This programme, available in both full-time and part-time study modes, offers you a broad-based understanding of how film, television and other screen media have developed and interacted across their varying histories.
It also gives you the opportunity to specialise in film exhibition and archival practice, in order to personalise your MA studies towards specific intellectual interests and future career hopes. The programme is unique in the way that it combines rigorous academic study with creative and practical opportunities, the latter offered both within certain option modules and via the two-month work placement.
This intermixing of the academic and the practical also enables you to take your interests further, into further postgraduate study, towards a career in teaching or into possible work opportunities in many areas of the media industries.
The programme has two other pathways: MA Film and Screen Media and MA Film and Screen Media (European Pathway).
The programme consists of the compulsory module Screen Media: History, Technology and Culture, a choice of option modules, a research project or placement and a dissertation.
The compulsory module is designed to introduce you to the basic methodologies and issues involved in the area concerned, as well as research skills and methods. The option modules allow you to pursue specific interests and areas of research.
A unique feature of the programme is the placement, which offers you the experience of working in a prominent media company or institution. Alternatively you can complete a research project which gives you the chance to undertake independent research and reflect on research methodologies.
You will complete the programme with a 15,000-word dissertation.
You will also have the option to take an intercollegiate module offered at another college of the University of London through the Screen Studies Group.
This interdisciplinary programme is taught by staff from a wide range of departments at UCL, all international experts in the fields of film and media studies. Linguistic and cultural expertise informs our teaching on the film-making traditions of Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and South-East Asia.
The programme covers the history of cinema and a wide variety of world cinemas. It is designed to provide students with advanced knowledge of both the history of cinema and its contemporary developments, and with the skills, concepts, methods and theories required for the study of cinema and media at graduate level.
Students undertake modules to the value of 180 credits.
The programme consists of two core modules (30 credits and one non-credit bearing), three optional modules (90 credits), and a dissertation (60 credits).
Core modules
Optional modules
Dissertation/report
All MA students undertake an independent research project which culminates in a dissertation of 12,000 words.
Teaching and learning
The programme is delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars, tutorials, and film and video screenings. The core modules are assessed by essays and examinations, which together count for 20% of the final mark. Optional modules are assessed by essays (40%), and the dissertation makes up the final 40%.
Further information on modules and degree structure is available on the department website: Film Studies MA
Graduates from the MA in Film Studies have pursued various careers, including: academic research and teaching; careers within media arts (writing, directing, editing); print and media journalism; arts and museum management; multimedia authoring and digital design; film preservation and curating.
Recent career destinations for this degree
Employability
Former students of this programme have gone on to careers in education and publishing and a wide variety of careers in the media arts, including film production, festival programming, and film curation with organisations including the BBC, the Barbican Centre, the Athens International Film Festival, and the London Film School.
Careers data is taken from the ‘Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education’ survey undertaken by HESA looking at the destinations of UK and EU students in the 2013–2015 graduating cohorts six months after graduation.
Each year, we welcome students from all over the world to our Film Studies MA. Under the aegis of UCL's Centre for Multidisciplinary & Intercultural Inquiry (CMII), students spend a year amongst a thriving, cross-disciplinary community of cinema scholars and research students.
We have particular research strengths in film history, film theory, and in an exceptionally broad range of national and regional cinemas.
UCL has made a major commitment to refurbishing its multimedia infrastructure for the study of film and related media. This includes building a significant collection of print and visual materials and new facilities for teaching and for film and media screenings.
The Research Excellence Framework, or REF, is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. The 2014 REF was carried out by the UK's higher education funding bodies, and the results used to allocate research funding from 2015/16.
Learn more about the scope of UCL's research, and browse case studies, on our Research Impact website.
This programme, available in both part-time and full-time study modes, offers you a broad-based understanding of how film, television and other screen media have developed and interacted across their varying histories. It also gives you the opportunity to specialise in chosen areas of those media histories, in order to personalise your MA studies towards specific intellectual interests and future career hopes. The programme is unique in the way that it combines rigorous academic study with creative and practical opportunities, the latter offered both within certain option modules and via the two-month work placement.
