What will I be studying?
The course is taught through a mixture of informal lectures and seminars, practical sessions and discussion.
Unit 1: Approaches to Film Analysis: Film Style
(4 Sunday day-schools - 14 October, 11 November, 18 November and 9 December 2018)
This unit provides students with an insight into an analytic and critical approach to the study of films and filmmaking contexts and practices since the beginning of the medium. Working through the key features of film language, the students are enabled to propose interpretive claims based on the careful analysis of the stylistic component parts of how a film is put together. Analysing films drawing on an understanding of form, style and technique, the students will examine in detail the ways in which stylistic choices create meaning and affect interpretation.
Unit 2: History of Film: Film Genres
(4 Sunday day-schools - 13 January, 3 February, 24 February and 17 March 2019)
In this unit the students will learn about film’s historical developments by looking at the genres that have defined classical Hollywood cinema. What is understood by the term genre, and what are the elements, conventions and iconography of melodrama, the Western, screwball comedy, the musical, film noir et al? Through the analysis of genres, the students will understand the codes and conventions that in different eras have dictated how films look, sound, tell stories, use stars and will also engage with them in non-Hollywood cinematic contexts.
Unit 3: European Cinema
(4 Sunday day-schools - 12 May, 2 June, 16 June and 30 June 2019)
This unit covers European cinema in its historical and cultural context across the twentieth century. Each day-school will explore one of the major schools of European cinema, the aesthetic ideas of its practitioners and theorists, and the historical moment to which it belonged. It begins with the avant-gardes of the 1920s, in the West and in the young Soviet Union, before turning to the ‘poetic realist’, ‘neorealist’, and ‘documentary’ movements of the Depression and the Second World War. The third session deals with the golden age of European art cinema in the late 1950s and ’60s, including the reawakened cinemas of the Eastern Bloc, and the fourth with the British ‘new wave’ – or ‘last wave’ – of the 1980s and ’90s.
Find out more
The course specification, giving information about course-content and assignments, is available below under Downloads.
If you would like an informal discussion on academic matters before making your application, please contact the Academic Director, Dr Jenny Bavidge: jrb203@cam.ac.uk
If you have any questions about the application process, contact our Admissions team: ice.admissions@ice.cam.ac.uk or +44 (0)1223 746262.
For all other enquiries, contact the Academic Programme Manager, Katherine Roddwell: ug-awards@ice.cam.ac.uk or +44 (0)1223 746223 / 746212.
