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Critical Debates in Screen Studies

Module description

This module introduces you to key intellectual, artistic, political, and philosophical debates in screen studies from across a range of methodological approaches and time periods.This will reflect social, geographical, regional and cultural modes of production, innovation and exhibition.

The module engages with historical and contemporary moments in critical race studies, postcolonial theory and world systems theory, gender studies, documentary, eco-critical and environmental approaches to screen media. It covers a range of films, television series, digital media, and visual culture and will consider the moving image across the world, with week-by-week focus on regional specificities and contextual material. You will explore the many ways in which film, television, digital and other visual cultures respond to and influence the world outside.

Module aims - intentions of the module

• The themes explored on the module will deepen your analytical and interpretive abilities when analysing and discussing film, television, digital media, and visual culture.
• The module will build on your analytical skills to sharpen attention to detail in areas such as: aesthetics, cinematography, sound design, editing, and post-production.
• We aim to broaden your understanding of what film and television can ‘do’; in other words how films can produce and interrogate meaning; how the essay film, or the documentary film can explore political and philosophical ideas; how televisual flow, or advances in digital media are related to practices of curation and programming.
• The module views screen studies in its relationships with art and visual culture, literature, and critical theory, and encourages students to pursue projects that expand and extend their existing knowledge and expertise.
• The module also offers opportunities to reflect on exhibition practices in cinemas, galleries, festivals, museums, and online platforms.
• The module aims to develop your skills and employability for careers in media, the arts, education and research, and related fields.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Analyse at an advanced level film and screen texts appropriate to your chosen area of enquiry, paying attention to language, mode, and aesthetics.
• 2. Critically evaluate at an advanced level current theoretical and philosophical debates in film, television, digital media, trans media, and other visual culture.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Analyse relevant theoretical ideas and concepts across interdisciplinary intersections, tracing the development of debates across disciplinary boundaries
• 4. Work precisely from the detail of film and screen texts, with a full appreciation of their formal and aesthetic aspects.
• 5. Deploy at an advanced level a range of research techniques and methodologies appropriate to the discipline, presenting your research in accordance with the norms and conventions appropriate to the discipline.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 6. Through the writing of essays and other pieces of written work, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, a capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose.
• 7. Through research, seminar discussion, and the writing of essays and other pieces of written work, demonstrate an advanced capacity to question assumptions, distinguish between fact and opinion, and reflect critically on your own learning.

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Early film theory – technology, aesthetics, innovation
• 1970s poststructuralist debates, film form, feminism, politics
• Genre – A Case Study
• Race, ethnicity, and the ethnographic documentary
• Theories of the Anthropocene
• Queer Ecologies
• Affect Theory and Speculative Realism
• Media Archaeology
• Transmedia
• Small screen theories – theories of curation and programming, theories of adaptation
• Film-Philosophy – the essay film and the audio-visual essay

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 50%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of referral will be capped at 50%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• De Luca, Tiago, Tiago de Luca, Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022.
• Fay, Jennifer. Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. Oxford University Press, 2018. 
• Gambaratio, Renira et al. Theory, Development, and Strategy in Transmedia Storytelling. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• Garfield, Rachel, Experimental Filmmaking and Punk!:Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s, London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
• Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, 2016. 
• Gregg, Melissa, and Seigworth, Gregory J. (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
• Huhtamo, Erkki and Parikka, Jussi.  Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.
• Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2008.
• LaRocca, David (ed) , The Philosophy of Documentary Film, London: Lexington Books, 2017.
• Marcus, Laura, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Erickson, Bruce, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Indiana University Press, 2010.
• Rascaroli, Laura, How the Essay Film Thinks, New York: OUP, 2017.
• The Salvage Collective. The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene. Verso 2021. 

Key words search

Screen studies, film studies, film-philosophy, film theory, critical theory