This intermixing of the academic and the practical also enables you to take your interests further, into further postgraduate study, towards a career in teaching or into possible work opportunities in many areas of the media industries.
The programme has two other pathways: MA Film and Screen Media (European Pathway) and MA Film and Screen Media with Film Programming and Curating.
The programme consists of the compulsory module Screen Media: History, Technology and Culture, a choice of option modules, a research project or placement and a dissertation.
The compulsory module is designed to introduce you to the basic methodologies and issues involved in the area concerned, as well as research skills and methods. The option modules allow you to pursue specific interests and areas of research.
A unique feature of the programme is the placement, which offers you the experience of working in a prominent media company or institution. Alternatively you can complete a research project which gives you the chance to undertake independent research and reflect on research methodologies.
You will complete the programme with a 15,000-word dissertation.
You will also have the option to take an intercollegiate module offered at another college of the University of London through the Screen Studies Group.
Our innovative MA in Film and Television builds on its prestigious heritage as the longest running degree programme of its kind in the UK. We aim to equip you with wide-ranging skills, knowledge and critical awareness to meet your career aspirations in sectors in which moving images play a central role. Our curriculum incorporates an exciting variety of learning and teaching activities designed to foster your capacity for researching and rigorously analysing different aspects of film, television and moving images. You will have the opportunity to develop key skills for communicating about and with moving images across a range of contexts and platforms. You can choose to have a broad-based learning experience in film, television and moving image, or you can specialise in moving image curation and screenwriting via our suggested pathways.
The core teaching team consists of members of the Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design. The course has close links with the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), the leading research centre in the UK for arts and design, whose members include internationally renowned filmmakers, film and television theorists and historians, and moving image artists and curators. We combine research-enhanced teaching with classes delivered by film and television industry and moving image art professionals, in order to make sure that you develop the skill sets and the full range of critical awareness that is in demand and to deliver an exciting learning experience for you.
The course combines core and optional taught modules. The design and delivery of our taught modules draw on CREAM’s research excellence in documentary, Asian and European cinema, moving image curation, and television history. The coursework requirements for some modules are research essays or a combination of research essays and research-informed blog posts and presentations. Other modules require a broad range of research-informed professional modes of writing such as a screenplay treatment, a curatorial proposal or an exhibition review. You will also undertake a substantial piece of independent research as a major part of your MA studies. In order to provide you with the flexibility to undertake a piece of independent research suited to your career aspiration, the final project module offers you the choice between writing a traditional dissertation or completing a theoretically-informed professional project such as a curating a film programme, writing and producing a series of themed blog posts, or writing a long-form screenplay.
The course is taught in two modes: full-time and part-time.
Full-time Postgraduate students study 180 credits per year. For the award of MA in Film, Television and Moving Image, you must complete two core taught modules, four optional modules and a 60-credit final project module, for a total of 180 credits.
The course structure includes two suggested pathways for those wishing to specialise in film programming and moving image curation, or in screenwriting.
The following modules are indicative of what you will study on this course
Core modules
Core modules provide you with a set of key skills for the theoretical, critical and reflective understanding of moving images.
Optional modules
Optional modules give you the freedom to choose areas of specialisation. The course leaders can advise on which modules best fit your interests. You have the choice to pursue specialised interests through your choice of optional modules and coursework assignments. If you are not sure which optional modules to choose or fit your interests best, or which types of final project work to produce to best develop your area of specialisation, you should discuss this question individually with the course leaders and you should aim to do so early on in the academic year.
The course structure includes two suggested pathways for those wishing to specialise in film programming and moving image curation, or in screenwriting.
We have strongly developed links with key London exhibition and research venues such as the BFI Southbank, ICA, Lux and Close-Up, as well as key critics, theorists, curators and festivals. We offer field visits to these sites as well as festivals like the Rotterdam Film Festival.
