Dr Sadie Wearing

This course is available on the MPhil/PhD in Gender, MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender (Sexuality) and MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access) and demand is typically very high. This may mean that you're not able to get a place on this course. 

Students need to have an awareness of and interest in contemporary cultural theory and film.

The aims of the course are to offer students the opportunity to critically explore 21st century international cinema as a site for the interrogation of contested contemporary social and political processes.  The course links cinematic representations to the preoccupations of cultural theory in relation to themes such as, colonial/postcolonial memory, neo liberalism and cultural dislocations, ethics and subjectivity, gendered migration and gendered violence, environmental degradation and protest, sexuality and representation. The course introduces students to a range of international film and will develop the critical tools for the analysis of both mainstream and marginal (or marginalised) cultural productions. It explores  a range of critical and theoretical writing on film considering questions such as cinema as oppositional practice,  transnational cinema, questions of representation, global spectatorship and 'witnessing' and the affective dimensions of cinema. Indicative films are:, Black Skin White Mask (dir. Isaac Julien), 24 City (dir. Jia Zhang ke), Cache (dir. Michael Haneke), Limbo (dir. Ben Sharrock), Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-Ho), Relic (dir. Natalie James), Dark Waters (dir. Todd Haynes) .

This course runs in the WT. This course has a reading week in Week 6 of WT. It is taught in an interactive 3 hour class that includes lecuture and seminar elements. There is a compulsory weekly film screening.

Essay (1500 words) including an element of film analysis in the WT.

• Downing, L. and Saxton, L. (2010) Film and Ethics: foreclosed encounters.
• Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow (2015) eds. A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film Oxford: Wiley Blackwell eds
• Lorey Isabelle, (2015) State of Insecurity London, Verso
• Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt eds (2013) Eco cinema Theory and Practice New York: Routledge
• Pines, J. and Wilemen, P. (eds) (1989) Questions of Third Cinema.
• Hamid, Naficy (ed) (1999) Home Exile Homeland: film, media and the politics of place
• Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (2003) Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media.
• Ezra, E. and Rowden, T. (eds) (2005) Transnational Cinema: the film reader.
• Kaplan, A. (2005) Trauma Culture: the politics of terror and loss in media and literature.
• Martin, M. (1995) Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: diversity, dependence and oppositionality.
• Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War.
• Imre, A., Marciniak, K. and O'Healy, A. (eds.) (2007) Transnational Feminist Encounters in Film and Media.
• Lingzhen Wang (2021) Revisiting Women's Cinema: Feminism, Socialism and Mainstream Culture in Modern China

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.