This course establishes a series of overlapping but distinct critical perspectives on technical elements contributing to the cinema experience, and develops a comparable analysis of the television medium. It focuses on the operation and understanding of film and television technology at a series of suggestive stages between conception and consumption.

10 x 1hr lecture

10 x 1hr seminar over 10 weeks as scheduled on MyCampus

None

None

The standard assessments for this course are:

■ Essay 1 (1,500 words or 5 minute video essay) (40%)

■ Essay 2 (2,500 words or 8 minute video essay) (60%)

If required, for instance where a disability prevents a student from undertaking a specific method of assessment, the following alternatives are available:

■ There is no alternative to the assessments, but flexible deadlines can be offered as reasonable adjustments (students should follow the usual process for extensions)

Further reasonable adjustments may be provided where necessary. Students are encouraged to consult with the course convenor.

The course aims to:

■ scrutinise accounts of technical 'invention' offered as conventional starting-points for histories of cinema and television

■ illustrate the diffusion of selected technical 'assemblies' at pivotal moments in the history of cinema and television

■ assess the roles that the recognition of technical 'apparatuses' have played in the development of the historiographies, theories and criticisms of Film and Television Studies

■ propose that the operation of 'new' screen technologies since the early 1990s has significant implications in terms of the manufacture of moving image products, and their critical evaluation within Film and Television Studies

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

■ articulate a clear sense of the synthetic character of film and television technologies, and their origins in pre-cinema, and pre-television apparatuses

■ demonstrate an understanding of the 'standardisation' of selected film and television technologies, and crtitque their impact on industrial, experiential and textual form at particular conjunctures

■ critically analyse the historical and theoretical literatures devoted to questions of film and television technology, and have deep knowledge of selected areas of those literatures

■ evaluate non-critical technical sources, and draw upon them productively as forms of evidence in the assessments