Film Studies and Art History
Film studies and art history together form a discipline of visual culture, examining how moving images and static visual objects are made, how they produce meaning and emotion, and what they reveal about the societies and historical moments that created them. Film studies analyses cinema as an art form, a cultural industry and a medium of social expression, engaging with questions of style, genre, authorship and ideology across the history of world cinema. Art history asks similar questions about paintings, sculpture, architecture and other visual forms, tracing the development of visual traditions across time and culture and investigating the relationship between visual objects and their social, political and historical contexts.
At the University of Essex this programme offers a distinctive curriculum that draws on the most current developments in both fields, combining different approaches to the study of visual media. You will study a variety of different films across genres, periods and national cinemas, and you will engage with the visual arts from a range of historical periods and cultural traditions, developing the ability to move fluently between moving and still images and to apply analytical frameworks from both disciplines. The programme runs full time over four years.
You will develop skills in visual analysis, cinematic literacy, art historical research, critical theory, close reading and extended academic writing. The ability to engage critically with visual culture across its most important forms is a genuinely transferable intellectual skill.
Graduates from film studies and art history programmes pursue careers in museums, galleries, film programming, cultural journalism, broadcasting, publishing, arts administration, education and research. The combination of visual literacy and cultural-historical knowledge is valued by employers in the creative and cultural sectors. Postgraduate study in film studies, art history, museum studies, cultural management or a related field is a natural route.