Pittsburgh - London Film Program

The Learning through Internships program is a unique and innovative opportunity for students to combine their internship placement (and living abroad) experience with a weekly in-class educational and mentoring experience (session), which aims to develop students' personal and professional skills while earning academic credit. The Focus Seminars and Regional Identities lectures and activities which make up an important part of the program are designed to provide theory and practice around societal themes which inform and enrich the internship experience. Students enrolling in ARTSC 1903 will earn 3 semester credits and intern 15-20 hours per week.

This course fulfills the "Category I: National Cinemas and Filmmakers" Film and Media Studies requirement.
 
The city symphony film emerged in the 1920s, when filmmakers were experimenting with the mobility of viewpoint enabled by the portable film camera and more sensitive panchromatic film stock. The city, in particular its interwar technologies of urban transport and machinery, provided the ideal testing ground for the newly sensitive and mobile camera. It demanded to be seen, and shown, in a new mode that for Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, only film could provide. But of all the international cities that were given the symphony treatment in the 1920s – New York, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, Sao Paulo – London was missing. If London lacked its own ‘city symphony’ film in the 1920s, what were the significant representations of the urban experience? This course looks at the ways in which London both invited and defied the filmmaker’s gaze in this critical period of early cinema, and considers how a contemporary city symphony for London might be composed.
The city has been an integral part of the filmmaker’s vocabulary since cinema’s genesis in the late nineteenth century. The urban environment and the craft of film grew up together in the twentieth century, seasoned by various convergences of technology, one notable one in the 1920s with broadcast radio, telephony and the talkies, and another over the last fifteen years, with broadband, smartphone cameras, and digital media. This course bridges these two periods, drawing on history and theory to interrogate the form of the city symphony film essay, and develop an urban filmmaking practice that allows students to gather and formulate their own reflections on London.
The course will be run alongside Urban Scavenger, in which students will develop and make their own film within a taught theoretical framework. Students will be strongly encouraged to bring ideas from one to the other, and to combine critical analysis with practical filmmaking.

This course fulfills the "Category III: Film/Photo/Video Production" Film and Media Studies requirement and the "Creative Work" General Education requirement for the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
 
The Urban Scavenger course takes the camera as a tool for the excavation of ordinary things scattered in the urban spaces of a modern metropolis. With a focus on the archaeology of banality and the relation between the public and the private we will explore the iconography of London through the lenses of surrealism, psychogeography and material culture studies. The course will look at a variety of moving image practices but with a special attention to the genres of the film essay, film diary and vlog, covered concurrently in the partner City Symphony course. By closely integrating practical elements with theoretical sessions, we hope to draw connections between the discourse on urban consumer society and the images surrounding it, between collecting objects and editing, between the order of things and creating a political narrative.     
Students will be asked to gather shots on a weekly basis responding to the discussions during the theoretical sessions. The shots will be uploaded to a dedicated video blog and commented on by the whole group throughout the term. Towards its end the footage collected by the students will be revised and they will be encouraged to use it when editing their own essay film.    
Methods of instruction will include screenings, in-class presentations and analyses, filming sessions, field trips to unusual London locations, crits or review sessions and editing supervision.

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).

FMST 1195 Diversity in British Cinema: Race, Gender and Class-This intensive and comprehensive course will allow students to take an innovative approach that sees race, gender and class in close dialogue with the underlying cultural phenomena that shape the British cinematic landscape. The course is designed to introduce students to British cinema whilst engaging in theory, practice and analysis. It intertwines historical accounts with film screenings and lectures as well as discussions with filmmakers and curators.
 
FMST 1195 Diversity in British Cinema: Race, Gender and Class introduces students to the question of diversity in relation to Britain and British cinema over the last fifty years. There are three different emphases in the course: race, gender and class, although we will be closely looking at their intersectionality. The first section of the course will examine race and multiculturalism in British film with an emphasis on the works of Isaac Julien. This section will cover the last forty years in British cinema with some of its major participants in the form of historians, filmmakers and curators. The second section of the course, taught by Professor Laura Mulvey, will look at films dealing with questions of gender and class and their modes of representation. The final section of the course will introduce students to the British class system through its modern representations and contestations.
 
Each class includes a theoretical discussion that provides a critical framework for working with visual media. Topics explored include multiculturalism, gentrification, women-inflected cinema amongst many others. This will allow students to both understand the cultural context of British cinema over the last fifty years, as taught by some of the leading figures in the British film industry.      
 
This course will meet once per week. Each session will have a screening, lecture and seminar discussion.
 

The gogglebox, the tv set, or perhaps these days your phone or tablet: The small screen takes many forms these days, and is ‘on demand’ in a way unlike any other time in the last century. Britain has a long and complex history of televisual endeavours. The influence of the BBC, ITV, Channel Four and now the streaming giants on British social, cultural and economic practices is immeasurable. The theoretical half of this course will critically engage with genre, national identity, culture wars and the sense of self Britain gets from the massive output of content on these shores, whilst simultaneously examining the nuances of British television industry practices, funding structures and distribution networks. The practical half of this course will seamlessly integrate practical exercises that make connections between these case studies and technological and industry policies and practices. While the title of this course refers to British television, this misnomer will form an undercurrent running through every session: who decides what British identity vis a vis television is? Who is defined as British on screen? What outputs are embraced as emblematic of Britain and who is excluded and overlooked? Why say British at all and not English since this course will not examine specific Scottish, Welsh or Irish productions? Through written critical work and practical exercises in pitching ideas and analyzing television scripts, students will leave with a critical and practical foundation in the British television industry. This course is a Category II elective that counts for the major, minor, and TVBA certificate. This course takes place in London as part of the Pittsburgh London Film Program.