London Film Program

This course will encourage students to theorize and document their own experiences as visitors to London and, while rooted in the historical context of the early 20th century, use the genre of the city symphony as a prism through which to examine several key features of early cinema, from sound/silence to montage and visual language.

This course will chart the development of British film from 1994-2012, a period of confidence and success mirrored by a major structural and financial reorganization in the industry. Students will critically analyze key films and how they both emerge from and transform earlier British cinema tradition; develop an understanding of important British genres and film-making tropes; explore the ways in which British films reflect and respond to contemporary social and political conditions and events; and develop an awareness of specific ways in which UK and US film differs.

This course will explore the digital media that permeate most social and economic interactions today, with a focus on digital media as a contemporary means of communication, placing them in the context of remix culture. Students will investigate still and moving images, which not only serve as entertainment, but also inform the way we communicate, learn about the world, purchase goods, and express our identities. (Pending SOR approval)

This course will explore interactive spectatorship in the pre and post digital eras. Students will analyze films from the end of the Hollywood studio system (the late 1950s)—the period in which the ‘old masters’ were making their last films—to trace ways in which technological change has affected the critical reading of the cinematic image.

This course will explore the ways in which media is used to facilitate and sustain exploitative political and economic practices (e.g. how media helped facilitate imperialism and, dialectically, how media has been used by individuals and groups to contest or speak back to power). Students will examine examples throughout history, but increasingly focus on the present moment.

This course will examine science fiction, horror, and noir/neogothic cinema and television from all eras, with emphasis on works that give London a major role in their story. Students will analyze such examples as disaster or alien invasion films that see the city as a site of devastation, horror films which render a familiar city frightening and strange, or noir explorations of London’s underbelly.

This course will explore the camera as a tool for the excavation of ordinary things scattered in the urban spaces of a modern metropolis. Students will develop an understanding of a theoretical framework; gain a related practical skillset; take their camera out into the city of London for hands-on exercises; and participate in readings, screenings, and course discussions that will facilitate their ability to experience the city with a critical and documentary approach.