Film Studies
Central to Kingston's Film Studies programme are three strands which structure the programme and appear in each year of study.
Hollywood
Why study the Hollywood cinema? What we call Hollywood cinema originated in the geographical location of Hollywood, Los Angeles, where the major studios were based in the 1930s. It was during this period that the system of "classical Hollywood" was established - film language, merchandising, stardom, distribution.
However, "Hollywood" is often used now to describe a set of cinema conventions - the way mainstream films are shot and edited, the way stories are told on film - that is no longer tied to the specific location.
Hollywood remains the dominant mode of cinema worldwide. Most of the films screened in Britain in the 21st century - in multiplexes and mainstream cinemas - will be "Hollywood" product. It is important to study this popular form of cinema, precisely because it is so popular: to explore how people interpret and make sense of it; to understand what pleasures people draw from it; to consider what view of the world it is putting across.
alt.cinema
Other forms of cinema have had to define themselves in relation to the dominant Hollywood form - economically and financially, as they compete in the market, and culturally and aesthetically, as they evolve their own way of representing the world and telling stories.
This strand of the degree includes a wide range of different cinemas from different cultural and historical contexts: early cinema, when film language was still being developed; the revolutionary Soviet films of the 1920s; German Expressionism; Italian Neo-Realism; the French New Wave; Spanish cinema; British cinema; contemporary "world" cinema; cult and independent films.
film-making
The full field programme is exceptional because of its practical side (full-field students only) that covers script writing, pre-production activities and the whole set of tasks and responsibilities involved in the making of a variety of short films.
These modules take up a quarter of the programme of full field students in the Second and Final Years. They are not designed to produce fully-fledged film-makers intending to make a career in production. Rather, the film-making modules are designed to complement and overlap with the more 'academic' modules in the rest of the programme, encouraging you to apply the knowledge, insights and ideas you gain from studying films to the practice of making them, and vice versa.
Following this practical strand and the theoretical strands will give students an invaluable combination of scholarly and hands-on skills, and a particularly sophisticated understanding of cinema and film. The modules also offer you the opportunity to explore your personal creativity and originality.
Within this structure you will be able to exercise considerable choice in determining which modules you will study in the Second and Final Years.
Modules in the First Year offer a broad introduction, often covering Hollywood and its alternatives - while the Second and Final Year modules become progressively more specialised, more narrow but more in-depth, giving you a richer understanding of a particular topic. This structure (culminating in the Final Year Special Study module, which offers the chance for dedicated investigation of a particular topic) allows you to build your own programme of study and, should you wish, your own areas of specialism - for example, in British or French cinema, or representations of women.
