BA English Language and French

Cinema has provided a privileged medium through which representations of history and memory have been constructed, articulated, and contested throughout the French-speaking world. Through its exploration of the intersections between these areas, this course helps students acquire detailed knowledge and understanding of how filmmakers across the French-speaking world have represented the past, while also equipping them with analytical means to interrogate the critical stakes of history and memory on screen, particularly regarding the uses of cinematic genre. By interrogating such works and notions of how history and memory have been represented by filmmakers across time, this course will appeal to students pursuing studies across French, film, history, politics, sociology, and the visual arts. 

• to familiarise students with aspects of the broad history of Francophone cinema in relation to history and memory 

• to introduce students to concepts of history and memory in relation to cinema in order to enable the analysis of Francophone film; 

• to provide students with key concepts related to genre in film;  

• to encourage and enable students to verbalise and intellectualise their emotional response to representations of history and memory in cultural production; 

• to equip students with intellectual and analytical tools to consider the stakes of representation with regard to history and memory in Francophone film.  

Representative example:

Week 1: Introductory lecture and seminar on Francophone cinema and notions of history and memory in Francophone culture

Weeks 2–5: World War Two, the Holocaust and Documentary (three film case studies)

Weeks 7–11: Memories of the past across the French-speaking world: a range of films spanning diverse genres, conflicts, times and spaces (five film case studies)

Week 12: Concluding lecture and seminar (revision; coursework essay methodology)

Introductory 2-hour lecture and 1-hour seminar on Francophone cinema and notions of history and memory in French culture;

4 x 2-hour lectures and 4 x 1-hour seminars on three film case studies (World War Two, the Holocaust and Documentary)

5 x 2-hour lectures and 5 x 1-hour seminars on five film case studies (Memories of the past across the French-speaking world)

Concluding 2-hour lecture and 1-hour seminar (revision; coursework essay methodology)

Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of some of the major aspects of history and memory as represented in Francophone cinema.  

Contextualise, analyse and discuss audio-visual material in a structured fashion; apply critically terminology and conceptual frameworks derived from film theory and relevant cultural theories on the cinematic representation of history and memory.  

Demonstrate the ability to carry out individual research for coursework essays, and express ideas and arguments coherently and convincingly in time-limited constraints, using an appropriate level of academic writing and exemplification. 

Demonstrate powers of analysis; manage word-count effectively when writing coursework; manage time effectively when planning coursework; participate in seminars; work as part of a group; assess the relevance of existing literature through independent research; seek advice and feedback and develop confidence. 

Assessment task	Formative or Summative		Weighting within unit (if summative)
Sequence analysis draft plan	formative		N/A
Sequence analysis	summative		30%
Coursework draft plan	formative		N/A
Individual assessed coursework essay	summative		70%

Feedback method	Formative or Summative
Individual written and oral feedback on a sequence analysis	summative
Individual written and oral feedback on a coursework essay plan	formative
Individual written feedback on coursework essay performance	summative

Austin, Guy, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) 

Banaji, Ferzina, France, Film and the Holocaust: from Le Génocide to La Shoah (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 

Cooper, Sarah, Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary (London: Legenda, 2006) 

Greene, Naomi, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999) 

McNeill, Isabelle, Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) 

Pollock, Griselda, and Maxim Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) (New York, NY: Berghahn, 2014) 

Rothberg, Michael, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 

Saxton, Libby, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallflower, 2008) 

Spaas, Lieve, The Francophone Film: A Struggle for Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) 

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)