Creative Arts and Design|Film Studies|Social Anthropology

In the fourth core course – which will run during the third term and over the summer - students .produce a research book (words and pictures c 5,000...

Research Work and Research Book (ANTH0179)

CINEMA|FILM|DOCUMENTARY FILM|ETHNOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY|FILM HISTORY|FILM ANALYSIS

Module Content

Cinema is an international art-form. The aim of this course, offered under the BASc Cultures rubric at Undergraduate Level 5, is to provide a...

An Introduction to World Cinema (ANTH0078)

Module Content

Cinema is an international art-form. The aim of this course, offered under the BASc Cultures rubric at Undergraduate Level 5, is to provide a general overview of some of the important national cinemas of the world as they have developed since the Second World War. We do this by looking at individual films by individual auteurs and then discussing them in detail in a seminar the following day. In addition to the communal screenings in Birkbeck cinema, students are asked to look at one other film in their own time during the week in question.

Indicative Topics

The course changes in small details from year to year. But in a typical semester we will start with classical Hollywood, before moving on to the national cinemas of Japan, South Korea, China, France, Italy, Sweden, India, Iran, plus one or other of the national cinemas of West Africa (Mali, Mauretania, Senegal etc). In the course of this survey we will discuss such important post war developments in cinema as Neo-Realism and the different New Waves that sprang up everywhere in the 1950s and 60s.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module you will have

acquired important background concerning the cultural and political structures of the countries in question.
	been introduced to the way that cinema has been thought about, theorised, criticised in practice over the past fifty years.
	begun to master the skills of how, practically, to write about cinema in our current era of identity politics.
Delivery Method

Film screening: two hours.
	Teaching session: two hours.
	Private screening of another film: two hours in your own time.