Module Overview

This module introduces students to World Cinema history, geography and theories with the aim of searching for possible answers to, and creating debates around the question, ‘what is “world cinema”?’  “World cinema” still remains a problematic, often broad and all-encompassing, category, subject to the geographical, historical, cultural, political and economic perspectives from which it is considered. The concept or categorisation of “world cinema” emerged initially from a US and UK-centric perspective to define non-English-speaking or foreign-language non-Western or non-Hollywood films, distributed and viewed with subtitles. However, the term has recently triggered much literature which challenged the dividing-line between Western/Hollywood cinema and the rest of the world cinema to include non-Hollywood, non-commercial, artistic, auteur, low-budget films, counter hegemonic cinema, revolutionary films, anti-imperialist/colonial cinema, anti-establishment, and anti-globalisation films, regardless of their country of origin and language of origin. This module presents a worldwide varied selection of films which will enable students to consider the historical evolution of cinema from post-World War I until our present day, and to gather knowledge of the different theoretical approaches relevant to film and cultural studies. Furthermore, this module encourages students to consider film culture’s interaction and inter-connections with emerging theories and debates specific to “world cinema”. Through film analysis, guided and independent reading, and discussion of different articles and texts, students are offered a film journey across different cultures and languages that seeks to explore human, moral, spiritual, historical and political change and conflict. This journey will take into account the film medium’s use and manipulation of aesthetics and narrative space; the interaction and overlapping of genres; film movements such as the new waves or new cinemas, classical, modern and modernist ways of story-telling and their thematic concerns; the otherness and distance of national cinemas outside Hollywood; concepts of transnational cinema, universal vs. accented cinema, history and memory; and concepts of authorship, influence, self-reflexivity, citation, parody and pastiche. The module aims to explore world cinema with a chronological overview focusing on representative films from the six continents. All the films will be viewed in their original language with English subtitles, unless their original language is English.

The aims and objectives of the module include:

• expanding students’ knowledge of film culture, film history and film theory;
• providing students with analytical and intellectual tools to understand world cinema, its distinctiveness and its otherness;
• developing and enhancing students’ critical, analytical and discursive skills in relation to the film medium’s aesthetic, narrative and ideological values;
• expanding students’ knowledge of the world’s cultural diversity and its major historical, political and moral challenges within the context of an increasing globalisation and the challenges derived from it;