What is Cinema? Film, Art, Technology 2

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• Understand critical methods of analysis of film texts and their connections with the other arts.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between technology, art and film across specific historical contexts.
• Use selected research techniques which will allow you to develop your understanding of a range of historical contexts where cinema has converged with or emerged from art forms and technological developments.

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Write in three distinct registers, a research report, an analytical essay and a comparative essay
• Compose a competent comparison of two secondary sources.
• Communicate effectively
• Critically analyse films and academic texts
• Independently research appropriate resources
• Organise time effectively
• Utilise research techniques which will allow you to develop your understanding of a range of historical contexts where cinema has converged with, or emerged from, art forms and technological developments and innovations.

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Engage critically with a range of theoretical materials, films, and cultural products
• Critically research and analyse film in academic writing
• Apply this knowledge to specific moments of technological and/or aesthetic innovation

The module introduces you to approaches to understanding the impact that technology and the arts have had on moving image entertainment forms from magic lanterns to digital streaming on smartphones and tablets. The syllabus will highlight specific narrative films that will encourage you to understand the connections these have with other art forms and technologies. The module explores the interactions between film and art forms such as painting, sculpture, literature, theatre, music and architecture. Running concurrently with

this emphasis on aesthetics will be the impact of technologies that have characterised and expanded the definition of what cinema is. These could include examples ranging from panoramas, magic lanterns and optical toys to digital formats of image and sound, interactive video games, 3D and IMAX. Throughout the module the emphasis will be on developing ways of understanding the links between technologies and the arts that have informed cinema and proto-cinematic forms over the last two hundred years.

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include

• lectures
• seminars
• screenings,
• specific films and fictional texts form the basis of seminars each week.

Learning activities include

• unassessed group presentations (usually in twos) in seminar.
• a specific workshop to introduce research through on-line archives and databases.

Resources & Reading list

General Resources

Oliver Twist. David Lean. Independent Producers. UK. 1948..

The Conversation. Franicis Ford Coppola. Zoetrope Studios. USA. 1974..

The Others. Alejandro Amenábar. 2001.

Se7en. David Fincher. New Line. USA. 1995..

Waxworks/Das Wachsfigurenkabinet. Paul Leni. Neptun-Film. Ger. 1924.

Collateral. Michael Mann. Dreamworks. USA. 2004..

Letter From an Unknown Woman. Max Ophuls. Rampart. USA. 1948..

Duel. Steven Spielberg. USA. Universal. 1971.

Her. Spike Jonze, 2013.

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010).

Strangers on a Train. Alfred Hitchcock. Warner. USA. 1951.

Mood Indigo. Michel Gondry, 2013.

Textbooks

Friedberg, Anne (2006). The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Smith, Grahame (2001). Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sterne, Jonathan (2012). MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Gitelman, Lisa (2006). Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Henry Jenkins (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Malin, Brenton J (2014). Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America. New York: New York University Press.

Sconce, Jeffrey (2000). Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong and Thomas Keenan, eds. (2006). New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge.

Kittler, Friedrich (1999). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wultz. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Nead, Lynda (2000). Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in 19th Century London. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Brewster, Ben and Jacobs, Lea (1998). From Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and Early Cinema. London: Oxford University Press.

Zielinski, Siegfried (1999). Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History, trans. Gloria Custance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Musser, Charles (1994). The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Brooks, Peter (1995). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External