Film and Television Studies BA

This module engages with the narrative histories of film and television, from their origins to the present day, a period involving many significant transitional moments in production histories. You will explore the coming of sound, the rise and demise of the Hollywood studio system, and the emergence of the TV network system. By raising questions such as: what are the industries producing at these moments, and how are cultural products marketed and distributed? this module also asks what transition means at different historical moments. It provides examples of different critical approaches to film and television history and interrogates the key debates around the periodisation of that history. This module is worth 20 credits.

This module asks questions surrounding the consumption — viewing and listening, in public and private environments including theatres, homes and more — of film, television and other screen media.

It addresses viewing contexts including public spaces such as cinemas, private spaces such as homes, and emerging hybrid spaces.

For you to understand not only consumption environments but also media users, the module also investigates constructions of screen audiences, through historical as well as contemporary cases.

You will complete the module with an understanding of how screen media offer components of experiences dependent on consumption environments and on audiences' attitudes, cultural backgrounds and other activities.

This module is worth 20 credits.

An essential introduction to the key:

• stylistic and narrative elements in films, television programmes and streaming media

• roles that are involved in creating these elements

• language used to analyse these media

Decisions around lighting, sound, scripts and edits all affect how an audience understands and reacts to what they are seeing and hearing. Using case studies across periods and genres you'll develop an ability to "read" these decisions and why they've been made.

You'll also become familiar with who's making and implementing these decisions.

Over the course of the module we'll build a common understanding of the language used when analysing film and television. This will help you both understand the analysis of others and make sure your own voice is clearly understood.

You'll watch plenty of film and television as case studies and work with your fellow students in small groups to tackle questions and present your findings.

Recent films students have worked with include:

• Nosferatu - a classic black and white horror movie from 1922

• Vertigo - one of Alfred Hitchcock's most talked about movies from 1958

• Deadpool - superhero comedy from 2016

By the end of the module you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to explain what's happening in what you see, ready for more specialised study in the rest of your degree.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module supports first year students as they make the transition into degree level work. You will gain skills in independent and collaborative learning with the aid of guided and self-directed learning tasks and individual and group research projects. The module prepares the ground for subsequent research training and for the final year dissertation.

While we may take the idea of our daily lives for granted, they are filled with 'realities' and phenomena that exceed our abilities to account for them: associating it with routine, familiar and repeated experiences, our everyday lives are, simultaneously, punctuated by the exceptional, the random and the disruptive. This module explores the cultural theory of everyday life, and covers the work of key theorists Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. You will be introduced to methods for representing everyday life in arts and media. You will also look at a wide range of attempts to register daily existence, including the modernist novel, photography, film, time capsules, poetry, video diaries and comics. This module is worth 20 credits.

Explore art and architecture from 1800 to the contemporary world.

• Discuss individual artists and works and set them within their historical contexts.
• Question how changing forms of art relate to their social, political and philosophical contexts.
• Examine the interplay of individual and collective ideas, practices, and institutions.
• Think about how contextual study can be married to visual analysis.

In this module you will critically examine the social forces that have shaped different media, focussing on the press, broadcasting, the internet, and film & television. You will explore key debates surrounding the development, composition and function of these different media forms, and examine the social, political, economic and cultural conditions that shaped their evolution.

You will be introduced to a range of theoretical approaches to understanding the production, content and reception of media messages and representations, with a particular focus on the social and political role of the mass media.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Explore art and architecture from the Renaissance to the Age of Revolutions (c.1789).

• Discuss individual artists and works and set them within their historical contexts.
• Question how changing forms of art relate to their social, political and philosophical contexts.
• Examine the interplay of individual and collective ideas, practices, and institutions.
• Think about how contextual study can be married to visual analysis.

In this module you'll learn how show business is broken down into 'show' and 'business' in film, television and promotional industries and examine how creative decision-making, technology and legislation influence those industries. You'll also learn about how advertising and market research influence the design and production of media in certain regions and how film and television industries have developed in different contexts and periods. This module is worth 20 credits.

During this year-long module you'll:

• think about industries, audiences and surrounding debates from a social and cultural viewpoint
• learn about the way that social and cultural meaning is produced by film and television programmes​
• explore the social practices that surround the consumption of media, such as movie going and television viewing

Some of the specific questions we might look at together include:

• How do value judgements shape the way in which movies and television programmes get made
• What is "good" television?
• What challenges are public service broadcasters, like the BBC, facing and how should they address these?
• How have writers and producers attempted to use television drama to enact social change?
• What kind of TV programmes are preferred by streaming services and why?
• How might binge watching impact on the viewer's experience and social communication?

