his reputation as a major film artist, while also considering his position in, and relationship to British cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.

Emerging in the 1980s, and promoted as a prestige cinema, the British heritage film is typified by high production values, period settings and, often, a canonical literary source. We will view films such as A Room with a View (1985) and The Remains of the Day (1993) and discuss their appeal for both domestic and international audiences, while exploring the critical debates around heritage cinema.

This is a chance to get a taste of what film studies courses are like at City Lit. You also can learn about forthcoming film courses in our programme, starting in January 2027.

This course explores the Japanese New Wave, a radical and transformative period in Japanese cinema spanning roughly from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. Emerging at a moment of political unrest, social upheaval, and industrial crisis, the Japanese New Wave saw a generation of filmmakers challenge the conventions of studio filmmaking, traditional aesthetics, and dominant narratives about Japanese society.

Have you ever wondered what lies beyond Hollywood? Are you interested in films from across the globe? Then this six-week introductory course is for you. We will consider alternative cinemas to the dominant North American industry and will focus each week on a selection of illustrative films from movie producing continents such as India, Asia, South America and Africa.

What is the relationship between film and music? From jazz to rap, from music documentaries to musicals, from female conductors to counterculture, what does cinema tell us about music? We will discuss the importance of music in films, not only in terms of the power of the film score and how it has changed over time, but also in relation to the impact that it has on the storyline and on the audience, without of course forgetting the representation of musicians and instruments as an historical and aesthetic mirror of times.

From the contemporary and familiar to the otherness of future worlds the dystopian film explores political, social and technological anxieties and conflict through the lens of fantasy and science fiction cinema and their many sub-genres. We will look at the history and development of the dystopian film, its treatment of a range of themes and the extent to which it might reflect our own fears.

Explore cinema before sound, from its beginnings to the late 1920s and its relationship with the spectator. We will view and discuss early, short films, such as A Trip to the Moon (1902) and Rescued by Rover (1905), and later feature films, including The General (1926) and Sunrise (1927), while considering the impact of narrative and the development of cinema during the period more generally.

With the success of films like Oldboy and Parasite, South Korean cinema has become internationally known and acclaimed. But behind this success, a rich and diverse history encompassing decades of filmmaking is far less well-known. This course offers an introduction to the vibrant and dynamic cinema of Korea, tracing its evolution from the post-war years to its recent global prominence. It will chart different traditions and eras, from the so-called Golden Age of the mid-20th century, through the politically charged cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, to the emergence of the Korean New Wave and the internationally celebrated auteurs such as Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook and Lee Chang-dong. We will learn about how Korean cinema has continually reflected the country’s complex history, shifting ideologies, and rapid modernisation. We will explore how Korean filmmakers have responded to colonialism, authoritarianism, democratisation, globalisation and capitalism, and how cinema has served as a space for cultural expression, resistance, and innovation.

With films such as Metropolis (1927) and Sunrise (1927) many critics felt that silent cinema had attained a level of sophistication that could not be surpassed by the 'talkies', but the imaginative use of sound and dialogue, in, for example, Blackmail (1929) and M (1931), could not be denied. Explore this exciting, transitional moment in cinema through these and other key films of the period.