MA in Film & Screen Studies

What you'll study Pathways The MA offers two pathways: MA Film and Screen Studies: Moving Image Studies Pathway The moving image media today are a concentrated form of culture, ideas, socialisation, wealth and power. 21st-century globalisation, ecology, migration and activism fight over and through them. How have the media built on, distorted and abandoned their past? How are they trying to destroy, deny or build the future? This pathway explores new critical approaches that address the currency of moving image media in today's global context – their aesthetics, technology and politics. It seeks to extend the boundaries for studying moving images by considering a wider range of media and introducing students to a wider range of approaches for investigating moving images' past and present. MA Film and Screen Studies: Media Arts Pathway The most intense and extreme forms of media, experimental media arts, test to breaking point our established ideas and practices. From wild abstraction and surrealist visions to activist and community arts, they ask the profoundest questions about high art and popular culture, the individual and the social, meaning and beauty. This pathway explores these emerging experimental practices of image making and criticism. Students on this pathway are encouraged not just to study but to curate and critique past, present and future media arts by building exhibitions and visual essays of their own. Short practical workshops will enable students to make the most of the skills you bring into the course. Structure The MA consists of: two core modules (60 credits in total) comprising one shared and one pathway-specific core module. option modules to the value of 60 credits. a dissertation (60 credits) on a topic agreed in conjuction with your supervisor (on the Media Arts pathway up to 50% of the dissertation can be submitted in audiovisual form). Core modules The core modules will give you a foundation to the subject. The shared core module in Archaeology of the Moving Image introduces current debates in film and screen studies through the key notion of media history. Pathway-specific cores develop new ways of conceptualising the cinematic today, focusing respectively on the political aspects of media forms and styles in Politics of the Audiovisual (the Moving Image Studies pathway) and on artists' use of various screen media in Experimental Media (the Media Arts pathway). Module title Credits. Archaeology of the Moving Image Archaeology of the Moving Image 15 credits In order to be able to make sense of what is happening now in our culture of moving images, we need to understand its past – not in the sense of teleological development but in terms of how untimely sensibilities and ideas embodied in obsolete images and technologies keep on reappearing, inadvertently perhaps, in the present. This module situates itself within the emerging field of inquiry called “media archaeology,” which searches through the archives in order to account for the forces that make up the contemporary world. The module will look at the deep history of audiovisual mediations through specific “turning points” so as to understand the recurrent forces, motives and forms of experience that have animated the movement of images for the past 400 years. Furthermore, it seeks new methodological approaches to understand the history of technical images, which bridge the rift between criticism and creation, that is, between thinking about and (re)inventing images. In this way, the module requires students to critically reflect on their own relationship to moving image media, relationships that may be productive, poetic and arbitrary as much as they are disciplined, rationalised and controlled. 15 credits. Politics of the Audiovisual Politics of the Audiovisual 15 credits Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and Politics of the Audiovisual Politics of the Audiovisual important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media.. This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20th and 21st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique. 15 credits. Experimental Media Experimental Media 30 credits or 15 credits The moving image created a revolution in perception. It changed much more than the media: it opened new ways of seeing. Fairly quickly after about 1906, the standard forms of the modern cinema began to stabilise; just as later TV would stabilise around the half-hour segment and the 30-second advert. This module focuses on those who refused to settle down, and who continued the immense deregulation of perception inaugurated by the cinema in 1896. Between the industries of cinema, TV and digital on one side and art institutions on the other, generations of artists have worked in and on moving image technologies to offer alternative projections of the world. Sometimes personal, sometimes spiritual, sometimes political, this diverse body of work is both a treasury of advanced forms of creativity, and a storehouse of techniques and ways of thinking for new generations. Experimental Media will address moving image and other recording technologies to analyse the breadth and boundaries of what might be considered an experiment, in artistic, activist and popular forms of media production. Topics may include the idea of beauty, medium-specificity, abstraction, sound, time ‘poor’ and ‘imperfect’ cinema, DIY aesthetics, expanded media and installation works. 30 credits or 15 credits. Option modules We offer a wide range of option modules each year. For more information, please refer to our list of Media modules that are currently running. Intercollegiate options Students on the MA in Film and Screen Studies can also take one option from the MA Film & Media programmes at other University of London colleges. Please consult the Screen Studies Group website for further details of other programmes and the Film and Screen Studies Convenor at Goldsmiths for more details on how to take part in options at other colleges. Options taken under this scheme are deemed to count for 30 credits at Goldsmiths. Assessment The MA is assessed primarily through coursework essays and written projects. Practical modules may require audiovisual elements to be submitted. It will also include a dissertation of approximately 12,000 words. Download the programme specification for the 2018-19 intake. If you would like an earlier version of the programme specification, please contact the Quality Office. Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.