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Dr Sadie Wearing, Pankhurst House.11.01C

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 will be limited to 30 places.

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

The aims of the course are to offer students the opportunity to critically explore contemporary international cinema as a site for the interrogation of contested contemporary social and political processes.  The course links cinematic representations to the preoccupations of contemporary 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, the emergence of transnational cinema, questions of representation, global spectatorship and 'witnessing' and the affective dimensions of cinema. Indicative films are: Unknown Pleasures (dir. Jia Zhang-Ke), Black Skin White Mask (dir. Isaac Julien), Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman), Cache (dir. Michael Haneke), The Road to Guantanamo (dir. Michael Winterbottom), Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-Ho), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir.Celine Sciamma, Dark Waters (dir. Todd Haynes).

This course runs in LT.  It will be delivered using both asynchronous and interactuve teaching and learning elements.

There is a compulsory weekly film screening.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

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

• Downing, L. and Saxton, L. (2010) Film and Ethics: foreclosed encounters.
• Marks, L. (2000), The Skin of the Film: intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses.
• Wilson, R. and Dissanayake, W. (eds) (1996) Global/Local:cultural production and the transnational imaginary.
• Appadurai, A. (1986) Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization.
• 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.
• Sobchak, V. (1996) The Persistence of History: cinema, television and the modern event.
• Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (2003) Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media.
• Gayatri, G. (2005) Impossible Desires: queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures.
• 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.

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

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