Core modules
Building on the strong interdisciplinary links between German and Film and Television Studies, this degree combines in depth study of cinema in German culture with the opportunity to explore wider aspects of film and other cinematic cultures.
In your first year, you will take language classes designed to develop your knowledge and understanding of written and spoken German. To complement your language skills, you will follow a programme focussing on contemporary German society and the origins of modern German culture in the late eighteenth century. This provides an excellent and comprehensive foundation for studying further aspects of German literary, visual and political culture in the later stages of your degree. In addition to this, you will take the Film Studies module 'Discovering Cinema'.
In your intermediate and final years, you will take Film Studies modules and modules that further develop your German language skills. In addition to cultural modules on nineteenth and twentieth-century German culture, you will have an opportunity to develop your own particular interests by choosing from a wide selection of modules offered by German specialists that cover a broad range of subjects in German culture, society, literature, politics, philosophy, film, history, and business, as well as translation and transnationalism. You can also opt to study some of our interdisciplinary cross-School modules.
You can choose to spend your year abroad studying at a university in a German-speaking country or on a British Council Assistantship or a work placement.
Important information
We are planning to make some exciting changes to the second year of our German with Film Studies (BA) degree for 2024 entry. We continually review our curricula to reflect developments in the relevant disciplines to deliver the best educational experience. The core and optional modules will undergo approval through the University's rigorous academic processes. As modules are approved, we will update the course information on this webpage. It is therefore very important that you check this webpage for the latest information before you apply and prior to accepting an offer. Sign up to receive updates.
Year One
Modern German Language 1
You will develop your translation, grammatical and speaking skills in German, and in doing so broaden your vocabulary and range of idiom, expression and awareness of various stylistic registers. You will work in a pair or group on a media project under the supervision of a tutor, which will contribute to your end-of-year mark in spoken German.
Read more about the Modern German Language 1 moduleLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
Provincial - Pariah - Powerhouse: Reading German-language Culture in a Global Perspective
Which stories, sounds, images, and events come to mind when you first think of Germany and the German language? This module focuses on the media and representations through which many of us first encounter German-language culture: fairy tales and adaptations; performance, visual, and screen culture; music and sound.
Across the module, you will build up your linguistic confidence by engaging with sources of increasing length, giving you a sense of the nuances of German delivered in diverse settings. Our aim is to equip students with a toolkit for critically engaging with the narratives and media that determine our relationships with contemporary society.
We will meet a wide variety of notable characters, including Nobel Prize winners and pioneering figures like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose works helped to define what German culture meant at a time when “Germany” did not yet exist as a nation state, and when the global elite looked down upon German as a provincial lesser cousin to Latin, Italian, and French. How, then, did German culture transform the status of the German language? How did German-speaking artists shape the cultural genres that we all consume today? And how does engaging with such works give us a more differentiated understanding of the positive and negative aspects of Germany’s history and its global influence? Ultimately, we seek to understand developments that led to Germany’s emergence as a cultural, political, and economic powerhouse.
Read more about the Provincial - Pariah - Powerhouse: Reading German-language Culture in a Global Perspective module, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
Plus an optional module in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures or an approved outside option (30 credits)
Independent Project
This module enables students to spend some time developing their independent working and in particular to build research skills for the later stages of their undergraduate degree. The module comprises a series of skills sessions on undertaking undergraduate research, tutorials with the module leader, along with a set of supervisory meetings with the project supervisor. In addition to producing work in a range of formats in the course of the year, linked to an aspect of the culture of their chosen language and the study of modern languages at university level, students will be supported to produce an end product related to their specific area of interest and linked to the curriculum for their other first-year cultural module. The end product will be an appropriate piece of work such as a mini dissertation.
Read more about the Independent Project in Modern Languages moduleLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
Two modules from Film Studies:
Film History and Methods
This module will focus on film and history, exploring the various ways film texts have been analysed as reflecting social and cultural historical moments, filmmaking movements of particular eras, and how films have historicised individuals and events. There are many ways to ‘do’ film history and this term will not be an exhaustive survey of the history of cinema. Instead, it will offer some key contexts, methodologies, and traditions that have formed the wide-ranging study of film and history.
