SCRN3300Contemporary World Cinema

Available in 2024
Course code

SCRN3300

Units

10 units

Level

3000 level

2024 Course Timetables

Course handbook

Description

This course explores key technological, aesthetic, political, conceptual, and cultural shifts in recent world cinema through a detailed examination of some important 21st Century films from beyond the Anglosphere. Appropriate theoretical, analytical and historical perspectives are applied to the films in order to both highlight complex changes in global cinema practices, reception and discourse, and address the specificity, diversity, and cross-cultural aspects of this genuinely international art-form. By paying close attention to the ways local, national, and regional experiences can relate to and play out within an increasingly interconnected world as seen in a given film, informed by its cultural context, production, and reception, we will explicate and interrogate ‘world cinema’ as practice, concept, and scholarly field.

Availability2024 Course Timetables

Callaghan

  • Semester 1 - 2024

Newcastle City Precinct

  • Semester 1 - 2024

Replacing course(s)

This course replaces the following course(s): FMCS3701. Students who have successfully completed FMCS3701 are not eligible to enrol in SCRN3300.

Learning outcomes

On successful completion of the course students will be able to:

1. Examine the significance and diversity of recent world cinema by studying select films from different countries and their aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts.

2. Analyse films as cross-cultural texts spanning local, national, regional, and global communication networks.

3. Explicate and interrogate 'world cinema' as a concept through consulting and discussing recent interdisciplinary scholarship devoted to this topic.

4. Demonstrate high-level undergraduate analytical, critical, and communication skills by engaging with recent world cinema research.

Content

Course topics may include:

  • Recent non-Anglophone films selected from a variety of different regions, nations and cultures spanning Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe;
  • The rich 21st history of global filmmaking marked by innovation and artistic expression beyond familiar Hollywood models;
  • The role of colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial history, discourse, and politics in contemporary international filmmaking practice, content, and analysis;
  • The ways contemporary global cinema is marked by complex and constantly shifting technological, industrial, aesthetic, and cultural representational systems;
  • Recent theoretical, analytical, and historical approaches born of studying world cinema;
  • The changing cultural, aesthetic and economic interface between national, regional and global cinemas and related discourse;
  • Dialectical, often non-linear relationships between new and old, modernity and tradition, 'us' and 'them', 'the West and the rest', self and other, in recent world cinema; and
  • Interrogation and critique of 'world cinema' as a phrase regarding definition, conceptual frame, and scholarly discourse.
  • 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 FMCS3701. If you have successfully completed FMCS3701 you cannot enrol in this course.

Assumed knowledge

60 units of 1000 level courses

Assessment items

Journal: Journal x 2

Written Assignment: Research exercise

Essay: Major Essay

Contact hours

Semester 1 - 2024 - Callaghan

Film Screening-1
  • Face to Face On Campus 2 hour(s) per week(s) for 12 week(s) starting in week 1
Seminar-1
  • Face to Face On Campus 2 hour(s) per week(s) for 12 week(s) starting in week 1

Semester 1 - 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)

Course outline