ENGL B32: Case Studies in Research: Reading Cinema

E. Ostrowska

Movies appear everywhere: in movie theatres, on our laptops, and our Smart Phones. Cinema is one of the most important forms of entertainment and a dominant cultural practice through which our life is mediated. Thus the cinematic text needs to be read within our cultural practices.
In this section of Case Studies in Research, we will consider how we read the cinematic image. Firstly, we will analyze films as cultural texts and, secondly, we will analyze critical writing about these films. We will explore multiple research methods and problems of interpretation, employing various approaches to cinema such as ideology, gender, and ethnicity. Further, we will research how texts are modified in the political, historical, and cultural contexts of film production and reception.