This course offers a critical study of British film cultures, with an emphasis on British film genres, movements and cycles from the 1960s to the present day. Earlier representative works, to include the British documentary movement, will provide a foundation for a comparative study of contemporary British cinema. Major and minor film cultures will be studied in their institutional, social, and cultural contexts to include: the long standing tradition of British realism; the Free Cinema Movement; the “New Wave;” “Swinging London;” “Thatcherite” cinema, including its heritage, art cinema, Brit-grit and Black British iterations; in addition to the recent “lad boy” underclass cycle that reconfigures the traditional conceptualization of British cinema as strictly oppositional “realism or tinsel.” Debates pertinent to the way in which British films and relate to a shifting sense of national identity, towards examining the “Englishness” of British national cinema, will be highlighted.

This course is offered through the Summer Abroad program.