Course Code: BFMP 1502
Academic Year: 2024-2025
Following the highly regarded, formally-oriented, approach set out in Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art, students learn how form and narrative shape our experience of film. Form relates to how we experience feeling and meaning as film audiences; it also relates to the formal properties of film (such as repetition and variation, distinct motifs or elements, development, and the overall effects of unity and disunity). Narrative relates to the structure of plots and the flow of story information in cinema. Students apply film form to the technologies and techniques of pre-cinema and developments from the across cinema's greater than one-hundred year history. Film Studies examines the emergence of styles, movements and genres of film in the 20th Century as filmmakers and studios attempt to refine and defend their preferred versions of this new art form. Students learn to critically analyze and evaluate significant films, movements and genres and apply them to contemporary film and media.