It is important to firstly consider the context of this unit as an exploration of world cinema. World cinema is difficult to define; with most definitions reverting to that it can be defined simply as any cinema outside of the globally dominant industry of Hollywood or any non English language cinema. Often discussed as an alternative to Hollywood’s ‘dream factory’, World cinema tends to be perceived as possessing certain features offering an insight into another country’s culture, a low budget gritty representation of real life or...

Ewan McGregor is a major British film star who has appeared in a wide range of films that have been released globally since 1994. His career has combined performances in a range of lower budgeted feature films and work in highly budgeted, event films released by the major film studios. Over the course of almost twenty years McGregor has appeared in nearly fifty films.

Professionally trained as an actor at London’s Guildhall, McGregor hails from Scotland and the narrative of his career progression from provincial Scotland to being an...

Apparatus Film Theory

‘Apparatus’ is another word for the means in which a specific production is created. In the case of film / cinema, the film projector and the screen. Apparatus Theory is a model of spectatorship and institutions. It argues that cinema is ideological (based on ideas) because the films are created to represent reality. This means that because film is created to illustrate different ideas, everything has meaning - from the camerawork to the editing. It argues that ideology is not imposed on cinema, but is part of its...

We had an enquiry recently about Postmodernism which led to some productive responses. Ellen Grundy’s approach involved:

(L)ooking at representation and postcolonialism (as follows):

A research task on Gurinder Chadha and her films. How do her life and the themes of her films suggest a post colonial identity? For example Bend it like Beckham as a coming together of different ethnicities / cultures.

The classic clip of going for an ‘English’ in Goodness Gracious Me that turns representation on its head. Useful for debating how different...

What is Auteur Theory?

There are various debates underlining the existence of Auteurs; how to define an “Auteur” has been much theorized. The original concept took birth in the pages of the Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, particularly voiced by French Nouvelle Vague filmmaker, Francois Truffaut.

Truffaut was both very critical of the trend in French cinema to identify the author as the screenwriter and very aware of both his, and his other Nouvelle Vague counterparts’ signature styles. In 1954 Truffaut wrote an essay entitled A...