This module is worth 20 credits.

To write about a product you need to know how it was produced.

We’ll take a screen product (for example a film, game or TV show) and break it down into it’s parts. You’ll create your own A-Z of the elements that make up the media (Atmosphere? Locations? Music? Zolly?) to help create an in-depth understanding of production.

We’ll also examine the art of media criticism – including vocabulary, audience and context.

You’ll then combine these two strands and create your own reviews of a range of media products. You’ll be encouraged to be creative. You might make a podcast as if you were a radio film reviewer or a video diary as a local film enthusiast.

Collaboration is key. In the same way that creating a programme involves a diverse range of people your reviews, while based on your own ideas, will involve working with others to create your final products.

This module is worth 20 credits.

For this year-long core research module you'll spend two hours a week in lectures and workshops to become familiar with different approaches to investigating research topics which interest you. This will include learning about and trying out first-hand a range of research methods and techniques commonly applied in ethnographic, historical and textual study, and determining their suitability for different projects. You’ll learn about the kinds of research that a range of industry professionals from diverse sectors within the media, creative, entertainment and heritage industries pursue, and have opportunities to reflect on how you could incorporate that learning into your own research. You'll also investigate the interdisciplinary nature of culture, film, media, the arts and critical digital studies and demonstrate this knowledge by choosing your own research project and methods. This module is worth is 20 credits.

This module develops critical modes of attention to the mediation of identity. On our screens and in our headphones, we shape and reshape our selves. Media do not reflect identities but play an active role in bringing them into being. This module takes up the question of 'identity politics', enhancing students' knowledge and understanding of key identity categories that have been advanced and problematized by media scholars, such as gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, national, regional and local belonging, age, ability and disability, and more. The module also interrogates the mediated forms these identities take, considering the politics of looking and visual culture, the politics of hearing and auditory culture, and the politics of affect, emotions and embodiment. The module encourages historical as well as contemporary perspectives.

Described variously as an era of dissent, revolution and experiment, the 1960s offers a unique vantage point from which to explore a range of issues and topics pertinent to media and cultural studies. The art of the period brings into view a volatile world where distinctions between different media were becoming blurred (as in performance art, for instance) and where inherited ideas, hierarchies and values were contested, if not exploded. Notions such as the Establishment, the underground, celebrity, obscenity, mass culture, alongside those of personal identity (gender, race, class, sexuality) were all subject to radical questioning in an era where events, such as those of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, challenged the received order of things. This module critically evaluates the idea of the 1960s, starting with its status as a fabled decade that is said to cast its shadow today. Historiographical and geographical questions structure the module.  When and, crucially, where were ‘the Sixties’? Was it primarily an Anglo-American phenomenon? Was it the 1950s until 1963? Did it end in the early 1970s, as some believe, with the Oz Trials?  These and other questions will help us to demythologise the period and begin investigating it anew.

Explore how film can be regarded as an art form through the study of avant-garde cinema in early 20th century Europe.

We’ll start by looking at what is meant by the term ‘avant-garde’, and consider the development of experimental filmmaking in the context of artistic movements such as:

• Futurism
• Cubism
• Dada
• Surrealism
• Constructivism

The focus will be on developments in Germany, France and the Soviet Union and consider key trends from abstract animation to Cinema Pur.

We’ll also explore some key concerns of non-mainstream cinema such as:

• Narrative
• Abstraction
• Reflexivity
• Spectatorship
• movement, time and space

You’ll examine how experimental film engaged with modernity, including the aesthetic and political strategies of the European avant-gardes.

By the end of the module you’ll be able to:

• contextualise the avant-garde in relation to broader artistic and historical developments
• understand the relationships between film and other media

This module is worth 20 credits.

You will explore the works and practices of Black artists that have been displayed or produced in Europe and America from the nineteenth century to the present day. This includes how methods of display, tactics of critique and attitudes towards the 'Other' have defined and influenced how Black art is viewed and produced in the Western world.

Moving through time we'll:

• examine nineteenth-century attitudes towards African objects
• explore the influences of ethnography and African material culture on artists working in the early to mid-twentieth century, such as the Surrealists
• consider artworks produced in the Harlem Renaissance by painters like Aaron Douglas and photographers like James Van Der Zee
• discover how artists like Jeff Donaldson and Faith Ringgold sought to recover African history, culture, and forms of memory in the context of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and how their work responded to the political and social pressures of this period
• look at the practices of more recent artists like Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker, and explore how artists have critically re-presented history’s narratives in ‘the present’ before focusing on the curatorial works of Fred Wilson

To finish we'll consider the rise of contemporary African art within European and American art markets, and the related economic and political shifts that have occurred since the colonial era. 

