How The Programme Is Structured
The MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image programme is one full-time calendar year. We also have a two-year part-time option available to UK students (there are limited part-time spaces available). For more information contact please email the programme convenor.
Students accepted onto the programme will already have outlined their key interests in their project proposal. It is from this starting point that you will be supported in developing your project through various teaching modes, including tutorials, seminar presentations, research skills training, workshops, mentoring and masterclasses with relevant professionals, which continue across the three terms of the programme.
Teaching is largely constituted of student-centred learning, guided independent research and studio practice, taking place across the Autumn, Spring and Summer terms leading to a final degree exhibition in July. The remainder of the summer is meant for completion of the dissertation, which is submitted at the end of August.
The programme has three compulsory summative modules that run simultaneously. All parts of the programme are mandatory. There are no optional modules on the programme.
| Module title |
Credits |
Artists' Film Practice
Artists' Film Practice
90 credits
The Artists' Film Practice module equips you with the conceptual skills and technical knowledge to successfully research, develop and produce an individual artistic project in moving image or related media. This practice-based Primary Project is supported by your contextual and discursive engagements in the co-requisite modules Research Portfolio and Histories, Contexts and Futures of Artist's Film. The module challenges you to synthesise the knowledge and understanding gained from the various taught sessions across the programme into a reflective, informed and decisive approach to the intellectual, aesthetic, social and technical processes involved in bringing your project from idea to realisation.
Running over three terms, the module provides an integrated combination of discursive and practical teaching and learning modes, facilitated by Goldsmiths staff and a range of visiting lecturers from the professional film and art communities. A series of seminars will offer in-depth explorations of individual professional practices, movements and strategies, addressing themes, concerns and processes emerging from within the overlapping fields of contemporary moving image and related areas. Special consideration will be given to how new technologies and emerging practices within new and hybrid genres might be informed by historical models as much as radically challenge established norms of working with a time-based medium.
Study visits to film festivals and exhibitions as well as locations and institutions related to Artists' Film will enable first hand experience and contingent discussions amongst the student group. This also serves as a continuing commitment to addressing the various strategies employed by artists to situate their moving image work within a spatial and sculptural practice as part of a wider concern for the materiality of analogue and digital film.
A series of group seminars will allow you to present your on-going research and work-in-progress amongst your peer group, soliciting and providing feedback on its development. A regular schedule of individual tutorial meetings will complement this feedback and guidance. The nature and extent of your Primary Project, its ambition and feasibility, will be developed through these tutorials and the various opportunities for feedback from peers and professionals which the programme offers. This will allow you to re-evaluate and advance your original project proposal in light of your artistic and analytical development across your studies.
|
90 credits |
Artists' Film Research Portfolio
Artists' Film Research Portfolio
45 credits
The Research Portfolio is your opportunity to map out your individual territory of contextual material and on-going practice-based research that inspires and informs the Primary Project being pursued in the co-requisite Artist's Film Practice. It challenges you to reach beyond received notions of 'high' and 'low' culture to connect your project and on-going experiments to a body of references across textual and audio-visual sources as much as researched and witnessed visual, material, spatial and socio-cultural phenomena. These can variably address different aspects of your practice, including subject matter, formal strategies, as well as material and social processes.
The module is built around a series of seminars focusing on research methodologies, study visits to archives, collections and sites, as well as a reading and screening group drawing on the indicative reading list. Individual tutorials and professional mentoring sessions will guide you in your research, development and coursework submission.
|
45 credits |
Histories, Contexts and Futures of Artists' Film
Histories, Contexts and Futures of Artists' Film
45 credits
The Histories, Contexts and Futures of Artists' Film module will enable you to deepen your contextual understanding of how your practice and artistic position can be informed by and further developed in relation to a pluralistic and global array of histories and critical theories that make up both the canon and fringes of artists' film and related avant-garde moving image cultures. The module aims to build active bridges to the speculative nature of the practice-based co-requisite module Artist's Film Practice, and as such negotiates historical bodies of knowledge firmly from a reflexive position in the present in order to facilitate original and audacious thinking about potential futures of the medium and field of practice.
The module is structured around a series of lectures and seminars that draw on a range of expertise from within the Department of Art, invited guests and affiliated institutions, addressing works, movements, themes and ideas that have been both central to the formation of the distinct identity of artists' film as much as demonstrating its productive overlap with related fields of narrative, documentary, ethnographic, community, militant, structuralist and essay film. Through varied modes of delivery, they will also seek to balance these received canons through exploration of practices and positions that actively or implicitly challenge art-historical hegemonies that are socio-cultural, racial, gendered, sexual or geo-political in nature.
Foundational histories will furthermore be re-evaluated in light of how emerging technologies and their attendant discourses have and continue to recalibrate the potential of artists' film in relation to industrial narrative filmmaking, computer generated imagery (CGI) and gaming, performance and interactivity, and non-linear temporalities. A principle concern that will span across the series will be a sustained consideration of the material display and discursive reception of artists' film within a gallery context and the agency of a pluralistic moving image in relation to the fixed plane of cinema or networked screen.
|
45 credits |
What You Will Be Expected to Achieve
You will be expected to complete a significant moving image project over the duration of the programme, which will be exhibited in a Final Degree Exhibition, alongside a Research Portfolio and a Dissertation. By working on and realising these three achievements you will develop a unique combination of practical, cognitive and analytical skills that will enable you to critically and constructively analyse your own practice in relation to a wider historical and contemporary context, and act upon this understanding through your practice and writing.
You will be expected to integrate the various taught elements across the modules on the programme toward working independently to develop your project, and to engage with the opportunities afforded by the programme to develop your professional practice as artist filmmakers.
You will develop a body of historical and theoretical knowledge that enables you to think and write critically about contemporary artists' film, exhibition strategies, distribution networks and its social and cultural contexts.
Assessment
Students will be assessed by project presentations leading to three examination elements: Research Portfolio, Final Degree Exhibition, and Dissertation. All three elements must be passed to successfully complete the programme.
The degree of MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image is awarded to students who have successfully passed all three elements of assessment.
Download the programme specification.
Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.
Between 2020 and 2022 we needed to make some changes to how programmes were delivered due to Covid-19 restrictions. For more information about past programme changes please visit our programme changes information page.
