Film Studies

Film studies treats cinema as both an art form and a cultural and social phenomenon, asking not only how films are made but what they mean, how they work on audiences, what cultural assumptions they embody, and how the film industry has developed as an economic and creative force across more than a century. It is a discipline that combines close textual analysis with historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives.

At the University of Liverpool you will engage with cinema from a wide range of national traditions and historical periods, from silent film and Hollywood classical cinema through to contemporary world cinema and digital media. You will learn to analyse films closely, paying attention to narrative, mise en scene, editing, sound, and genre, and to situate films within the industrial, social, and political contexts of their production and reception. Theoretical frameworks from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism are among the tools you will encounter, not as ends in themselves but as ways of opening up questions that surface viewing cannot answer.

This three-year full-time programme includes a year abroad, placing you at a partner university in a different country and giving you the opportunity to engage with film culture and scholarship from a different national perspective. This international dimension is particularly appropriate for a discipline concerned with cinema as a global form.

Graduates go on to careers in film criticism, journalism, broadcasting, arts marketing and communications, programming, cultural organisation, publishing, education, and the creative industries. The analytical and communication skills developed in the degree are valued in many professional contexts. Many graduates also continue to postgraduate study in film studies, cultural studies, media, or related fields.