Cinema Studies
Postgraduate
In Bristol
Description
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Type
Postgraduate
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Location
Bristol
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Duration
2 Years
To equip students with the skills to prepare for the independent research element of the programme.
Facilities
Location
Start date
Start date
About this course
Normally an upper-second class Honours degree (or international equivalent) in an appropriate subject.
IELTS score: 6.5 in all bands
Reviews
Course programme
MA in Cinema Studies
Mode: part-time
The Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, and Television supports a lively postgraduate culture in film and television studies. Bristol is a focus for film culture: there is a rich variety of cinema venues - the Arnolfini, the Cube and the Watershed Media Centre, as well as major multiplexes - and the city is host to the annual international Ecounters Film Festival.
The MA in Cinema Studies engages students with cinema and television in different contexts and genres using historical, textual and theoretical approaches. While the programme is founded on film, in each unit of study there are opportunities for comparative analysis of television and other media. Students selecting the television pathway* take a dedicated unit, 'Television Forms'. Although the programme is not practice-based, two practice-based options are available to students on writing for screen media and 'narrative practices'.
The programme addresses a wide range of themes, including historic and contemporary practices in cinema and television production, distribution and exhibition; the relationship between contemporary trends and earlier developments in cinema and television history; the role of cinema in the formation of identity, particularly in terms of race, gender and nation; the visual properties of the moving image as an object for analysis.
This may take the form of a dissertation or, subject to approval, an industrial placement in a film/television or related organisation, for which a critical essay, which reflects on the experience, is required.
Programme Structure
All students take two core units (one in each semester), four optional units (two in each semester) and the dissertation.
First Semester
Core unit:
- Screen Forms and Analysis
Optional units:
- TV Forms - television pathway unit
- Screen Histories: Documentary Histories and Contexts
- Screen Narrative Practices
- Film Theory
- Critical Theory
- Optional units on offer in other departments within the Faculty of Arts
Second Semester
Core unit:
- Screen Research Methods
Optional units:
- Screening Nations
- Production Skills: Writing
- Screen Style and Aesthetics - subject to approval
- Optional units on offer in other departments within the Faculty of Arts
Dissertation
A written dissertation (15,000) words or, subject to approval, an industrial placement with critical analysis/essay.
Optional Units in Other Departments (Subject to Availability)
- Reception: History, Time and the Archive
- Reception: Theories and Research Methods
- Greek Tragedy and Cinema
- Politics, Poetics and Places of Memory: Remembering the Holocaust, 1945 - present
- Critical Analysis of Media Music
- War on Screen
Cinema Studies