MA Film and Literature

at University of Essex

Explore the relationship between literature and film in an exceptionally broad array of contemporary and historical contexts, and from a variety of different perspectives. You discover cutting-edge approaches to cinematic and literary aesthetics, adaptation, and relationships between different media, reception contexts, ethics, and interfaces between theory and practice.

On our course you gain a deep understanding of the theoretical and practical interactions between literature and film, choosing specific areas of literary and cinema studies to complement your preparation for a creative practice or theoretical dissertation project of your choice. You will forge and develop connections between audio-visual and textual media. Focusing a variety of cultural productions and diverse forms of enlightenment, and entertainment, you will encounter parallel and sometimes more densely intertwined media histories, discovering the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with, and draw on one other.

Through weekly seminars, screenings and discussions of key cinematic and literary texts, you consider different ways that texts create their meanings. You study topics including:

• Areas such as modernism, poetic practice, American prose, Caribbean literature, and African American literature
• Documentary and fiction film production including screenwriting, pre-production, camera, lighting, sound, storyboarding and editing
• Landmark directors and movements such as Expressionism and the avant-garde
• Film theory including feminism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, haptic cinema
• Adaptation and comparative media

You also benefit from a series of masterclasses conducted by invited industry professionals which focus on the craft of filmmaking: developing your technical understanding of cinematography, directing and editing/postproduction.

These also introduce you to potential employment routes and industry career pathways, from setting up your own production company, to identifying and tapping into distribution networks and preparing and marketing your completed films.