Film Studies Pathway - Keele University
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Film Studies Pathway

You can take modules in Film Studies throughout your undergraduate study at Keele - and Keele also offers the opportunity to move on to an M.Res Humanities (Film Studies) once you graduate. There is also Film Studies as a main degree subject.

In order to qualify as a pathway within your degree you need only take one module option in a given subject at each level (i.e. three modules in total), though you may, in consultation with your personal tutor, take more should you wish.

The Film Pathway begins by offering students core introductory modules at level I that cover key approaches to film criticism and interpretation. After this, however, you will be able to chose from a diverse and exciting range of areas of film study that include courses on national cinemas (U.S., Canada, France and U.K.), literature and film, film and music, film directors and film genres. These modules aim to introduce students to new ways of reading mainstream cinema but also to new film and film-making traditions (both contemporary and historical) that will challenge your ideas about what cinema can be and what its social and cultural role is.

Film studies modules will be taught through a range of different teaching styles and arrangements, but central to each module will be a combination of lectures on key ideas and films, and small group work where you will work in detail with other students, discussing particular scenes and excerpts from films and working through your critical approaches to the films studied.

At Level One (semester 1) you will be able to take the first core module, Reading Film. Of all forms of communication, film often seems the most obvious, pleasurable and self-explanatory. With an emphasis on variety of film practice, this module aims to introduce students to the essential elements of film narrative and engages them in thinking critically about the choices made by film-makers in constructing the look and sound of their films. We will be asking, therefore, how meaning is created in the cinema, as well as what ideas and arguments such meanings may generate among critically aware spectators of it. In doing so we will be exploring the richness and complexity of cinema's potential to communicate with its spectators through a carefully selected variety of films. Represented amongst these will not only be the classic Hollywood model with which we are all most familiar, but also films from other national and artistic traditions. These will be examined in the context of both fortnightly lecture/workshops and small group classes.

In semester 2 you will be able to go on to take Approaches to Film. Who is the author of a film? How do we categorize and make sense of films in relation to each other? How is the meaning of a film shaped by the historical period or national culture that produced it? What sorts of ideas and ideologies about gender and race do films include or exclude? This module provides an introduction to all these questions addressed within film theory. Like any other discipline of enquiry, Film Studies has generated a set of debates about value and meaning that revolve around some key questions, concepts and terms. Through a series of fortnightly two hour workshop lectures and small group classes, this module will examine the development of critical thinking on the cinema and will invite students to debate, question and apply ideas on: film authorship; film genre; history; psychoanalysis. Each of these critical areas will be investigated with reference to an exciting range of films, chosen for the way they have shaped film history and challenged cinema's potential as a form of art and entertainment.

At levels two & three you will select your choice each year from a list of options that will include:

  • Twentieth Century Novels into Film
  • Hooray for Hollywood? Approaches to American Film
  • Unheard Melodies
  • French Cinema
  • Québécois Cinema
  • Politics and Cinema
  • Disney and the Landscapes of Popular Culture
  • British Society Through the Eyes of British Cinema: 1960s to the Present
  • Postmodern Fiction, Theory and Film
  • Shakespeare on Film