This module is worth 20 credits.

In this module you'll learn about the concepts of ‘transnational’ and ‘postnational’ media, taking into account the movement and interactions of people, finance, technology and ideas around the world. The module addresses in particular global media interactions emerging from tensions between forces of cultural homogenisation and heterogenisation. You'll also develop a foundation of theoretical knowledge to be applied to case studies in global film, television and other screen and print media. This module is worth 20 credits.

Digital communication and media are significantly transforming the ways our societies operate. In this module you will critically explore key issues behind this transformation, and investigate theoretical and practical foundations of digital communication and media and their relationship to contemporary culture. You will study the cultural, political, economic, technical and regulatory contexts from which digital communication and media have emerged and in which they continue to operate. To link conceptual frameworks to real-life experiences and situations, the module also provides opportunities for you to explore the interactive forms and practices that result from the use of digital communication and media through a range of both individual and group activities. This module is worth 20 credits.

A vital introduction to the first-hand study of art and architecture.

Through a series of weekly site visits you’ll explore:

• space - residential, commercial, industrial, recreational, ceremonial
• function - art galleries, streets, churches, factories, monuments, municipal buildings, museums, private estates, public parks
• identity - civic, familial, institutional, political, religious

We’ll examine how these change as a city develops and ask important questions about heritage and conservation.

The on-site study will be supported by archival material from Manuscripts and Special Collections. This might include architectural drawings, guide books, maps, newspapers, pamphlets, and photographs.

Media, TV, film and visual culture play a central role in forming our knowledge of the past. There is no memory without its representation in language or images. Using a range of case studies, you will explore how different forms of remembrance add weight to what they represent. Who remembers what, when, where, why and to what purpose? Why do screen and other media retell certain stories over and over again, and how is such remembrance linked to the erasure of other pasts? What is the relationship between national and transnational memories, when set against memories of enslavement and its visualisations? These, and other questions, will guide our approach to an interdisciplinary field of media, film and visual studies. The module will also encourage you to reflect critically on regimes of visibility and narration, and on the distinct ways that memories of certain events are communicated via different genres, institutions, and artefacts. This module is worth 20 credits.

This module introduces a number of artistic and architectural practices that emerged in Southern California after 1945. Exploring their cultural and historical context, we will consider the role of Los Angeles in the development of post-1945 American art and architecture, including mid-century modernism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Light & Space Art. Central to this module is the question of whether all art made in Los Angeles can be classified as “Los Angeles Art” – that is, the extent to which the art and architecture of the region necessarily reflected the geographical location, climate, and expansive urban layout of Los Angeles. To this end, we will consider the critical reception of art of this period, investigating, amongst other critical constructs, the notions of centre and periphery, regionalism and the cultural construction of the American west that shaped much writing on California during the period.

Throughout your degree you'll come across topics that really engage you and you wish you had more opportunity to explore in greater depth. The dissertation is that opportunity!

You'll agree a topic with your supervisor who'll be there to support and advise you throughout the entire project.

This individual support will be matched by more general sessions that develop your research and writing skills.

By the end of the year you'll submit a well researched and written project of 8,000 - 12,000 words.

The project will not only demonstrate your subject knowledge but also your ability to:

• critically assess evidence and sources
• argue coherently
• work independently

Essential skills any employer wants to see.

 

This module is worth 40 credits.

This module examines North American short stories and novels and their film adaptations, paying attention to the contexts in which both the literary and the cinematic texts are produced as well as to the analysis of the texts themselves. In particular, the module takes an interest in literary texts whose film adaptations have been produced in different national contexts to the source material.

What is a film, television or literary classic? How has this term come under pressure and fractured over the past half century or so? In this module you will consider the concept of the mid and late twentieth century American “classic” in a variety of contrasting and overlapping contexts. These contexts will be elaborated on the basis of their formal, generic, period and/or cultural designations that will cover university and exam curricula reading lists, popular opinion and widespread critical consensus (such as the currently prevalent view, for instance, that the early twenty-first century constitutes a ‘golden age’ of US television).

Almost every country has a cinema industry. Yet what’s shown, and why, varies wildly.

We’ll look at how films outside Hollywood are made, distributed and received globally, and how these reflect local, regional and international trends.

We’ll ask how these cinemas:

• reflect past and current international film industries setups and audiences’ tastes
• are driven by local cultural specifics and global changes
• might benefit different institutions and structures in society

We will also try to untangle categories such as national cinema, transnational cinema and world cinema, as well as to make sense of different filmic traditions, genres and modes around the world. Who creates these categories and who do they serve?

