What to do with a degree in Film Studies

The film industry is notoriously competitive, but graduates will have developed a highly transferable range of skills.

You don't need a film studies degree to be the next Alfred Hitchcock or Quentin Tarantino, but it could put you on the right path.

Film studies degrees offer the chance to gain hands-on experience of film-making and also touch on topics such as film history, theory and criticism. Students study everything from Hollywood blockbusters to art house movies, taking in screenwriting, critiquing and directing along the way.

Famous graduates include Paul WS Anderson, director of video game adaptation Mortal Kombat. Anderson graduated with a degree in film and literature from Warwick University and is also behind such box-office successes as Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator.

What skills have you gained?

As well as practical film-making skills such as how to operate a camera and edit footage, you will have developed skills which will make you attractive to employers in a wide variety of fields. These include good research and communication skills, critical thinking, project management and the ability to organise your time effectively and work to deadlines.

What jobs can you do?

Almost 60% of film studies graduates went into full-time employment in 2009. Of those, 12.5% found jobs within the art/design/culture sector and, within the film industry itself, 2.1% became directors, 1.2% video/film recorder operators and 1.4% broadcasters. Some 34% found work in retail/catering, perhaps as a temporary measure and an indication of the competitive nature of the industry.

The focus of your degree is an important factor, says Margaret Holbrough of Graduate Prospects. "Careers within the film industry are fiercely competitive and opportunities to pursue a technical or practical career will depend on the graduate's experience and the content of the degree, and whether it focuses more on hands-on film production skills as opposed to the appreciation, analysis and interpretation of films and film genres," she says.

"Within the film, TV and video industries the roles may include film/video/television editor, camera operator, photographer, art director, TV or film producer or production assistant, runner, location/props manager or programme researcher.

"In addition, the publishing industry, including printed newspapers, magazines, online publications and websites, may offer opportunities to write about films as a journalist, content manager or editor, or to work in film and picture research and archiving."

Some business areas, such as advertising, marketing and communications, may also utilise the creative and analytical abilities of film studies graduates in roles such as art directors, account managers, copywriters and market researchers.

Teaching and lecturing are also potential career options and require a postgraduate teaching qualification.

Postgraduate study?

Of those who graduated in 2009, 6% went on to study for a higher qualification. There are many masters and postgraduate diploma courses available in film studies, providing an opportunity to specialise in areas such as scriptwriting, directing, producing and final editing. Some jobs require a postgraduate qualification, such as teaching or journalism. There is also the chance to do postgraduate research in film-making.

Data supplied by the Higher Education Careers Services Unit and Graduate Prospects

Source: The Guardian 2011

A2 - Practical Deadline

A2 Deadline - 'Creative Projects'

All A2 Practical Assignments for Film Studies must be submitted by (or before):

Thursday 10th March 2014

• Printed Copy & Word file for Screenplays
• Quicktime file (moving image)
• 
  
• 
  
• Thursday 10th April 2014

• 1,000 word Reflective Analysis (Film)

FM4: Postmodern Theory - Useful Notes/Site

This extract on Postmodernism and Consumer Society provides some useful quotes that may be applied to many of the topics for A2 Film and Media this year. 'Fight Club' (FM4) is the most obvious text but these concepts can be applied to other examples of Film/Television/Music throughout the year. Getting to grips with this type of theory and applying it to those examples will set your answers apart from other students who rely upon more descriptive responses.

Working with Frederic Jameson's categories (Postmodernism and Consumer Society)

(1) "the transformation of reality into images" (cf. Debord and Baudrillard)

(2) "the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents"

"the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture" (Jameson).

Pastiche and parody of multiple styles: old forms of "content" become mere "styles"

stylistic masks, image styles, without present content: the meaning is in the mimicry

"in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum" (Jameson).

No individualism or individual style, voice, expressive identity. All signifiers circulate and recirculate prior and existing images and styles.

The postmodern in advertising: attempts to provide illusions of individualism (ads for jeans, cars, etc.) through images that define possible subject positions or create desired positions (being the one who's cool, hip, sexy, desirable, sophisticated...).

"our advertising...is fed by postmodernism in all the arts and is inconceivable without it" (Jameson)

For more useful notes on postmodern theory visit here.

New Deadline - Finished 'Small-scale Research Project'

A2 Deadline - 'Small-scale Research Project'

All Small-scale Research Projects must be submitted by (or before):

Monday 13th January 2014

• Printed Copy
• Blog Updated

New A2 Media Studies Blog!

Click above to access

A2 Media Studies posts will now be available on a separate site from A2 Film Studies to make it easier to navigate and find material.

All Media posts are now deleted from this site and have been re-posted on the new blog.  

FM4 - Genre Theory

Genre Theory

Do genres in the cinema really exist and if so, can they be defined?

“Genres isn’t a word that pops up in every conversation about films or every review – but the idea is second nature to the movies and our awareness of them. Movies belong to genres much the way people belong to families or ethnic groups. Name one of the classic, bedrock genres – Western, comedy, musical, war film, gangster picture, science fiction, horror – and even the most casual moviegoer will come up with a mental image of it, partly visual, partly conceptual” (Richard T. Jameson, They Went Thataway, 1994, p. IX).

“The master image for genre criticism is the triangle composed of artist/film/audience. Genres may be defined as patterns/form/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the filmmaker, and their reading by an audience” (Tom Ryall, quoted by Stephen Neale, Genre, 1980, p. 7).

“…genre can be defined as a structural pattern which embodies a universal life pattern or myth in the materials of language… Genre is universal, basic to human perceptions of life” (John Cawelti, The Six-gun Mystique, 1975, p. 30).

