Contemporary Culture Courses in London

This course on contemporary/current cinema crucially coincides with the wide variety of films released during Bafta/Oscars awards season. It provides a weekly ‘what’s on’ of new releases. The first session is a wide-ranging discussion and debate about favourite films of the past year, from which emerges a definitive student list of best films, modified as we view and review current films week-by-week. This course is now more timely than ever as we continue to support cinema-going. The course meets in City Lit’s own Cultureplex cinema at Keeley Street.

Experimental film is often non-narrative and avant-garde. It is made to explore the boundaries of film and push the limits of what is considered so-called normal filmmaking. Experimental films often use unconventional techniques such as animation, found footage and non-linear narrative structures to create unique visual experiences. The class will look at early experimental films by Georges Méliès, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Maya Deren, alongside recent digital works.

Twenty-first century culture is becoming increasingly strange: from conspiracy theories and climate anxiety to compulsive doom-scrolling and the meme-ification of everyday life. This course will explore these and other phenomenon endemic to the present, analysing and exploring their significance through texts, films, artworks, cultural objects and psychoanalytic theory.

This course 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 Global South, from films like The Battle of Algiers, to Latin American Third Cinema, via Sub-Saharan African filmmakers such as Sembene or Mambety, in order to enrich the canon of world cinema.

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.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Do you ever get the sense that things are constantly speeding up? Well, you’re not the only one! Since industrialisation, writers and artists have explored the accelerating effect of technological advancement. From the new perceptions of space and time produced by the railways to Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, art and culture has always been in dialogue with new technologies, and the new subjective experiences they produce has likewise influenced literary and artistic form. In this course we will explore a range of materials (literature, art, photography, film) from the last 200 years to consider how cultural representations of gathering speed continue to help us to negotiate the now.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

The Coens’ Blood Simple (1984) was a new kind of film noir set in Texas. A career later they returned to post-Civil War Texas to re-make True Grit (2010). This map of their USA trips through Raising Arizona (1987), then mainstreams to Fargo (1996), but somehow never far from Hollywood and its genres: Barton Fink (1991), O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), or Hail, Caesar (2016). If their America was No Country For Old Men (2007), then where art they now? (See separate but related courses on Once Upon a Time in New Hollywood, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and David Lynch).

The 1950s in British literature was a time of bold new movements alongside struggles to break free of the past. Find out how writers like Daphne du Maurier, Philip Larkin, Iris Murdoch and Sam Selvon forged a new era of British writing to reflect the rapidly changing times.

Short stories offer a brief window into a variety of other lives, places, and situations. This literary form has remained popular in Japan over several centuries, with topics as diverse as natural disasters, the beauty of everyday life, hellish curses and the consequences of fame. We’ll explore the history of this medium through a selection of short stories by some of Japan’s most popular short story authors.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

This course focuses on the intriguing and unlikely storytellers at work in recent fiction. How do we believe a story told by a woman who has dementia or a man who thinks that only fifteen people ever lived? What do we think when a dead person is telling the story, or a ghost? What are we to make of these improbable and sometimes unsettling stories? Can these unusual narrators open up new ways of thinking about the world?

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.

Akira Kurosawa is one of the leading figures of Japanese cinema with a career – from Shanshiro Sugata (1943) to Madadayo (1993) – as varied as it was influential. Most famous for directing a series of iconic samurai films, including Yojimbo (1961), Hidden Fortress (1958) and Seven Samurai (1954), his filmography also includes crime dramas and police thrillers (Stray Dog 1958), literary adaptations (Throne of Blood 1957) and profound meditations on life and death (Ikiru 1952). This six-week course, led by Professor Stacey Abbott, will examine the richness of Kurosawa’s work and his lasting global legacy through his dynamic visual style; innovative storytelling; revitalised approaches to genre and adaptation; and preoccupation with themes of family, society, and honour.

In the twenty-first century, feminist theories of othering and oppression, identity and relation, sex and sexuality come into new life. From trans-medicine and Artificial Reproductive Technologies to climate crisis and internet activism, feminism remains at the forefront of struggles for a more just and inhabitable world. This course will explore how feminist thought is undergoing interesting transformations to meet these and other challenges of our times.