Course Tutors

Dr Karl Schoonover with Nicolas Pillai

This module will introduce you to a broad range of theories about the nature of the cinema that ask: what are the particular capacities, propensities, and limits of the moving image? How does cinema mediate reality? How does the medium engage the body and the mind? In what ways did traditional forms of cinema (photographic films projected in theaters) anticipate and determine the screen technologies of today?

The module will trace the ways in which these questions have been taken up by the past century’s most influential film and media theorists. We will examine the writings of key classical film theorists, such as filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein, and the work of pioneering writers such as André Bazin and Christian Metz. Throughout the module, we will also look to contemporary theorists such as Tom Gunning and Mary Ann Doane for how they incorporate older film theory and adapt its questions of medium specificity to the age of digital image production and manipulation. In the last ten years, these scholars have rethought the medium’s relationship to photography, documentation, and politics. Across the past century, however, certain key issues persist: questions about the image and about the cinema’s fixation on the human body; debates over the nature of movement in the film image; speculation about the interaction between screen and viewer.

SUMMARY OF AIMS

• To provide an understanding of central debates about the moving image.
• To provide the opportunity to reflect on different theoretical frameworks.
• To encounter complex writing and learn how to read it with precision.
• To practice using conceptual and theoretical language with precision.
• To apply theoretical models, creating close textual analyses of specific film texts.

ANTICIPATED LEARNING OUTCOMES

You will be able to:

• Locate the development of theoretical models in film and media studies within broader interdisciplinary contexts.
• Demonstrate a sound understanding of the key areas of theoretical debates.
• Demonstrate an ability to deploy and to analyse argument in a rigorous way.
• Demonstrate an ability to apply the theory to specific film texts and to add a conceptual dimension to close textual analysis. Alternately, to provide a close analysis of a written text using an analysis of a film to open up, expand, or trouble its conceptual framework.

Click here for a module outline (Film and Television Studies staff and students only).