Postgraduate courses

Ways of Screening, Ways of Seeing

HT71090A

Content

This course will introduce students to the differing and changing ways in which historians have used film as evidence, and the problems and opportunities in historians’ engagement with film as a source. It will explore the differing type of film that historians analyse, and it will contrast still and moving images. In weeks 7-10 these debates and approaches will be applied to British films from the 1940s to the 1960s. Students will be introduced to London-based film sources as well as relevant internet sites. The course will be taught mainly through seminars and short screenings from films.

Learning outcomes

• A critical understanding of the differing and changing ways in which historians have used films as evidence.
• An ability to evaluate the problems and opportunities of films as a source for cultural historians.
• A specialist knowledge and understanding of the differing types of film genres that historians analyse.
• An ability to compare the use of the moving image with that of other historical sources.
• An ability to apply the above outcomes to a specific historical period.

Introductory reading

Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (1985)
Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money (1970)
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (1947)
M. Landy, British Genres (1991)
Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society (1976)
Peter C. Rollins (ed.), Hollywood as Historian (1998 edition)
Robert Rosenstone, Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (1995)
Film History: An International Journey