Screening the World: Global Film Aesthetics

This course is the capstone for the Film major and acts as a bridge into Honours/MPhil. The course will introduce students to the cinemas of Asia, South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The approach is to get us thinking about cinemas other than Hollywood and the Anglophone world in order to develop a sensitivity in our critical engagement with cinema and to build upon knowledge of other cinemas, and the aesthetics, narratives and practices that shape them. Students will be introduced to a wide range of films from across the globe that are often never exhibited outside of their national and cultural context. We seek to consider world cinema as a dynamic circulation of transnational flows: moving away from cinema as an assemblage of disparate histories, the course maps changes across time, space, language and cultures. Relevant theoretical, analytical and historical perspectives will be studied and applied to various films to address ideas of cross-cultural interconnectedness in a globalised, media-saturated culture.