GI410 Half Unit
Screening the 21st Century: Cinema and Cultural Critique
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Dr Sadie Wearing
Availability
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 (Rights and Human Rights), MSc in Gender (Sexuality), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture, MSc in Gender, Peace and Security and MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process.
Students should apply by 10am UK time on Friday 26 September 2025. Offers will be made after 10am on this date and will continue until all places are filled.
Priority is given to home department students and to those who have the course listed in their programme regulations who apply in the first 24-hours (by 10:00am, Friday 26 September 2025), space permitting. Please note the timing of your request within the first 24-hours will not impact chances of being accepted onto the course. Requests received after this timeframe, or outside option requests, will be allocated randomly if space remains.
Please do not email the Course Convenor with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place. Contact gender@lse.ac.uk with any queries.
Requisites
Additional requisites:
Students need to have an awareness of and interest in contemporary cultural theory and film.
Course content
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) .
Teaching
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.
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 lecture and seminar elements. There is a compulsory weekly film screening.
Indicative reading
- 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
Assessment
Essay (85%, 2500 words)
Source analysis (15%)
Key facts
Department: Gender Studies
Course Study Period: Winter Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 7
CEFR Level: Null
Keywords: Contemporary Film, Cultural Theory, Eco Cinema/Eco Criticism, Post/colonial Memory and Film, Witness and Testimony, Film, Ethics and Politics, Critical Disability Studies and Film
Total students 2024/25: 36
Average class size 2024/25: 36
Controlled access 2024/25: YesCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.
Personal development skills
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Application of information skills
- Communication
- Specialist skills