Our graduates have found employment in small- and large-scale film and television companies as filmmakers, producers, distributors, and exhibitors. Others have gone on to organise film festivals, or to work in film-related magazines and journals as well as in international arts and culture sectors. Some of our recent graduates have gone on to pursue academic careers as researchers or doctoral students at the University of Westminster and elsewhere. As the UK’s longest-running postgraduate programme in film and television several of our alumni are pioneers of the discipline of film and television studies.
Are you passionate about films and all things visual or on screen? Do you want to work in the arts or do you want to find a way to do this? This programme gives you cultural contexts across a range of different genres and history of film to understand why films depicted what they did and how this contributed to the world around us and the way we live. It is well known that film has shaped other disciplines like fashion, the way we think, cultural identity, how we are able to express ourselves or understand something better we previously didn't know about. It is an opportunity to put the record straight on history and get to the root cause and effect of different periods in history through characters. Film is also about getting to the truth in documentary films. Film also follows many other arts disciplines in interpreting them and bringing them to our attention in a way that theatre and performance cannot in terms of scale and reality. Much of what has been successful on the West End Stage, Opera, ballet, the life of a famous painter or other creative is often successfully depicted in film due to its ability to portray several art forms together successfully.
Film isn't the only art form to transform our lives but it probably reaches more people than any other art form around the world. It probably has more of a profound influence in people's lives around the world to change the course of their life in work, interests, style, imitation and more. Different ages of photography have been monumental in transforming our perceptions and getting us closer to reality such as old film and photography of the 19th century, war in the world and celebrities being the first fashion icons of the 50s, without the need for script.
You study and analyse film across the recent past and you look at animation and digital from the days of the Walt Disney team making up each frame to its evolution into digital animation and speed production. You also look at how changing tastes and cultural styles have changed the way in which we view film and by what method, plus you look at living overseas in the context of your own cultural identity. From this you gain useful skills and knowledge to critique contemporary film, curate exhibitions work in museums, become and expert in a specific theme or age of film.
Semester 1
Semester 2
Semester 3
Find out more detail by visiting the programme web page
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-taught/degree-programmes/332/film-and-visual-culture/
Find out about fees
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/study/international/tuition-fees-and-living-costs-287.php
*Please be advised that some programmes have different tuition fees from those listed above and that some programmes also have additional costs.
View all funding options on our funding database via the programme page
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/funding/
Find out more about:
Find out more about living in Aberdeen and living costs
Address the image world, find out how images create meaning, and discover what you can do with what you see on this eclectic MA programme
If this degree were a film we’d be watching the beginning and the end. We think, like Walter Benjamin, that it’s in these moments – in their inception and their obsolescence – that you see the utopian possibilities of a form or social movement.
Are we in the midst of a beginning? What can we learn now from visual culture’s past? What’s happening to our bodies when we play a video game? What are the gestures involved in everyday life? How do our bodies relate to technology?
These are the kinds of topics we analyse on this MA. We want to go beyond the borders of a traditional film studies degree so we go back to the beginning of film history to explore what it meant to fashion yourself in an image, or for a society to see itself in an image. Then we explore how images gain meaning now, and where they’re going next.
We’re interested in the evolution of the image, but also image culture. As photographs and films constitute more and more of our communication, we encourage students to try to put their thought into audio-visual form for some modules.
For the MA’s Media Arts Pathway, you can make your own piece of work and submit it as part of the final project, the dissertation. Production values are not the focus for us. We’re interested in what you do with an idea.
We think learning is about trying to get hold of something you don’t know yet; wrestling with ideas you’re unsure of so as to work critically and imaginatively across multiple media forms. While we do look at films, we also investigate such things as contemporary gallery work, the city’s screens, computer and phone interactivity to reconsider our relationship to images.
We study our heritage of image taking and making not just to discover how that relationship has changed over time, but also to find jumping off points for own experimentation and try to create something new.
As part of the University of London you also have the chance to explore one option from the MA Film & Media programmes at other universities. Find out more on the Screen Studies Group website.
