Film and History
Film and history are disciplines with a deep and sometimes troubled relationship. Cinema is simultaneously an art form, an industry, a historical document, and a powerful shaper of historical consciousness, and the relationship between what film claims about the past and what the historical record actually shows is one of the most productive tensions in the humanities. Studying them together means developing the skills to analyse films as aesthetic and cultural objects while also interrogating them as historical sources, and to bring historical knowledge to bear on understanding why films represent the past in the ways they do.
At the University of Southampton, this part-time programme offers an approach to this combination that is both rigorous and genuinely engaging. You will study film history across multiple dimensions, examining cinema as popular art, as big business, and as a cultural record of the societies that produced and consumed it. Alongside this, you will develop the historian's skills of source analysis, contextualisation, and argument construction, learning to read films with the same critical intelligence that historians bring to documents and archives.
The programme attends to the full range of film cultures, not just Hollywood, examining how different national cinemas have recorded and interpreted historical experience.
Studying part-time allows you to develop your knowledge and skills alongside other commitments, working through the material at a sustainable pace while engaging with genuinely challenging intellectual content.
Graduates move into careers in heritage and cultural institutions, broadcasting, journalism, education, film programming and criticism, documentary research, and archiving. Some pursue postgraduate study in film studies, history, media, or cultural policy. The analytical skills developed on the programme, which include close reading of visual and written texts, contextual analysis, and the ability to construct evidence-based arguments, are valuable across a range of professional contexts.