Courses - Online & in London

The history of the cinema is a rich, rewarding and dynamic area of study. Cinema, because it is both an art form and an industrial product, can be studied from several different historical perspectives. These have included investigations into the history of technological development associated with cinema’s origins and its subsequent development, but historians have also explored its evolution into an art form. They have written about important individual figures or influential groups and have examined specific films in great detail. Historians have also examined the national, cultural, political and social contexts that might offer insight into the cinema at a given historical moment. They have examined the changing demographic and viewing habits of spectators and explored the mutability of cinemas themselves. With so much to consider and so many different approaches to take, the history of cinema continues to evolve. As such this advanced level film studies course will explore what it means to study film history, examine the various methodologies that one might take, while at the same time looking at relevant filmic and cinematic examples.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami became celebrated and championed internationally, at film festivals, by film critics, on the arthouse cinema circuits. He came to be seen as a director who had revitalised international cinema – Jean-Luc Godard famously quipped that “cinema began with D.W. Griffith and ends with Kiarostami.” Yet, despite all this international acclaim, the deep Iranian roots of Kiarostami remain often misunderstood or even ignored. This course shall cover the long and rich career of Kiarostami, one inevitably formed by an Iranian context and set of cultural references, and closely examine the different phases of his work, the recurring stylistic and thematic concerns, and his trajectory from little-known Iranian filmmaker to global auteur director.

This module will examine a crucially important but often neglected area of film history, namely the responses to and against colonialist legacy made by many different strands of filmmaking around the world. We will analyse and discuss examples of filmmaking through the lens of postcolonial theory, covering specific films from Africa, the Arab World, the Philippines, the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas in Britain, Argentina, and Hong Kong.

The course will assess the performance of the Labour government in the six months since its landslide victory in July 2024.Join us to discuss!

India's three indigenous religions - Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism - have given rise to one of the oldest artistic civilisations in the world. Part 1 will cover the period from the Harappan civilisation (c 2500 BC) to to end of the Mauryan dynasty (c 185 BC). The last session will be a visit to the British Museum.

For ukulele players who have completed a term of study or have a command of the basics. Refine your technique, get a better understanding of fretboard navigation, and learn to play new songs.