The MA offers two pathways:
MA Film and Screen Studies: Moving Image Studies Pathway
The moving image media today are a concentrated form of culture, ideas, socialisation, wealth and power. 21st-century globalisation, ecology, migration and activism fight over and through them. How have the media built on, distorted and abandoned their past? How are they trying to destroy, deny or build the future? This pathway explores new critical approaches that address the currency of moving image media in today's global context – their aesthetics, technology and politics. It seeks to extend the boundaries for studying moving images by considering a wider range of media and introducing students to a wider range of approaches for investigating moving images' past and present.
MA Film and Screen Studies: Media Arts Pathway
The most intense and extreme forms of media, experimental media arts, test to breaking point our established ideas and practices. From wild abstraction and surrealist visions to activist and community arts, they ask the profoundest questions about high art and popular culture, the individual and the social, meaning and beauty. This pathway explores these emerging experimental practices of image making and criticism. Students on this pathway are encouraged not just to study but to curate and critique past, present and future media arts by building exhibitions and visual essays of their own. Short practical workshops will enable students to make the most of the skills you bring into the course.
Structure
The MA consists of:
Assessment
The MA is assessed primarily through coursework essays and written projects. Practical modules may require audiovisual elements to be submitted. It will also include a dissertation of approximately 12,000 words.
Our graduates go on to work in areas such as programming and curating, film and video distribution, and film and television criticism, but many also create their own careers. Twenty per cent of our graduates pursue PhD degrees.
Find out more about employability at Goldsmiths.
Our MA Filmmaking course offers you the opportunity to develop your creative and technical skills as an independent filmmaker working in fiction film. You will have the opportunity to write and direct your own Short Film, or follow a specialist route as a Head of Department in film production.
You'll develop high level skills in a learning environment which nurtures technical excellence in the creation of cinematic sound and image. You'll develop personal creativity and the ability to collaborate effectively within a team in pursuit of a shared cinematic vision.
The course, taught at UCA Farnham, allows you to experience the rigours of filmmaking by reflecting the realities of current film practice, within the supportive structure of our extensive Film School. It will enhance your understanding of the professional demands of the film industry and fully equip you for a freelance career, should you so desire.
You'll have the opportunity to engage in critical debate around current theoretical approaches to filmmaking practice, as well as developing your own practical project alongside other like-minded students.
At UCA, you'll also benefit from access to a fantastic selection of cutting edge facilities, including 16mm and digital cinema cameras, advanced sound recording equipment, a purpose-built film studio and industry standard post-production suites.
Our graduates have gone on to work on some of the biggest box office movies of recent years - including Gravity, the Harry Potter franchise, The Dark Knight, Mission Impossible, Skyfall, Godzilla, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Rush, Total Recall, Fast & Furious 6 and many more - as well as on major TV programmes and other projects with leading media companies. Some alumni have also started their own companies, with recent successes including Kode Media, Bright Stem and This Place.
This course prepares you for a career within the field of fiction film production and also equips you with a range of versatile skills that open up a broad variety of career paths.
Graduates from related UCA courses have been commissioned to work by broadcasters and film funds worldwide in a wide range of roles within the industry such as directors, producers, editors, cinematographers, sound designers, screenwriting, production design and VFX. Potential careers open to students undertaking this course might include work in archives, curating or distribution.
Visit our Postgraduate Virtual Media Space to find out more about our courses, see what it's like to study at UCA and gain access to our campus virtual tours.
We support innovative art research across a range of modes and practices that seek to contribute to wider cultural and artistic fields through original, critical work.
The Department of Art at Goldsmiths has an international reputation for creativity, innovation, and cultural diversity. Our aim is to facilitate artists, curators and writers to make work and to reflect upon, debate and disseminate individual and collaborative practices, thus contributing to wider artistic culture and debate.
As an MPhil/PhD researcher, you will be contributing to the Department's research culture as well as to the wider Goldsmiths tradition: one that values interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge and understanding, supports inventive new practice and critical work, and contributes to the creation of a dynamic research environment both nationally and internationally.
