Film and Visual Studies
From the heady experiments of the European avant gardes, the gritty reflections of postwar cinema, the wild energy of the global 1960s, to the vibrant landscape of contemporary film in Europe, South America and Africa, Film and Visual Studies offers a comprehensive introduction to film history and theory. We underscore the key role of moving image technologies in the emergence of modernity and in the political and artistic contestations of the 20th and 21st centuries and teach students to approach film through careful formal analysis, accounting for the specificities and complexities of the film cultures they encounter.
The study of film at Cambridge has a rich history, one that has been energized by student enthusiasm for and desire to understand film from the first instance. Formal lectures on film topics were first delivered at the university in the 1960s, but already in the 1940s, however, students at the Cambridge Film Society “aim[ed] at a close and more personal contact with the audience” in designing a film program that strove to seriously and systematically explore film form and history (a fact recently discovered during a session on the use of archives in our MPhil programme!). In the following decades, the study of film developed across multiple Cambridge faculties. Today, the Section of Film and Visual Studies is dedicated to comprehensive teaching and research in film studies at the University. Undergraduate students can encounter film in one of two dedicated film papers, European Cinema (CS6) and Cinema and the Political (CS7), and many papers across various language areas that either focus on or significantly feature film and visual culture (details in the 'Undergraduate' section below).
Film and Visual Studies hosts a calendar of film screenings, research events and residencies to foster an intellectual community dedicated to the study of film and other visual media. Our mission is to combine Cambridge’s tradition of rigorous intellectual inquiry and its history of innovative interdisciplinary methods with a focus on the theory and history of moving image media.
Our core academic staff and MMLL academics who work on film and visual culture are active researchers and dedicated teachers whose expertise covers a broad range of topics. Additionally, scholars in other Faculties (including Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, English, History of Art) contribute their expertise to teaching film. This interdisciplinary approach allows students to develop formal analytical skills and granular knowledge of various film traditions, deepening their understanding of the entanglements between film and visual culture, history and politics that have shaped our past and will continue to shape our futures.
Image credit: The façade of 'Kino Relax' in Warsaw, Poland in the early 1970s. The marquee announces that the cinema is playing Mackenna’s Gold, the 1969 widescreen Technicolor Western directed by J. Lee Thompson. Photo by Grażyna Rutkowska, held by the Polish National Digital Archives and free to use without copyright restrictions.
The academic staff of Film and Visual Studies are active scholars with dedicated research agendas that cover film history, film and media theory, television studies, decolonial and postcolonial film practice, queer, feminist and ecocritical approaches, and science and technology studies. Between the core and key staff, areas of expertise speak to the section’s breadth and include African, American, Arab, Asian, European, and South American cinemas. Recent and forthcoming publications include the first book on the cinematic prop, an essay on the forgotten medium of the Video Compact Disc, a history of San Francisco’s Chinese telephone exchange, and an exploration of global solidarity in the 1987 documentary Al-Manam.
CS6 European Film and CS7 Cinema and the Political are the core undergraduate papers offered by the Section of Film and Visual Studies. These comparative studies papers allow students to bring their expertise across language areas together. Though they may be taken individually, sequentially, they offer a comprehensive introduction to major topics in film theory and history. In both, students are expected to develop formal readings of film and visual media and to rigorously historicize the visual texts that they write about.
Film is also a significant component of several papers offered by other sections of MMLL. Though focused through specific concerns related to their respective language areas, these papers share a deep concern for theoretical, historical and formal analysis of cinema.
FR1 Introduction to French literature, film and thought
FR12 Literature, thought, and visual culture of the French-speaking world (1900 to the present)
GE13 Memory and Identity in German-speaking Europe since 1945
SL10 Studies in Twentieth-Century Ukrainian Literature and Film
The optional dissertation available to Part II students as a replacement for one written exam can also be developed on a topic related to film studies.
Cambridge Film and Screen is the home of postgraduate teaching in film studies and hosts a large and active postgraduate community. The Film and Screen Studies MPhil programme is an intensive 9-month degree that can both prepare students to pursue further study and enrich the skills and knowledge of those interested in pursuing professional careers in fields related to film culture. The PhD programme affords students the opportunity to develop unique and theoretically innovative projects in conversation with supervisors working at the top of their fields.