Aims

This module has two principal aims: first, to identify how religious concepts have influenced filmmaking in the USA during the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and second, to supplement the accounts of politics operating through discourses of sex/gender, race and class with which students are normally familiar by Stage 3 with an account of how politics operates through discourses about the supernatural. It also provides students with a self-contained crash course on the study of film; no prior experience in studying film is needed.

Outline Of Syllabus

Each week students will attend one lecture (two during the first two weeks of the semester) and a two-hour seminar (viewings will also be organised, though attendance is not compulsory if students can watch the film otherwise). Lectures will cover the specifics of working on film, the political compass, the politics of specific religious truth claims and religious moral prescriptions (concentrating, in line with the module's focus on the USA, on Judaeo-Christian beliefs), examples of ways that these religions’ political stances have made it into even seemingly anti-theistic films and examples of ways that the mythologies of these religions have populated filmic content.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures gives students insight into all five knowledge outcomes. Seminars give students the ability to develop all five skills. Film screenings permit students to watch the primary works in an academic environment conducive to critical viewing, and present the films in theatrical scale.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The submitted work format is particularly good for testing all of the organizational, research, logic and writing skills involved in detailed analysis and argumentation, and permits the in-depth analysis of time-based visual texts that is fundamental to this module. A single end-of-module essay is used to give stage 3 students maximum room to explore their chosen films and ideas; feedback will be provided to all students during the module in the form of scrutiny of methods and ideas during seminars.