Film Studies

Course summary

At the turn of the 20th century, Hollywood was a small and recently-named town that had begun as an agricultural community only fifty years earlier and film was a newly-established industry whose pioneers worked in Europe and America. Today, Hollywood is at the centre of a multi-billion dollar global industry and film is rightly recognised as a form of art in itself. Film Studies is an academic A level designed to equip you with the critical skills and knowledge to understand film both as an industry and an art form. You examine different genres of film and the filmmakers and technology behind them. The study ranges across American, British and world cinema, including documentary and silent cinema, experimental and mainstream film. The coursework will involve your writing a screenplay for a short film and making a digital photo storyboard for one sequence from it, followed by an evaluative analysis. In the first year, you will begin your academic examination of film with a focus on contemporary British and American cinema. You will be introduced to the workings of the film industry and learn how to analyse films concerning genre, representation, narrative structure and historical context. There are films for close study (all set by the exam board) on each topic. You will look at Hollywood films from 1930 to 1990, contemporary American independent films, recent British cinema and a non-English language European film. You will also work on coursework skills and tasks. In the second year, the course broadens and deepens, with the study of world cinema and silent film, together with documentary and experimental film, alongside a further US independent film. For coursework, you will submit cross-media production pieces that develop skills first practised in the lower sixth.