Browse Hierarchy FLM5208: The Visual Essay

The Visual Essay is a single-semester module (15 credits) which interrogates the links between the essay form and visual media. The module explores how film, still and moving image work can be constructed to produce arguments, debates, and other rhetorical forms. The module allows students to develop a short moving-image or video essay, focusing on its visual elements to create an essay, argument or other poetic form. Students will also acquire a broader historical and theoretical understanding of the essay form, in text, photography, illustration, film, video and digital media. Beginning with the essays of Montaigne, students will be introduced to the visual essay as a hybrid form that navigates the personal and the political, expression and argument, feeling and reason, in cinematic language. The module forms part of the production pathway for Single Honours Film Studies, and as a result requires students to have undertaken production modules at Level 4. As a module it will be available to students registered on degree programmes involving Film Studies only.