Module VISU3191: Travelling Cinemas (20 credits)

Department: Modern Languages and Cultures (Visual)

VISU3191: Travelling Cinemas (20 credits)

Prerequisites

• VISU1021 The Art of the Moving Image 1: Key Concepts and VISU2021 The Art of the Moving Image 2: Theories and Contexts

Corequisites

• None

Excluded Combination of Modules

• VISU3162 Travelling Cinemas (40 credits)

Aims

• To develop the students' research skills.
• To develop the students' ability to analyse and criticise filmic texts.
• To develop the students' ability to engage with theoretical and philosophical texts
• To expand the students' knowledge of global cinema trends.

Content

• The mobility of visual culture substantively changes with its technological reproducibility. While one could consider postcards, catalogues and other (relatively) static forms of visual culture, the course will focus on cinema, a term derived from the Greek, kinema, meaning movement. The history of cinema, profoundly entwined with the history of modernity in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, is deeply imbricated with movement of many kinds, a range of which will be interrogated in the module. Taking a broadly chronological approach to the 'road movie', broadly and diversely understood, the module ranges across the globe tracing cinematic examples of voyages both literal and virtual, as cinematic ideas and technologies travel, tapping into archetypes, gelling into genres, intersecting with the colonial, racial, class and gender politics of the image.
• The first term will normally focus on a specific dimension of a topic around travelling cinemas, such as the 'road movie', broadly and diversely understood. In the second term, students move beyond that paradigm to investigate a further diverse range of works that engage more broadly with movement, and to discuss them in terms of more extensive theoretical questions of cinematic time and space, flânerie, nomadism, the body in motion, as well as thinking about the pleasures of the dérive and of experimental film form.

Learning Outcomes

• By the end of this module, students will be expected to:
• critically assess the moving image with sensitivity for issues such as genre, period and gender.
• critically understand the presentation of bodies in motion in mainstream and independent cinemas from around the world

• By the end of this module, students will be expected to:
• think critically about the ways in which films represent movement
• think critically about theories of mobility think critically about the politics of the travelling image and the image that travels (gender, national, racial, colonial),
• critically analyse films (including technical aspects of filmmaking and subject-specific terminology)
• think critically about academic and journalistic texts read in the module and beyond,
• write about film with clarity and sophistication, using subject-specific language and academic writing style.

• By the end of this module, students should:
• develop research skills and independent study skills,
• develop excellent analytical skills (including visual texts and especially moving image),
• develop writing skills appropriate to finalist level, develop presentation skills,
• enhance time management, IT, organisational, leadership and team-work skills (all essential for the presentation).

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• The module will be taught in term 1 (20 credits)
• Weekly 2-hour seminars will typically start with a brief talk by the lecturer introducing key theoretical concepts and skills to manage during the session, or with students having watched a pre-recorded lecture, followed by group discussion of a set weekly reading and/or film.
• Each topic (4 in total) will usually be studied over a 2-week period.
• The last two weeks of each term will be devoted to small-group work that will allow students to formulate research questions and plans for their projects and to receive informal feedback from their peers and tutors or ask questions about any aspects of the content studied in the previous 8 weeks.
• The assessment will consist of a film commentary due at the end of term 1 and a longer research project due by week 4 of Term 2

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Seminar participation. Attendance and participation will be monitored. Quality of participation in the last two weeks of each term (group work) will be closely monitored. Informal oral feedback will be provided in those sessions.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University