How do form and style structure our experience of film? This unit provides a critical introduction to elements of film making and viewing, moving through an exploration of formal components of film to consider film aesthetics in relation to the history of film scholarship. We will consider films in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, from early cinema to youtube, and introduce a series of "case studies" to explore historical, cultural and material contexts of film production and consumption.

Since the early 20th century, Hollywood has dominated film screens around the world. This unit considers America's 'dream factory' as profit-oriented industry, mass entertainment, and cinematic art form. It covers key historical developments including the star system, Production Code censorship, New Hollywood, and the franchise film.

Examining cinema as a manifestation of modernity, this unit of study contextualizes early film as art, commodity, industry, institution and mass production of the senses. It introduces students to the study of the history and aesthetics of silent cinema, including major genres such as melodrama and slapstick, and the impacts of the transition to sound.

This unit focuses on the history of cinema in the Arab world. The chefs-oeuvre of Arab cinema, the contemporary independent productions, and the poetic of their authors are studied in relation to the cultural, social and political history of the Arab world.

1. A historical study of independent cinema, or New Wave movements in post-World War II Europe, including Italian Neo- Realism, the French New Wave and New German Cinema among others. 2. The study of Gilles Deleuze's thesis about these cinematic movements and concepts. 3. A study of the idea of Epic cinema cross-culturally so as to understand how memory is erased, sustained and created anew by film.

Nations are like movies: they are the result of complex imaginings. To what extent have nations been imagined through movies, and have movies been affected by national imaginings? This unit of study takes Hollywood as a starting point to examine the evolving relation of national cinemas and film genres. A national case study - for instance, Australian cinema - will be studied to identify and analyse some of the complexities of the relation of film genres and national audiences.

This unit of study introduces you to the conceptual frameworks and technologies that shape the making of screen-based media and contemporary art practices. Through a series of lectures, seminars, tutorials and screenings you will explore the evolution of experimental film, video art and independent filmmaking from the 1960s to the present. You will engage in the production of a self-directed digital film that may be realized in any style or genre. The unit is supported by a technical program that provides you with the applied skills and competencies needed for the use of studio facilities and equipment.

What was postmodernism? This unit will explore the most interesting and innovative theoretical, literary and multimedia texts of the last half century to think about what aesthetic texts brought to arguments about politics, identity, truth and knowledge. We will examine the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, movements, communities and subcultures, experimentalism and activism, popular and high culture, and the rise of identity politics, the 'culture wars,' and queer theory.

This unit will examine issues arising from a comparative study of literature and cinema, including: the continuities and discontinuities between the two mediums; the cultural and historical contexts of literary and cinematic texts; authorship, auteurism and aesthetic authority; adaptation and intertextuality; the figurative styles of literature and cinema; narrative and narration in literature and cinema; genre study.

Australian theatre and cinema have lively, at times intersecting, histories, and have played significant roles at both national and international levels, from the depiction of various local 'types' on stage and screen, to the work of Australian actors, directors and cinematographers overseas. This unit examines selected plays and films over the last century or so through a number of thematic focuses, including: race, gender and national identity; comic traditions; Australia and the world; modernity and innovation.

Cinema was born on the eve of a century of conflict in Europe. Celebrated as an avant-garde art form, it was also used for political propaganda and popular entertainment during the 20th century. Most recently European cinema has taken on another function, contributing to the creation of modern European identities through critical self-representation. This unit focuses on a range of recent films in order to study social and cultural change in the new Europe of the past two decades.

Science Fiction is one of the most interesting explorations of human future. Yet it addresses a number of social, political and existential issues that refer to the present: dilemmas, phobias and hopes of a world traumatised by war, disease and internal contradictions. Through the comparative study of novels and movies, this unit explores how the future, from a promised land of a great utopia, has become the dreadful exile into a dark dystopia.

This unit will investigate how film stars reflect national preoccupations and how they achieve national and transnational fame. It will examine and compare several major film stars from several cultures and will analyse their star image through, for example, their on-screen performance in film adaptations, their celebrity bodies and faces and their representations in the popular media. Students will be introduced to film star theories. Students will have to attend at least 4 film screenings.

This unit is an introductory survey of the history and aesthetics of film music from the late 1890s to the present day. Topics for discussion will include the dramatic function of music as an element of cinematic narrative, the codification of musical iconography in cinematic genres, the symbolic use of pre-existing music, and the evolving musical styles of film composers.

This unit will use the screening and criticism of carefully chosen classical and contemporary films to raise important philosophical questions and to contribute to our response to them. Each film screening will be paired with a key philosophical question that is explored in the film and further investigated in class: problems of freedom, human action, democracy, crime, love, otherness, marriage, conversation, selfhood, and being human. The class will also explore some central questions in the philosophy of film.

This unit, taught in English, will introduce you to Latin American film studies, comprising history, theory and criticism through the exploration of 'national' cinema industries. We will examine the history of film production of Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, looking at the cultural and socio-political context in which filmmaking should be placed. Apart from tracing the history of film production in such countries, we will be focusing on recent developments in this field from the 1990's to the present day.

What is the cinematic object of the twenty-first century? Where do we locate the essence of a medium that has undergone such a radical transformation? This course examines the intersection of film, digital cinema, and new media experiences such as YouTube, machinima and mobile cinema. Where many have spoken of the death of cinema in a digital era, we will conceptualise the complexity of cinema's evolution from its earliest celluloid incarnation to the technologies of digital simulation.

This unit introduces you to the history of Japanese film production with a focus on theory, criticism, and reception. Films will be discussed according to themes and genres and read in their socio-political contexts. It provides an initiated understanding of one of the most important film traditions in an international perspective.

An examination of the relationship between Italian cinema and fiction. Do they speak a common language? Do they employ comparable techniques? Who copies whom? This unit investigates these and other questions by analysing the adaptation of selected contemporary Italian novels into film.

Interdisciplinarity is a key skill in fostering agility in life and work. This unit provides learning experiences that build students' skills, knowledge and understanding of the application of their disciplinary background to interdisciplinary contexts. In this unit, students will work in teams and develop interdisciplinarity skills through problem-based learning projects responding to 'real world problems'.

Many scholars take Andre Bazin's four-volume work--Qu'est-ce que le cinema?--as the moment of inauguration for the critical project of film studies. Echoing Bazin's famous question, this seminar investigates what it means to take cinema as a scholarly object. Covering materials from early cinema to post-cinema, this seminar is organised around a series of mutually informing concepts that have structured film studies scholarship: disciplinarity, temporality, realism, indexicality, sound, spectatorship and digitality.

What is the cinematic experience today, in an age of fragmented audiences and multiple platform delivery? Taking the film festival as its central case study, this unit examines the festival as a cultural institution, as a site for the making of film history, and as a scene of the curious mixture of the festive and the cerebral, the sensual and the serious.

This unit involves research towards and preliminary writing of an Honours thesis of 18000-20000 words, in collaboration with a supervisor approved by the Film Studies Program Honours Coordinator.

This unit involves completion and submission of an Honours thesis of 18000 - 20000 words in collaboration with a supervisor approved by the Honours coordinator.