The Department of Art supports the development of art research in and through Fine Art, Curating, Art Writing and across disciplines. We consider all elements of the MPhil/PhD to be sites of rigorous experimentation and encourage you to develop your research through processes of making, collaboration, investigation, study, inquiry, trial and error, analysis and speculation.
We understand that your research may change shape and subject matter as you make intertextual and interdisciplinary connections and as relevant modes of artistic, cultural, social, scientific and philosophical production become important to you throughout the course of your research. We work with you as you find the appropriate practice for pursuing your research and related form for consolidating and disseminating your findings.
It is important to note that the MPhil/PhD is not an extension of the MFA. The MFA is a professional degree geared specifically at the development of your art practice. Distinct from this, the MPhil/PhD is a 3-4 year (full-time) or 6-8 year (part-time) research project, the pursuit of which may involve your already-established practice, or require the development new modes of practice specific to the research project.
The PhD is also distinct from ongoing studio practice or a residency in that it asks you to place your work in relation to that of other practitioners, be they artists and other cultural workers, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, or others; be they in a contemporary and/or historical context. In this respect, the model of the PhD encourages you to follow your curiosity for – and make connections with and between – the thought and action of others.
Another major distinguishing quality of art research is the need to document process. For this, our researchers are encouraged to think expansively about how to do so. How might a process of documentation become a space for reflecting on decisions, however intuitive they are in the first instance? How might this process communicate something of the mode of enquiry that is pursued, as much as of the findings? How might this process, as much as the outcome of the research, reflect the complexity inherent in thinking, making, questioning and communicating art?
Based in the Department of Art, and linked to the MPhil/PhD Programme, is the Mountain of Art Research (MARs). MARs supports and promotes the development of innovative art research across a range of art practices including - but not limited to - studio, performance, film and video, curatorial, critical, art-writing, situated, participatory and interdisciplinary practice.
Committed to rigorous formal experimentation, maverick conceptual exploration and socially-engaged articulation, MARs emphasises the material ‘stuff’ of art research as much as its speculative possibilities and political imperative.
As both platform and ethos, the aim of MARs is to challenge received ideas and habits; to promote new ways of thinking and being both in and out of this world.
Through MARs we bring together researchers within Art, across disciplines, between institutions and beyond higher education for intentional, concentrated discussion and sharing of research.
You will apply with a well-developed idea for an individual research project that you have begun to plan artistically as well as to contextualise with reference to contemporary and historical examples of artworks, exhibitions, designs, social, political and philosophical ideas, etc.
Within the overarching programme of MPhil/PhD in Art there are three different pathways for undertaking doctoral research, including:
Pathway 1: Thesis by Practice
The thesis comprises a substantial body of studio practice, curatorial practice and/or art writing practice, presented as an integrated whole. This is accompanied by a considered form of documentation, as appropriate to the project, and a written component of approximately 20,000-40,000 words for PhD (10,000-20,000 words for MPhil) offering a critical account of the research.
Pathway 2: Thesis by Practice and Written Dissertation
The thesis comprises a body of studio practice, curatorial practice and/or art writing practice AND a written dissertation of 40,000-80,000 words for PhD (20,000-40,000 for MPhil), presented together as an integrated whole. The thesis will be accompanied by a considered form of documentation, as appropriate to the project.
Pathway 3: Thesis by written dissertation
The thesis comprises a written dissertation of 80,000-100,000 words for PhD (40,000-50,000 words for MPhil), presented as an integrated whole.
Researchers will start on one of these three pathways when they apply and may change to a different option only up until the time of Upgrade.
Our art programmes aim to equip you with the necessary skills to develop independent thought and confidence in your practice. In addition, these skills are of use in other career paths you may wish to follow.
Our researchers have been successful in many fields including media, museums, galleries, education, the music business and academia. Many have continued to be successful, practising artists long after graduating, and have won major prizes and exhibited around the world.
Taught Masters degrees in History, Art History, Philosophy and American Studies at Sussex, a top 20 University
Join one of our 16 International English-language Master’s programs at the University of Haifa