As Barry Keith Grant writes in the introduction of his genre reader, “the work of defining film genres is surprisingly difficult and complex’” [1] because “…recognition of the importance of genre in the cinema is a relatively recent development….although chronologically it narrowly predates the early work of auteur criticism.” [2] Grant takes notice that until the late 1940s and early 1950s – when Robert Warshow and genre pioneer André Bazin wrote the first significant essays on film genre (about gangster movies and about the Western) – films were only distinguished by a phrase (for example, ‘a war movie’) “used as a convenient label to give one an idea of what the story was like, what to expect generally from a film.” [3] As before in literature, in painting and in other forms of art, “genre became a critical term, providing another conceptual framework for understanding movies.” [4] A genre classification can also double as a precise commercial study because it evokes certain audience expectations and therefore it allows one to establish classifications, comparisons, balance-sheets, valuations for the future and so on. Although it has been helpful for cinema studies, classifying films in accordance with their genre remains a difficult and risky endeavor because genre ‘impurity’ is by now, some twenty years after the solidification of genre study, a constant characteristic and a usual practice of the cinema as art and as industry.

Extract from: Offscreen.com

On-line Books Page

There is now a page below the blog heading with links to many useful Film and Media Studies on-line books.

You will find it beneficial to browse through the publications to gain a better understanding of the key concepts for all aspects of both subjects:

• Research

• Theory

• Exam Prep 

• Production  

FM4/MS4: Postmodern Theory - Everything is a Remix Part 1

Remixing is a folk art but the techniques are the same ones used at any level of creation: copy, transform, and combine. You could even say that everything is a remix.


Apply the same principals to your key texts (Nirvana/Radiohead/Lady Gaga) and you will develop theoretical constructs that are key to a better understanding of the way that media texts can be analysed more culturally and academically.

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Re- posted from screenagers.me

FM4/MS4 - Postmodernism and Mass Culture

For some comprehensive notes on Postmodernism and Mass Culture use the link below.

pcpmod.doc

WJEC Modules

WJEC: Modules

AS/A2 Film Studies

FM1 : Exploring Film Form

FM2 : British and American Film

FM3 : Film Research and Creative Projects

FM4 : Varieties of Film Experience – Issues and Debates

AS/A2 Media Studies

MS1 : Media Representations and Responses

MS2 : Media Production Processes

MS3 : Media Investigation and Production

MS4 : Media: Text, Industry and Audience

FM4/MS4: Postmodern Theory - Useful Notes

FM4/MS4: Postmodern Theory - Useful Notes

Postmodernism: An Artistic Style

Postmodernist art reveals itself when:

1. It's self-referential. In other words, it refers to itself, or is about itself. Postmodernist artists often refuse to let their works be simply or totally about something else. Their works are about themselves as works of art, and they constantly draw attention to themselves as artifices instead of trying to be windows on some sort of reality beyond themselves.

2. It's "intertextual." That is, it's art that often likes to be about some other work of art, or some other "text." A famous pop artist named Roy Lichtenstein loved painting images taken right out of comic books. That's "intertextuality," he made art about somebody else's art.

3. It's category-defying, often in confusing ways. Postmodernist artists love to defy our expectations and do things they're not "supposed" to do -- maybe to remind us that the rational categorisations we often use to understand art never work as well or as perfectly as we like to think they do.

4. It's "pastiched." Fancy French word, that. "Pastiche," to recent art critics, is the practice of borrowing elements of different genres and different styles from lots of different historical periods, then mixing them all together in a single work of art. It creates a kind of historical collage.

5. It's not snobbish. In fact, postmodernist art can be very "pop." It often draws its subject matter from the realm of popular culture and employs pop-culture forms and genres. Most postmodernist artists don't draw the sorts of distinctions between "high" and "low" culture many artists of the past did -- and so they defy yet another mode of categorisation.

6. It gets fact and fiction all mixed up. Postmodernist artists aren't much interested in the distinction between real and make-believe. They often make famous "real" historical figures interact with fictional characters in their works, and they often re-tell "actual" textbook history in peculiar, unsettling, often illuminating ways. Mixing fact and fiction is a way to amplify this idea.

Read more here.

FM4/MS4: The Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Extract)

Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.

The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:

'What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.'

FM4/MS4: Postmodern Theory - 'Fight Club'/'The Matrix'

Postmodern Ideas

1. We no longer have any sense of the difference between real things and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them.

2. The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we now live in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state of simulacrum.

3. Postmodernism rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All judgments of value are merely taste.

4. Culture ‘eats itself’ and there is no longer anything new to produce or distribute.

5. All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses – and what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the ‘winning’ discourse.

6. Postmodern texts are said to be intertextual and self-referential – they break the rules of realism to explore the nature of their own status as constructed texts.

7. In the postmodern world, media texts make visible and challenge ideas of truth and reality, removing the illusion that stories, texts or images can ever accurately or neutrally reproduce reality or truth

FM4/MS4: Postmodern Theory - Useful Notes/Site

A very good discussion of postmodernism can be found here with some very contemporary examples used including Lady Gaga.

FM4/MS4: Postmodern Theory - Useful Notes

Postmodernism: Theory, Theorists & Texts

FM4/MS4: The Male Gaze - Useful Notes/Site

Despite the many references to an intimate and apparently heterosexual relationship with the celebrity in mass media and culture, it is important to stress that the ads are mostly reproduced in women’s magazines. In other words, the representation of gender in the perfume ad formula ads is designed for a female spectator. The typology of the perfume ad formula thus brings up a visual paradox in feminist visual culture. While the ads are designed for a female spectator, they apparently subscribe to the iconography of voyeurism, the commodification of women, even the visual codes of mens' magazines.

For further discussion of 'The Male Gaze' in perfume ads and other issues visit visualculture.blog here.

Or get an overview of the theory here.