World Film Studies

This course explores how filmmakers across the world have used cinema to confront, question, and reimagine the legacies of colonialism through memory and history. Focusing on specific films from Lebanon, Palestine, Taiwan, the Philippines, Chile, Africa, and the diasporas, we will examine how cinema has become a crucial medium for addressing historical violence, displacement, silence, and resistance in postcolonial societies. These films span fiction, documentary, essay film, and experimental modes, and they engage with topics including gendered memory, forbidden histories, colonial amnesia, Indigenous erasure, exile, diaspora, and intergenerational trauma. Cinema emerges here as both a site of remembrance and a space of counter-history: a medium through which suppressed stories can be visualised, and emotionally reactivated in the present.

Please note that for those students who have taken previous versions of this course, the selection of films and the topics covered will be different from past iterations of the course.

2019 was marked by the death of a true mistress of world cinema, Agnès Varda. A giant of French and world cinema her career began in 1955 with her first feature film, La pointe courte and ended with the release of her final work, Varda par Agnès (2019), not long after her death. This 3-week course will introduce you to three of her classic films and will allow us to explore her life, her career and her status as a ‘feminist’ icon.

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.

Wong Kar-wai is one of the most distinctive and influential filmmakers in world cinema, celebrated for his visual style, melancholy romanticism, and evocative treatment of time, memory, and urban life. This six-week course introduces students to Wong’s cinema and explores the wider contexts that shaped his work, from his emergence out of the Hong Kong film industry to his international consecration as a transnational auteur. Through close study of films such as Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, I n the Mood for Love, 2046 and The Grandmaster, we will take a deep dive into Wong’s signature stylistic and thematic motifs of missed connections, longing, repetition, displacement, and historical transition, while situating his work within Hong Kong cinema before and after the 1997 handover.

Are you curious about world cinema? Do you want to learn more about a dynamic but often neglected region of cinema culture - the Arab world? This course will introduce you to some of the classic films of the of the Egyptian cinema and its stars like Omar Sharif, including The Land (1970) and Cairo Station (1958), alongside recent films such as Chaos, Disorder (2012) and Lebanese film Capernaum (2018). Each session will include a film screening, short lecture and group discussion.

Chris Marker (1921-2012) was a legendary French filmmaker best known for works such as La Jetée (1963), A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and Sans soleil (Sunless, 1982). He is regarded as the pioneer of the essay-film, a hybrid of documentary and personal reflection, but he was also a writer, photographer and multimedia artist. This course will explore the 60-year career of this highly influential and multifaceted cult director.