Film Studies Courses
Study online & in London
Enjoy a fresh look at big screen classics, ground-breaking titles and cult favourites featuring a cast of iconic names, former stars and the men and women who called the shots.
Check out our blog post on our Ciné-Club, where once a week, for 12 weeks (and throughout the academic year in terms 2 and 3), we will watch and discuss film.
Study in-person, or online from the comfort of home, with classes that allow you to participate in discussions with fellow adult students and share your passion for Film as part of a learning community. We offer daytime, evening and weekend courses, both short and long. Our tutors are experts in their fields and experienced educators. Tutors share their knowledge and passion for Film through presentations, screenings, interactive discussion, analysis, and other activities.
Many students return to take more courses, telling us they enjoy being part of our City Lit literary community. Our popular courses often sell out quickly, so we invite you to browse and book your place now.
99 courses available
- Italian Neo-Realism
The filmmakers associated with Italian Neorealism are celebrated for their commitment to representing post-World War 2 Italy as realistically as possible and their influence has been significant. In this one-day course, I will examine the richness of this ‘movement’ and consider the reasons for its enduring legacy, while countering some of the myths that have grown up around it on the way.
Keeley Street
Sat 5 Jun 2027Paul SuttonFull fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 - Chris Marker: Film Essayist
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.
Keeley Street
Fri 11 Jun 2027Chris DarkeFull fee £159.00 Senior fee £127.00 Concession £103.00 - From the counter culture to a new hope: The new Hollywood, 1967-1977
By the second half of the 1960s 'old' Hollywood had fragmented and a new generation of studio heads and filmmakers had set the industry on a different course in which 'blockbuster' and 'event' films, along with more personal auteurist projects, came to typify production. Explore the 'new' Hollywood, the films and filmmakers behind it, and the innovations that shaped this key moment of change.
Online
Sat 12 Jun 2027Jon WisbeyFull fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 - Hollywood Imagines Itself
This course examines how Hollywood has repeatedly turned the camera on itself, producing films that reflect, critique, and mythologize the film industry. From early backstage musicals to contemporary satires, the course explores how Hollywood narrates its own labour, power structures, stardom, creativity, and decline. By analysing films that depict filmmaking, students will investigate how cinema constructs its own history.
Online
Sat 12 Jun 2027Ann-Marie FlemingFull fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 - The French New Wave
The French New Wave describes one of those moments in cinema history that many of us have heard of but may perhaps not know as much about as we would like. Are we familiar with the context for its emergence, for example, or the filmmakers associated with it and the legacy that endures even to this day? This one-day course aims to provide you with a comprehensive guide to la nouvelle vague with clips from iconic films from celebrated directors such as Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and others and from films that will include Les Quatre Cents Coups/The 400 Blows (François Truffaut 1959), A bout de souffle/Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard 1960), Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda 1962) and Paris nous appartient/Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette 1961). We will discuss all of these and more…
Keeley Street
Sat 26 Jun 2027Paul SuttonFull fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 - Masters of Cinema: Alexander Mackendrick
“Film is a medium. It is a language of communication that transmits a concept from the imagination of the creator into the mind’s eye and ear of those to whom the message is addressed. Nothing therefore, is absolute.” - Alexander Mackendrick, director, writer, storyboard artist and film school teacher.
Keeley Street
Sat 3 Jul 2027Graham RinaldiFull fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 
The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema: Ozu, Kurosawa and MizoguchiThis course examines the transformative period of Japanese cinema during its so-called Golden Age (from late 1940s to early 1960s), a time when Japan’s traditional film studio system was at its peak, and several iconic directors, including Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi, were making their most iconic films. We will discuss, analyse, and contextualise several of these directors’ films, as well as look at films by other directors of that period, such as Mikio Naruse and Masaki Kobayashi, and more. We will consider the socio-political and film industry contexts which shaped the films, including the cultural meanings behind the samurai genre, the post-war Occupation of Japan by Allied Forces, and the international impact of Japanese cinema on global filmmaking.
Online
Tue 15 Sep 2026Jean-Baptiste de VaulxFull fee £239.00 Senior fee £239.00 Concession £155.00- Art history and cinemaSince cinema's earliest days, literature has provided movies with stories. But there is another way of looking at film: through its relationship with painting, the oldest of the art forms.
We’ll look at paintings by Friedrich, Titian, Hopper, Bacon, Delaroche and many more. We’ll view Red Desert, Pan’s Labyrinth, Easy Rider - looking at realism, surrealism and more.
As you can see, all of these are quite different! Let’s see how movies connect us to art history.Online
Tue 15 Sep 2026Gillian McIverFull fee £189.00 Senior fee £189.00 Concession £123.00 - Cultureplex ciné-club (Autumn)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.
Keeley Street
Tue 22 Sep 2026Paul SuttonFull fee £279.00 Senior fee £223.00 Concession £181.00
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