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.