Film Studies and History

Film studies and history is a combination that recognises something important: films are not just entertainment but historical documents, cultural artefacts, and modes of understanding and reshaping the past. Film studies provides the theoretical and critical tools to analyse how cinema constructs meaning through image, sound, narrative, and form. History provides the evidence, the questions, and the methodological rigour to situate films in their social, political, and cultural contexts and to assess what they tell us about the worlds that made them.

At the University of Manchester you will study across three years on a full-time programme. The film studies strand gives you a thorough grounding in film history and key theoretical approaches to the study of cinema, from formalism and structuralism to psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and postcolonial criticism. The history strand brings you into contact with the full breadth of historical scholarship, from medieval to modern, developing your ability to work with primary sources, construct sustained historical arguments, and engage with historiographical debates.

The two disciplines reinforce each other: film studies benefits from history's attention to context and evidence, while history is enriched by film studies' analysis of how representation works and why it matters. You will also have the opportunity to develop specialist areas of interest within both disciplines, following your own intellectual curiosity as your studies progress.

Graduates of film studies and history enter careers across a wide range of professional contexts. Journalism, film criticism, broadcasting, and documentary production draw directly on the film studies expertise. Archiving, museum and heritage work, publishing, and education draw on the historical training.

The analytical and writing skills developed across both disciplines are valued in communications, public affairs, and the civil service. Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in film, history, media, or cultural studies, where the combination of close textual analysis and rigorous contextual thinking provides a strong foundation for research.