Read more about the Film History and Methods moduleLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
and
Film Analysis and Methods
This module is concerned with the close reading and interpretation of film texts through close textual analysis. Over the course of the module, you will acquire the skills and vocabulary necessary to analyse the ways in which meaning is conveyed through the formal properties of film. This module is also concerned with the broader applications of close textual analysis. By the end of the module and you should be confident in applying your skills of textual analysis in order to interrogate the political dimension of audio-visual texts.
Read more about the Film Analysis and Methods moduleLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
Intermediate Year
Modern German Language 2
In this second-year module, you will increase your general and specialised vocabulary in German through translation into English and German, essay-writing in German, spoken and listening comprehension, and work on business-related materials. In pursuit of these aims, you will learn to identify and rectify grammatical problems, and gain increased sensitivity towards language in general, and an awareness of register, semantics and style in particular. You will also gain important research skills, including correct use of dictionaries.
Read more about the Modern German Language 2 moduleLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
German Studies module:
Reason, Romantics and Reactions. Germany in the Age of Revolution
You will get to grips with the emerging sense of German nationhood, against the background of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. You will study concepts such as the state, the nation and the classical ideal as an aesthetic and political model through the work of authors such as Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin, before exploring German Romanticism up to its critical reappraisal in the 19th century. You will develop your appreciation of the role of the artists in the German Weltanschauung and the rise of nationalism to broaden your understanding of how literature reflects different models of progress and anticipates social and political change.
Read more about Reason, Romantics and Reactions. Germany in the Age of RevolutionLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2022/23 year of study).
Plus an optional module in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures or an approved outside option (30 credits)
A Film Studies module:
Hollywood Cinema: History, Theory, Industry
This core module will build on what students have learned about Hollywood in first year modules (such as Film History and Screen Technologies) by expanding their knowledge about Hollywood as an industry, its history (depending on when it is taught this may extend from the classical period into the post-classical and contemporary period), and theoretical concepts that engage with Hollywood cinema. The module will illustrate important aspects about the Hollywood industrial filmmaking system, including style, genre, and stars. By first focusing on Hollywood as an industry, examining the practices and cultures of film production, the module will then consider its ideological influence by promoting specific American values and traditions through political issues, such as race and ethnicity.
Read more about the Hollywood Cinema: History, Theory, Industry moduleLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
Final Year
Modern German Language 3
In this third-year module, you will use vocabulary of increasing sophistication in both general and specialised fields, and improve your skills in spoken and written German and translation. You will improve your listening and reading comprehension skills, and learn to identify and rectify grammatical problems. An important aim of the course is to cultivate sensitivity towards language in general, and an awareness of register, semantics and style in particular.
Read more about the Modern German Language 3 moduleLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
German cultural module:
The Rise of Capitalist Modernity: Gender, Class, Identity
You will study the evolution of modern German literature, from Poetic Realism, through Naturalism and Modernism across a wide spectrum of authors, genres and themes in dialogue with major social, cultural and political movements that mark the transformation of Germany and Austria from the 1870s onwards. Themes include the Industrial Revolution, social critique and the dramatic form, sexuality, adolescence and education in the Wilhelmine period, gender roles and modernity, and the lead-up and response of German writers to the First World War. You will analyse major literary movements through the work of, among others, Theodor Fontane, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Georg Kaiser, and appreciate how the arts became a vehicle for expressing ambivalent attitudes to modernity.
Read more about The Rise of Capitalist Modernity: Gender, Class, Identity moduleLink opens in a new window, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study).
Plus an optional module in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures or an approved outside option (30 credits)
A Film Studies module:
Film Aesthetics
You will begin by exploring overarching ideas about aesthetics and how these relate to evaluative, historical and political discourses. The study of film aesthetics will subsequently see you applying these tenets to the evaluation and interpretation of film, particularly in the light of considerations of representation, mode and genre, and social context. By bringing together philosophical and theoretical questions of aesthetics with detailed textual analysis of a range of films, you will learn to apply such concepts to your understanding of contemporary international cinema.
Read more about the Film Aesthetics module, including the methods of teaching and assessment (content applies to 2023/24 year of study):
Optional modules
