Undergraduate Course: Intimate Exposures: Fifty Years of French First-Person Cinema (ELCF10068)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | So-called "first-person cinema" has been an enduring current in French film-making ever since emerging at the time of the French New Wave. Unlike more conventional documentary or feature films that recount an (auto)biographical narrative, this mode of film-making emphasises the filmic construction, not the recording, of a self, via filmic journeys into the selfhood and identity of a talismanic figure closely identified with the film director (sometimes even being played by him or her).
Straddling - and indeed interrogating - the boundaries between documentary and (auto)fiction, these films foreground the theme of personal identity, tracing this through such narrative preoccupations as the personal histories, memories, desires and itineraries (sometimes invented) of their main protagonists.
By innovating new ways by which the cinematic self can be represented, these films belong to a Nouvelle Vague film-making tradition (as will be explored in the course). Through their fascination with the screening, staging and exposure of the self, they also participate in a postmodern preoccupation in contemporary French culture with all that is testimonial, confessional, intimate and personal. The films studied on this course reveal connections between personal identity and phenomena such as the following: traumatic legacies of war and colonial conflict; cultural memory and amnesia; gender, sexuality, AIDS; and ethnic origins. |
| Course description |
Not entered
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 21 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
100% Coursework:
Oral presentation, max 8 mins long, excl. film clip (should include PowerPoint slides) (30%)
Time limited essay max 1800 words (70%)
The Course Organiser has indicated that the following Learning Outcomes are met by each of these two assessments:
Essay: [LO 1, 4, 5]
Oral Presentation: [LO 2, 3]
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| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Show understanding of the distinctive qualities of French first-person cinema, as these manifest in a range of twentieth-century and contemporary films in French that will be studied on the course, as well as the capacity to relate French cinematic preoccupations with representing first-person experience to relevant social, cultural and theoretical contexts.
- Execute and present analyses of films (this includes the production of sequence analyses), with due regard to the specificities of the medium of film, and using analytical strategies, techniques and terminology appropriate to the academic study of film.
- Articulate their insights and analyses relating to these French-language films and their contexts orally in French, demonstrating as they do so a satisfactory grasp of register, vocabulary and grammatical and syntactical structures in the French language.
- Interpret and synthesise, deploying the analysis of particular scenes or sequences from films, as well as other analytical methods, information drawn from a variety of written as well as audiovisual sources, which should include a selection of films drawn from those which constitute the set primary works of the course, as well as critical and theoretical perspectives found in works of scholarly secondary literature.
- Construct coherent written responses to essay questions which engage with the selected films and the conceptual material studied on the course, and present these discussions with due clarity and scholarly rigour, whilst using a suitable written register of academic discourse.
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Reading List
| http://resourcelists.ed.ac.uk/ |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | DELC Intimate Exp |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Claire Boyle
Tel: (0131 6)50 4024
Email: claire.boyle@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Hope Hamilton
Tel: (0131 6)50 4167
Email: hope.hamilton@ed.ac.uk |
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