Dr Sadie Wearing, COL 5.04D

Optional course on MSc Gender, Media and Culture, MSc Gender, MSc Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc Media and Communications, MSc Media and Communications (Research) and MSc Culture and Society. The course is also available as an outside option where regulations permit.

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 and reproduction of contested contemporary social and political processes such as migration, globalisation and conflict. The course will link cinematic representations to the preoccupations of contemporary cultural theory in relation to themes such as diaspora and identity, colonial/postcolonial memory, neo liberalism and cultural dislocations, religion and subjectivity and gendered violence. The course will introduce 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 will offer students 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), Persepolis (dir. Marjane Satrapi), Black Skin White Mask (dir. Isaac Julien) Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman) Cache (dir. Michael Henneke), The Road to Guantanamo (dir. Michael Winterborttom).

Ten hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT. 10 x 2 hours screening sessions in the LT.

1,500 word timed essay including an element of film analysis.

Marks, Laura (2000), The Skin of the Film intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses, Durham: Duke University Press; Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake eds.(1996) Global /Local Cultural production and the transnational imaginary Duke, Duke UP; Appadurai, Arjun. (1986). Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization, Minneapolis,: Minnesota University Press. Pines, Jim and Willeman Paul , (1989) Questions of Third Cinema, London: BFI; Naficy Hamid ed. (1999) Home Exile Homeland: Film, media and the politics of place, New York, Routledge; Sobchak, Vivian,(1996) The Persistence of History cinema, television and the modern event, London, AFI. Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert,( 2003), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press; Gopinath Gayatri (2005) Impossible Desires: Queer diasporas and south asian public cultures; Ezra Elizabeth and Terry Rowden.eds. (2005) Transnational cinema :the film reader London: Routledge; Kaplan Anne (2005) Trauma Culture: The politics of terror and loss in media and literature New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; Martin, Michael, (1995) Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, dependence and oppositionality.

4,000 word essay (100%).