2025/26

As a recorded audiovisual medium, cinema is especially suited to the representation of place and movement through the simultaneous registration of space and time. This module will examine the implications of this proposition in a series of film texts that mainly privilege the representation of a particular city or geographical landscape, often in relation to the underlying narrative trope of the journey. It will thus introduce you to a range of current disciplinary and inter-disciplinary debates about film’s engagement with urban space, landscape, place, ecology and mobility. In particular, the module will also give you a chance to engage with a deliberately broad range of global and local cinemas. In so doing, it will think both about the representation of cities and landscapes, and look at the way in which travel, location and terrain may be understood more broadly as fundamentally significant cinematic concepts.

Two Filmmakers provides an opportunity for you to examine the works of two film directors in close detail. It will acquaint you with key films from these filmmakers’ oeuvres, and situate them within the critical discourses surrounding these figures and their work, and wider debates concerning film authorship. The module is designed to enhance your ability to critically assess films and academic scholarship, and to develop your understanding of historically significant critical paradigms that sought to theorise authorship in relation to the moving image. This year the two filmmakers will be Ernst Lubitsch and Gus Van Sant.