This paper is available for the academic year 2025-26 at Part II.
This comparative paper aims to explore pressing political, aesthetic, theoretical and historical questions regarding the nature of cinematic representation. Examining fiction, documentary, mainstream and experimental moving image practice, from 1945 onwards, the paper will engage with a range of issues such as gender and sexuality, race, labour, capitalism, digitality, biopolitics and ecologies. It will address topics including trauma and historical memory, decolonisation (particularly Third Cinema in its Latin American and African iterations), political filmmaking in various contexts (Black, feminist, queer, trans), cinematic representations of AIDS/HIV, and contemporary explorations of identity, disability, precarity and crisis.
The scope of the paper is global. While the major language areas covered will be French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian and English, students are encouraged to adopt a global, comparative approach that explores such material alongside cinemas in other languages.
The paper is divided into seven key topics:
- Trauma and decolonisation
- Gender and sexuality
- Labour and class
- Migration and Diaspora
- Cinema of crisis
- Disability
- Ecologies
The paper begins with an introductory lecture on the history of political cinema.
There is a list of suggested (rather than prescribed) films for each topic. Information on the topics, films and suggested reading can be found in the reading list (on Moodle, requires Raven login).
The paper encourages a global, comparative approach. Students writing about European film are encouraged to bring this material into contact with cinemas beyond Europe.
Robin Blaetz, Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (2007)
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2008 [2000])
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ (1969)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963)
Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2019)
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. D. Macey, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana (2003)
Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, Queer Cinema in the World (2016)
Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005)
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (2015 [1992])
Laura U. Marks, Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (2015)
Karl Marx, ‘The Labour Process’, in Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (1990), pp. 283-292.
Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (1990)
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (2019)
Robert McRuer (ed), ‘Cripping Cinema and Media Studies’, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 58:4 (Summer 2019), https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/40707
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975)
Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (eds), Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (2013)
Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, in Mignolo and Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option (2010), pp. 22-32.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (2004)
Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (2010)
Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (2006)
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994)
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ (1970)
Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (2019)
The paper will be taught through a combination of lectures and supervisions. Students should cover at least 5-6 of the topics listed above in their supervisions. They will usually work with one supervisor across the year.
Supervisory arrangements are centrally organised and communicated to students at the start of the Michaelmas Term.
For the CS7 Moodle site, please see here (will require Raven sign-in)
The examination paper will be divided into seven sections, according to the seven topics taught, with two essay questions available per topic. Students write three essays in response to questions drawn from three different sections.
Each answer should be comparative across at least two different language areas (which may include English). Scripts as a whole must engage substantially with at least two different language areas (excluding English).
Optional Dissertations should also engage substantially with at least two different language areas (excluding English).
Past examination papers can be found here (but please note the new format, as described above): https://www.vle.cam.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=114761
Dr Laura McMahon |
