How does film function as an artistic, technological and cultural form? This unit provides a critical introduction to elements of filmmaking and viewing, exploring the components of film form as they have evolved through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will study films in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, from early cinema to the emergence of new digital cinemas, and discuss topics that include visual style, sound design, narrative, genre, and film authorship.

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.

From the postmodern nostalgia film to the holocaust documentary, cinema is implicated in complex processes of forgetting and remembering. This unit introduces students to thinking about how film represents memory formally and narratively and its thematic, cultural, and moral implications. It traces film's relation to nostalgia while approaching cinema more broadly as an archive of memory, especially of those ephemeral minor or affective experiences not often thought of as historical.

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.

This unit of study introduces you to the art and craft of writing for the screen. Through a series of lectures, seminars, tutorials and film screenings you will explore a range of approaches to screenwriting. These include looking at the structure of dialogue and character driven scripts, then moving to an analysis of more experimental approaches to script writing that rely less on character or dialogue and more on mood, situation and atmosphere. You will write an original script for a digital film that can be realized in any style or genre.

This unit explores the relationship between cinema and sexuality in classic films through detailed, historicised readings. Questions to be investigated include the erotics of cinematic genre and form; the sexual politics of representation and spectatorship; stardom, scandal and cult appreciation; cinema and sexuality as technologies of modernity; cinema, sexuality and pedagogy.

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.

The range of media channels through which we experience popular music has proliferated in recent years. The emotive power of music is used to tell stories, sell products and connect people to one another. This unit of study will analyse the use of popular music in a broad range of multimedia forms from film and television to video games and the use of digital media to disseminate a multitude of musical multimedia productions.

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 cinema in 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 platforms such as YouTube, mobile cinemas, and virtual reality technologies. 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.

Time is one of the most exciting and perplexing concepts in Film Studies. How does the cinema create time and what effect does it have on our own sense of time? Can we sense times other than our own? This unit explores cinematic time in a global context. A survey of key films and reflection on the experience of cinema will serve as focal points for thinking time cinematically.

In the age of reality television and instantaneous sharing of social media, why do documentary's truth claims, and modes of representing reality, continue to be so compelling? This unit introduces students to the history and poetics of documentary cinema, its codes of realism and its reality effects. It focuses in particular on transformations since the 1960s, including the impacts of new film technologies, television, new media, computerisation and the Internet.

What are the current debates and issues driving Australian art and film? We explore contemporary studio practices through screenings, on-site gallery visits and the study of works in university and other local art and film collections.

This unit will draw on a wide range of photographic material, including university and museum collections, to examine the pivotal role of photography in recording and shaping our image-culture across diverse global contexts. The unit will engage with key debates to examine the social, cultural, theoretical, historical and art practice contexts of the photograph as an image and as an object. Key theories from Walter Benjamin to Hito Steyerl will be used to interrogate themes of memory, documentary and the real, witnessing, conflict, gender and sexuality, decolonisation, and the digital.

Explore digital technologies in the visual and performing arts, film and popular culture to analyse how new media transform the ways art is made and experienced. Discuss and evaluate their technologies, aesthetics, and how audiences interact with, and even produce them.

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 sociopolitical contexts. It provides an initiated understanding of one of the most important film traditions in an international perspective.

This unit critically explores modern and contemporary utopias and dystopias in literature, tv, and cinema. It examines the history, aesthetics and politics of utopias and dystopias, focusing on questions of the development of new spaces and social orders, technology, the environment, surveillance, the posthuman and IT. It assesses different conceptions of the future in relation to the present and the past. The unit addresses questions about the representation of the future in different media and asks students to imagine the future as both dream and nightmare.

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'.

This interdisciplinary unit provides students with the opportunity to address complex problems identified by industry, community, and government organisations, and gain valuable experience in working across disciplinary boundaries. In collaboration with a major industry partner and an academic lead, students integrate their academic skills and knowledge by working in teams with students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. This experience allows students to research, analyse and present solutions to a real¿world problem, and to build on their interpersonal and transferable skills by engaging with and learning from industry experts and presenting their ideas and solutions to the industry partner.