Film Studies and History of Art

Film studies and history of art are disciplines that share a fundamental concern with visual experience and the cultural meanings carried by images, but they approach that concern from different angles and with different methodological tools. History of art examines painting, sculpture, architecture, and other visual forms across centuries and cultures, asking how aesthetic objects are made, what they meant in their original contexts, and how our understanding of them has changed over time. Film studies focuses on cinema as a medium with its own distinctive properties, asking how films create meaning through editing, cinematography, sound, narrative, and performance, and what place they occupy in culture and society.

Studied together, the two disciplines enrich each other: the long historical perspective of art history illuminates cinema's debts to earlier visual traditions, while film's engagement with popular culture and contemporary theory opens up art history in important ways.

At the University of Manchester, this three-year, full-time programme draws on the strengths of a research-active department that takes both disciplines seriously. You will develop skills in visual analysis, close formal reading, historical contextualisation, and critical theory, learning to engage with works across a wide range of periods, styles, and cultural traditions. The programme covers the full span of Western art from antiquity to the present alongside international and contemporary cinema, and it introduces you to the major critical and theoretical frameworks that scholars in both fields use.

Manchester's cultural resources, including its museums, galleries, and cinema, are an important supplement to classroom learning, and the city's cultural life provides constant opportunities to engage directly with the objects and films you study.

Graduates work in museums and galleries, film journalism and criticism, arts administration and programming, publishing, education, and cultural policy. Many also go on to postgraduate research in art history, film studies, or visual culture.