With an entire global cinema to draw from, the focus will narrow in any year to particular regions, filmic genres or movements.

This module is worth 20 credits.

The cultural and creative industries are at the forefront of government strategies across the world for developing post-industrial economies, are seen as exciting places to work, and regularly feature at the top of graduate employment destinations.

• But what are these industries, and what is it like to work in them?
• How do you gain entry to these competitive, highly skilled jobs?
• What is ‘creativity’ and why is it so important to modern economies?
• And what does the future hold for cultural and creative sectors?

We’ll examine the structure, organisation and working patterns in the creative and media industries alongside more practical exercises designed to help you to identify and evaluate your own skills and interests. This combination of industry knowledge and personal reflection is aimed to help you to find a rewarding and exciting career when you leave university.

You’ll also examine key aspects of contemporary work including:

• the concept of creativity, the knowledge economy and precarious labour
• important issues such as internship culture, exploitation and inequality

There will be plenty of opportunity to discuss and build upon your own experiences and aspirations, and to conduct independent research on areas of creative and media work that interest you.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module considers the main processes and people involved in the development and production of screen content. In particular, it will cover the following areas: People (talent development and management); Ideas (development and content creation); Money (financing and assets); Places (global production trends).

 

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module examines the development of photography in America from roughly 1945 onwards. The module breaks the period down into themes and considers:

1. the transformation of ‘documentary’ photograph;

2. the emergence and importance of colour photography;

3. experimental, conceptual and post-conceptual photography;

4. issues of serialism and seriality;

5. landscape photography;

6. the photobook

7. analogue/digital

The module will draw on the work of a diverse range of photographers, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Ed Ruscha, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Robert Heinecken, Stephen Shore, Todd Hido, William Eggleston and Doug Rickard.

Many films share common traits. Together they might be classed as “action”, “made for television” or “low budget”. But how does as film get assigned a genre? Who does the assigning? And what impact does this assigning have?

During the module we’ll delve deep into a particular genre. We’ll examine it’s:

• key concepts and texts
• development
• influence and influences

Building on what you’ve learnt in years one and two you’ll also look at the genre in the context of production and consumption.

As well as knowledge of a specific genre you’ll also develop the skills to apply your learning to other genres.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Develop and expand your understanding of the relationship between screen media and their most important component – the audience.

We’ll explore widely across history including:

• pre-cinema moving images
• the changing nature of cinema space
• the impact of domestic television and VCRs
• the playing of games and use of smartphone apps
• experimental forms of screen media

You’ll also consider the impact social and political factors, and changes in daily living, have on screen media’s relationship with its audience.

Alongside the theory you’ll also get practical experience by using questionnaires and focus groups to conduct your own audience research.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module combines the historical and theoretical knowledge you have gained with the practical task of video production. You'll investigate the ways that production activities contribute to videomaking through recording and editing techniques, and experience the many decisions that must be made through the production process. You'll spend time in media labs and in the field making a collaborative video production, alongside four hours a week in lectures and seminars.

Examine how issues of gender and sexuality relate to media and popular culture.

Using the intersectional fields of feminism, queer theory, and media and cultural studies we'll ask some crucial questions such as:

• How are gender and sexuality represented in media and popular culture?
• How do media and cultural industries structure gender and sexual inequalities?
• How are identities and practices of media audiences and users gendered and sexualised?
• How can gender and sexual norms be challenged in creative and radical ways?

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module will examine cultural production during Italy’s fascist regime. There will be an emphasis on the experience of visual culture in public settings such as the exhibition space, the cinema, and the built environment. A wide range of cultural artefacts will be examined, paying attention to material as well as visual aspects. Visual material will be situated in the social, cultural and political circumstances of the period. Topics will include: Fascism’s use of spectacle, fascist conceptions of utopia, the regime’s use of the past, the relationship between Fascism and modernism, Fascism as a political religion, the cult of Mussolini, urban-rural relations, and empire building. The module will also consider the afterlife of fascist visual culture and the question of ‘difficult’ heritage.

This module is part of the nationwide Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme, which works with universities to provide academic modules that enable students to go into local schools to act as inspiring role models. You will split your time between the university-based seminar and your allocated school, where you will be placed in an appropriate department as a teaching assistant. You will design and deliver a teaching project aimed at improving pupil understanding of selected aspects of media studies. You will be supported by the module convenor, the education specialist on campus, and the school's contact teacher. The module typically includes fortnightly seminars and seven half-days spent in school. Placements are in secondary schools and Sixth Form or FE colleges.