Module Information

This new module is designed to supplement and extend the current provision for Year 2 students by offering them a pathway into non-mainstream cinema. There are currently few opportunities for students to study in depth more experimental forms of storytelling that significantly depart from the Hollywood model. This module also introduces a more solid foreign-language element to the degree programme, with all the films studied coming from non-Anglophone countries. This will offer students broader perspective on the field of Film Studies, one that will complement other modules by offering a counterpoint. Importantly, this module creates a foundation for and pathway into the restricted module (formerly FM32620 Alternative Cinema).

This module introduces students to a popular area of non-mainstream film production, commonly (but not unproblematically) referred to as 'art house cinema'. Students will first be made aware of art cinema as a contested concept, and the debates surrounding its employment in designating a heterogeneous body of works from around the globe. The economic and institutional factors involved in the emergence of art cinema will be a continual point of reference. The module aims to build a gradual understanding of various unconventional approaches to style, narrative and characterisation, where the cause and effect model of conventional cinema is rejected through a privileging of ambiguity, time, space, place and memory. Students will thus be encouraged to consider this area of film production as a frequently inward-looking, contemplative cinema, but also as a cinema of transgression, provocation and excess, dealing with themes such as poverty, race, gender, sex and violence in brutal and uncomprising ways. Consequently, the module will also deal with the critical reception of these works and the controversy surrounding them. Students will also be asked to test various theoretical concepts, notably Giles Deleuze's 'time-image' and Andrey Tarkovsky's 'sculpting in time', which will provide a central focus of the module. The module will cover the topic not from the usual chroological perspective of canonical works, directors and movements, but through a number of case studies of key themes and concerns that help to frame and conceptualise this area. As such, key historical figures and films will be placed alongside emerging contemporary filmmakers in order to provide a more holistic understanding of the development of art cinema. Films from a wide range of European, Asian and North African countries will be discussed such as Austria, Sweden, Greece, China and Tunisia, taking into account specific national and transnational contexts.