Film & Media Culture

Cinema and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 20:20:53 +0000

Cinema and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain HIST 0480 / FMMC 0480 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/13/2020 - 16:20 Tutorials Film & Media Culture History Autumn 2022 Autumn 2023 Autumn 2024 Autumn 2025 Spring 2023 Spring 2024 Spring 2025 Spring 2026

This tutorial explores British cinema and society during the twentieth century. Cinema became enormously popular in the first half of the century; it both shaped and responded to changing social and cultural attitudes. This course draws on films from a range of genres, including comedy, action, and documentaries. These provide a stimulating opportunity to explore themes such as social change, attitudes to gender and sexuality, nationhood, the British empire, and the impact of the World Wars. This tutorial is also allows students to examine the methodological challenges of using film as a historical source.

Sample Films:

War Women of England (1917)

A Day in the Life of a Munitions Worker (1917)

Fires Were Started (1943)

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945)

The Dambusters (1955)

Alfie (1966)

Darling (1965)

A Passage to India (1984)

Billy Elliot (2000)

This is England (2006)

Novels on Screen

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 20:20:53 +0000

Novels on Screen FMMC 0490 / ENAM 0490 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/13/2020 - 16:20 Tutorials English & American Literature Film & Media Culture Autumn 2022 Autumn 2023 Autumn 2024 Autumn 2025 Spring 2023 Spring 2024 Spring 2025 Spring 2026

This tutorial explores the adaptation of nineteenth-century fiction in twentieth and twenty-first century cinema. The earliest forays into film were made while Queen Victoria was still on the throne and a striking number of these early experiments are adaptations of Victorian novels. Through the course of the nineteenth century, the novel had become a (or perhaps even the) culturally dominant art form of its day. As the century came to a close and film began to develop alongside its more venerable and established forebear, the two forms became entangled in surprising and mutually illuminating ways. This interrelationship was profound and has informed thinking about both genres at least since 1946 when Sergei Eisenstein noted a “‘genetic’ line of descent” between the two and insisted that “from the Victorian novel […] stem[s] the first shoots of American film esthetic”. In this course, we will consider how film interacted with the novel and, as it became increasingly dominant, how this shaping influence began to work in both directions.

Adaptation offers an approach to filmmaking in which cinema and the novel come into especially close contact and, as such, this will provide the focus for our investigation. This course will consist of eight tutorials, each pairing a novel with at least one cinematic adaptation. Possible topics include:

David Lean’s Dickens: Great Expectations (1860/1946)
Lewis Carroll and a proliferation of Alices
William Makepeace Thackeray and Stanley Kubrick: Barry Lyndon (1844/1975)
Dream and Disillusion: Michael Winterbottom, Jude (1996) and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897): from Nosferatu to Coppola
Making it Modern: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) and Clueless (1995)
H.G. Wells and Sci-Fi: The Invisible Man (1897/1933)
From Page to Radio to Screen: The War of the Worlds (1897/1936/1953)
Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1899) and Apocalypse Now (1979)
Neo-Victorianism and Layered Adaptation: Fingersmith (2002) and The Handmaiden (2016)

The Middle Ages in Cinema

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 20:20:53 +0000

The Middle Ages in Cinema FMMC 0485 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/13/2020 - 16:20 Tutorials Film & Media Culture Autumn 2022 Autumn 2023 Autumn 2024 Autumn 2025 Spring 2023 Spring 2024 Spring 2025 Spring 2026

This tutorial explores cinematic depictions of the middle ages, mainly in European and North American film. It draws on the burgeoning scholarly literature in this field, to explore the complex interplay between cinema and ‘the medieval.’ This includes thinking about the interaction between films and other forms of artistic expression: many relevant films are adaptations of plays or novels (‘The Lion in Winter’, 1968; various versions of Mark Twain’s ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’).

Medieval topics have captured the imagination of film makers since the early years of cinema, as seen for instance in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s tremendously influential silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). Perennially popular topics for cinematic treatment include King Arthur, Robin Hood, and the Crusades. (On the latter, compare Kingdom of Heaven (2005), with the 1963 Egyptian film Salladin the Victorious). They range from cerebral films such as The Seventh Seal (1957) to swashbucklers such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) or El Cid (1961). Central elements include depictions of gender and sexuality, Christianity, and Orientalism. Humour is also an important theme, for instance in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and Les Visiteurs (1993).

The Making of Europe

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 20:20:53 +0000

The Making of Europe CLAS / ENAM / HIST / GSFS / HARC / LITS / MUSC / PHIL / PSCI / RELI 2499 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/13/2020 - 16:20 Research Classics Comparative Literature Economics English & American Literature Film & Media Culture Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies History History of Art & Architecture Literary Studies Philosophy Political Science Religion Theatre Autumn 2022 Autumn 2023 Autumn 2024 Autumn 2025

The autumn semester Research Course occupies the first five weeks of the program. This will allow you to research a topic of your choice from any area of European history or culture in the period up to c.1750. You will identify a text or image, object or building you wish to explore (or a small group: for instance a selection of poems by a given author). You will formulate a question and write a 6,000 word essay. Some classes and field trips will help to get you thinking. Once you have identified the area you wish to work on, you will have weekly one-to-one meetings with an individual supervisor, who will also read and comment on your final draft. This project will help you with your tutorial writing later in our programme. It will also help you develop the research and writing skills needed for senior theses, graduate work, and similar challenges ahead.

There is no obligatory preparatory reading for this course. Anything written in Europe before c.1750 that captures your imagination would be worth looking at. Working with texts in translation is expected: many students work with translations from Latin and other languages. If you do wish to work in a language other than English that is welcome, to, but this will not automatically receive a higher grade. There is no textbook for this course, and you will not be under any obligation to purchase any volumes (although you may wish to do so). The resources of the Bodleian Library, Keble College Library, and the Feneley Library will almost always suffice.