The City Made Strange

This course fulfills the "Category II: Themes, Genres, and Theory" Film and Media Studies requirement and the "Specific Geographic Region" and "The Arts" General Education requirements for the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
 
London has existed for more than two thousand years, and the ghosts of the recent and ancient past remain abroad in its streets and its culture. This course aims to explore the deep funds of strangeness and otherness that permeate London’s places and spaces, through examining films and television series that show the city as a brimming reservoir of past and future shocks.
The course will examine science fiction, horror and noir/neo-gothic cinema and television from all eras, with a particular emphasis on works that take London itself as a major part of their story. These might be disaster or alien invasion films that see the city as a site of destruction or devastation, horror films which render a familiar city frightening and strange, or noir explorations of London’s underbelly that expose sides of the city that are normally hidden.
The course will both present an alternative history of London on film, and also provide students with rich possibilities for the analytic study of film and television. Horror and science fiction are notorious as vessels for the expression of both social and political anxieties, and the selection of films would encourage analyses of both psychological content and broader contexts (areas might include, for instance, Cold War-era fears, body horror, racial or class concerns).
Readings will be both critical and complementary, and hope to locate uncanny London on film in relation not only to American cinematic tropes in genres such as horror, but also to the large fictional and occult literature which features London as a place of archaic energies and occult forces.
All students develop their basic skills in analyzing film texts, and will also develop a good grasp of long-trends and recent themes in British horror and science fiction cinema. They will gain insight into the ways that film can reflect and respond to contemporary social and political conditions and events, and the way that film and television relate to literature. Students will gain an understanding of horror and science fiction as key genres in British film, and gain awareness of some key points at which these genres in British cinema and television differ from their counterparts in US film.
As a result, students on this course will:
- understand and engage with the international history of cinema (as well as that of other visual media forms) and be able to ­place media texts within their social, political, cultural and historical contexts.
-have hands-on experience in at least one area of film and media production (e.g. photography, film, video, video installation, or digital imaging).
-be able to write clearly, coherently and skillfully about the cinema (its history, theory, aesthetics, and/or social/cultural context).