Introductory description

Film has an extraordinary power to move us, but can it affect or even effect change? This module explores the potential of film to impact upon personal, social and political experiences and events.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

The syllabus moves from mainstream Western paradigms to much lauded counter-narratives to more marginal examples. New technologies and platforms become increasingly significant as the module tracks an alternative history of the power of film into the Digital Age.

W1: Ideology
W2: Resistant Readings
W3: Revolutionary Film
W4: Radical Filmmaking
W5: Community and Participatory Film
W7: Film and Activism I: In/Visibility
W8: Film and Activism II: Case study
W9: Digital Platforms and Embedded Film Practice
W10: Human Rights Film Culture

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Provide sound and accurate accounts of how theoretical approaches locate and refigure the agency of those watching film texts
• Critically interpret and evaluate how effective film, film movements and film practices are in creating individual and/or socio-political impact.
• Bring into dialogue the textual strategies of the film and the socio-political import of its context
• Verbally articulate this dialogue in an original, critically engaged and persuasive manner
• Demonstrate an ability to offer complex, nuanced and detailed analyses of film texts

Indicative reading list

Aaron, Michele. Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. (London: Wallflower, 2007)
Agamben, Georigio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998)
Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, eds, Death and Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993)
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (London & New York: Verso, 1994)
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and New York, 2009)
Chaudhuri, Shohini. Cinema of the Dark Side (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Spectatorship of Suffering. (London: Sage, 2006)
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963, London: Penguin, 1990)
Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)
E. Ann. Kaplan, Looking for the Other : Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze (new York: Routledge, 1997)
Lina Khatib, Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle (I.B Taurus, 2012)
Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota, 2007)
Philip Rosen, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York ; Guildford : Columbia University Press, 1986)
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978, London: Penguin, 2003)
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentricism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994)
Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, [1984] 2004), pp. 226-57.
Debra Walker King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain (University of Virginia, 2008)
Sonia Tascon, Human Rights Film Festivals (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015)
Mccaughey, Martha and Michael D. Ayers, eds., Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2003)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

This module develops skills of audio-visual literacy, through close textual and/or contextual analysis in relation to the moving image and sound. It may also develops understandings of historical, theoretical and conceptual frameworks relevant to screen arts and cultures.

Transferable skills

• critical and analytical thinking in relation
• independent research skills
• team work
• clarity and effectiveness of communication, oral and written
• accurate, concise and persuasive writing
• audio-visual literacy