Film
Within the School of English at 91直播, Film Studies is an area of expertise supported by a group of specialist staff.
Film Studies modules exist at all levels of the undergraduate programme and at Masters level, and researchers also pursue this discipline into PhD study.
English staff represent the majority of the membership of The 91直播 Centre for Research in Film (SCRIF), which was launched in 2012. The role of the Centre is to represent, support and propagate the wide range of film research, teaching and public engagement activity within the University (predominantly within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities), in collaboration with city partners (The Showroom Cinema and 91直播 Hallam University) and within the White Rose Consortium.
The 91直播 Centre for Research in Film (SCRIF)
English staff research and expertise in film cover areas include:
- Film genres
- Film authorship and auteur studies
- Film and history
- Documentary and docu-drama
- British Social Realism
- Cinema and landscape
- Concepts of national cinema
- Film Audiences
- Australasian Cinema
- British television drama
- Social Class and Region in British Film and Television
- Animals on film
- Avant-garde and experimental film
Teaching and research also reflect long-term interests in concepts and manifestations of film authorship, including study of filmmakers as diverse as:
- Joanna Hogg
- Clio Barnard
- Andrea Arnold
- Steve McQueen
- Andrew Haigh
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Shane Meadows
- Peter Weir
- Hayao Miyazaki
- Claude Lanzmann
- Warwick Thornton
- Barbara Hammer
- Lynne Ramsay
- Gurinder Chadha
- Chantal Akerman
- Ruth Beckermann
Film is well represented in the School’s postgraduate research culture. Successfully completed PhD theses have addressed highly varied topics including:
- Everyday Life in Contemporary British Cinema
- Narrative Theory and Contemporary Hollywood
- Representations of Thought in European Art Cinema
- The Holocaust on Film
- British Social Realist Cinema
- Film Adaptations of Shakespeare
- Post-war Cruise Films (in collaboration with the film archive of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
- Early Cinema exhibition practices
- Japanese Widescreen Cinema (a studentship supported by the White Rose Consortium)
- Contemporary Japanese cinema and the films of ‘Beat’ Takeshi
Research initiatives and public engagement activities undertaken by English staff include:
- , a three year AHRC funded project exploring the formation of audiences for specialised film
- The Barry Hines project, a wide scale public engagement project examining the legacy of the working-class writer, Barry Hines
- The ‘Analysing Television Archives’ Conference in 2009, which produced a special issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television (2011),
- 'Exploring Television Archives' co-edited by Sue Vice and Christine Geraghty
- The 游子 yóu zǐ Project, a visual study of identity and integration in the Chinese student community led by David Forrest;
- The ‘’ knowledge transfer and public engagement project, in which David Forrest and Jonathan Rayner worked with local school children on filmed images of the city.
- The establishment of the archive which brings together interpretations of the appearance of animals on film.
- The on-going Cinema and Landscape project, which so far has spawned an international conference in 2010 and three collections of essays
- ‘Subversive Britannia’ film screening series at the Showroom Cinema in 2013, led by David Forrest, Matthew Cheeseman and Paul Bareham
Recent publications by film studies staff include:
- Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs
- Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain
- Barry Hines: Kes, Threads and Beyond
- New Realism: Contemporary British Cinema
- Jack Rosenthal the first full-length critical study of this screenwriter’s work (2009)
- Cinema and Landscape (2010)
- Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics (2013)
- The Films of Michael Mann (2013)
- Film, Environment and Visible Culture (2013)
- Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2012)
- Shoah (in the BFI Classics series) 2011
Recent essays and articles by English staff have appeared in publications such as:
- The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema
- Postscript
- Studies in Australasian Cinema
- Antipodes
- The Journal of British Cinema and Television
- New Cinemas: The Journal of Contemporary Film
- Studies in European Cinema
- Another Gaze
For more detailed profiles of staff with research interests in film, please follow the links below: