This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module examines the way New York has been used as a site for filmmaking, looking at the history of the production of films in and about the city, and as a vital centre of film culture -- not just of filmmaking, but also exhibition and film criticism. The module considers questions of modernity, the avant-garde practice in New York during the 1950s and 60s, and the city's representation in mainstream Hollywood productions. The work on New York and film will be contextualised within a cultural history of the city, with a dual emphasis on narratives of immigration and the city as the post-war centre of the world art market.
Total contact hours: 60
Private study hours: 240
Total study hours: 300
Essay (2500 words) (40%)
Essay (3500 words) (60%)
Stanley Corkin, Starring New York: Filming the Grime and the Glamour of the Long 1970s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
James D., ed. (1992), To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground Princeton: Princeton University Press
Pomerance M. (2007), City that Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press
Sanders J. (2001), Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, London: Bloomsbury
Shiel M., and Fitzmaurice T., eds, (1997) Screening the City, London: Routledge
Peter Stanfield, 'Going Underground with Manny Farber & Jonas Mekas' Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, & Philippe Meers (eds.), Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2011)
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
- Demonstrate detailed knowledge of key questions, concepts and critical debates around film as both a popular medium and artistically valued object of study.
- Demonstrate systematic understanding of the different modes of analysis made possible by key methods of enquiry that are concerned with modernity, film and the city, the avant-garde and underground subcultures and be able to demonstrate their relevance to the topic of New York and the movies
- Devise a discussion of cinema and the city through a sustained a engagement with key methods of enquiry based on a synthesis of historical, theoretical, and aesthetic approaches
- Demonstrate systematic understanding of the complexities involved in studying representation (race, class, gender, sexuality), art and cinema, film exhibition, and film and the city (modernity).
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