Courses - Online & in London

In the inaugural 1952 Sight and Sound greatest film of all time poll, Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) was voted in first place. Seventy-five years after its initial release, we will celebrate and analyse the film’s enduring popularity with both audiences and critics alike.

A creative, high energy and inspiring workshop in mask characterisation and mask physicality. If you are interested in learning about performing in full mask this one day workshop will introduce techniques helping to build confidence and understanding of mask performance. Masks provided.

Wedged between the two wars, the poets of the 1930s were drawn to forces larger than themselves. For poets such as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, war, revolution and the allure of communism dwarfed mere personal anxieties. Others – such as William Empson, Kathleen Raine and Dylan Thomas – found a seam of spiritualism in other, more mystical, even Romantic antecedents. Our course traces these discrepant paths through the decade.

Discover how to return your body to its natural state of balance and poise in this beginner's guide to the Alexander Technique. Learn to become mindful of muscular and mental tension in two sessions.

Explore the enriching relationship of drawing and mindfulness and how this can support new ways of seeing to stimulate new directions in your drawing. Suitable for those with experience in mindfulness and/or drawing who wish to re-fresh their practice or stimulate new approaches, as well as enthusiastic beginners.

Ascension is a system which allows you to rise beyond the limiting structure of your mind. Here you discover the magic and power of life beyond those limits. It reconnects you with your natural state of love and harmony so that you can discover inner peace, freedom, and a living experience of oneness.

There is still a time and place for film noir in David Lynch’s dark films. No filmmaker is more unique. He gets his own adjective, ‘Lynchian’: films of an eerie, surrealist, dreamlike quality. He looks every inch the auteur, working and painting in a studio just above Mulholland Drive, a recluse whose boyhood was in 1950s America, who came of age with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and its co-star, Dennis Hopper, who continued to live as a recluse on the wrong side of town 30 years later in Blue Velvet (1986), a virtual remake. “A film or painting has its own sort of language. It’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The language of film is the language it was put into, and it doesn’t translate. It’s not a word thing. It would reduce it, make it smaller. Film is a magic act, and magicians don’t tell how they did it.” He hates behind-the-scenes footage or making-of films. “People do it for sales, for money, but the film is the thing and should be protected. I never was a movie buff. I like to make movies. I like to work. I don’t really like to go out.” (See separate but related courses on Once Upon a Time in New Hollywood, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and the Coen brothers).

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process which produces a beautiful deep blue print from a variety of artwork, including drawings, photographs, physical objects or combinations of all of these. All levels welcome.

Learn how to ease tension in your eyes, jaw and tongue. Re-educate your nervous system through gentle Feldenkrais movement sequences to help improve your vision, breathing, face tension, quality of voice and sleep pattern.



This course is delivered in-person at City Lit. To take this course online, please use course code FSC32O.

André Bazin famously asserted that, ‘the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up with love’. Join us for this one-day course and explore the extent to which Bazin’s remark may be seen to be true. We will look at how love is represented across the history of film and explore the ubiquity of love at first sight in classical Hollywood cinema. We will consider the extent to which romance, primarily heterosexual, has been a structuring narrative device in popular cinema, while also considering films that explore same sex romance. We will look at a range of genres, including, of course, the rom-com, or romantic comedy. We will also think about love of the cinema itself – cinephilia – as a possible reason for our regular and continued return to this frequently most powerful of experiences. We will consider work by directors such as Jean Genet, Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, and others, as well as looking at specific films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Groundhog Day (1993).