Film season

On this fast track practical experimental film making course you will be encouraged to push boundaries exploring experimental digital film making. Explore ideas, develop skills and create your own personal project using professional equipment and software. Invaluable for film makers and artists who wish to enhance their moving image practice, explore visual and conceptual ideas.

This comprehensive introductory course provides an overview of the main historical, technical and theoretical aspects of filmmaking and film analysis. In its exploration of aspects of film theory as it relates to film aesthetics and film history, the course develops certain ideas with rigour and depth.

Learn how to evaluate and discuss films while enjoying a working example of a City Lit Film Studies class. In this class we will view and explore clips from a number of films, including popular remakes, enabling us to consider and compare themes and techniques from differing filmmaking countries. There will be a chance to review - in brief - film courses at City Lit (January - April 2027).

This course will develop your critical appreciation of the cinema by teaching you how to read and understand film texts. We will look at the elements that underpin film form - narrative, mise en scène, cinematography, editing and sound - alongside its historical development. We will consider film style by exploring classical, post-classical and art cinema and we will examine influential critical modes of analysis, such as genre, authorship and spectatorship.

2019 was marked by the death of a true mistress of world cinema, Agnès Varda. This one-day course will introduce you to her oeuvre, from her first feature film, La pointe courte (1955) to her final work, Varda par Agnès (2019), exploring her life, her career and her status as a ‘feminist’ icon. We will also consider how the digital was central to her ‘rediscovery’ in the 2000s and how it was key to her later career.

Characterised by chiaroscuro, or high contrast lighting, and similarly stylised narratives, the expressionist film informs German cinema of the 1920s, French poetic realism of the 1930s, and the American and European film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. This course explores a range of key examples of expressionist cinema drawn from these contexts and asks why the style continues to fascinate us.

This cinema course focuses on Italian cinema in the years between 1945 and 1980. It will provide the students with an overview of the main historical, cultural and social aspects of Italian filmmaking in Italy by looking at the work of some of its most influential authors.