SCRN3200
10 units
3000 level
Course handbook
Description
This course offers a critical, historical, and theoretical survey of documentary film as a reportorial, experiential, persuasive, educational, and innovative form of global cinema spanning diverse cultures and political contexts. The course comprises an examination of the different styles, aims, and methods characterising documentary approaches to filmmaking via historical and more recent examples, and informed by a range of scholarly work dedicated to this form of cinema. In the process, the special status and claims of documentary filmmaking are identified, interrogated, and explored.
Availability2024 Course Timetables
Newcastle City Precinct
- Semester 2 - 2024
Online
- Semester 2 - 2024
Replacing course(s)
This course replaces the following course(s): FMCS3600. Students who have successfully completed FMCS3600 are not eligible to enrol in SCRN3200.
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of the course students will be able to:
1. Demonstrate an understanding of documentary cinema's informative and educational role in how we understand social, political, cultural and historical contexts and realities.
2. Effectively apply and adapt major theoretical cinema studies models to documentary filmmaking.
3. Evaluate and critique ethical questions arising in documentary filmmaking.
4. Analyse, at advanced undergraduate level, documentary cinema's contribution to audio-visual media's technological, formal and aesthetic development.
Content
Course topics include:
- The relationship between documentary films and history, politics, social reality, and personal and cultural memory;
- The usage and function of experts, witnesses, archive footage, and narrators;
- How the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity play out within documentary films and scholarship;
- The responsibility of the filmmaker to his/her filmed subjects as existing within a specific social context, and the relationship between 'the audience's right to know' and on-screen subjects' right to privacy; and
- The ways by which new audio-visual technologies and filmmaking innovation can erode traditional boundaries between documentary, narrative, and experimental cinema.
Requisite
This course replaces FMCS3600. If you have successfully completed FMCS3600 you cannot enrol in this course
Assumed knowledge
20 units in 1000 and 2000 level film and television studies courses.
Assessment items
Journal: Weekly Journal
Annotated Bibliography: Research Exercise
Essay: Major Research Essay
Contact hours
Semester 2 - 2024 - Newcastle City Precinct
Film Screening-1
- Face to Face On Campus 2 hour(s) per week(s) for 12 week(s)
Seminar-1
- Face to Face On Campus 2 hour(s) per week(s) for 12 week(s)
Semester 2 - 2024 - Online
Film Screening-1
- Online 2 hour(s) per week(s) for 12 week(s)
Seminar-1
- Online 2 hour(s) per week(s) for 12 week(s)
Course outline
Course outline not yet available.
The University of Newcastle acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands within our footprint areas: Awabakal, Darkinjung, Biripai, Worimi, Wonnarua, and Eora Nations. We also pay respect to the wisdom of our Elders past and present.