Skip to main content
School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

Breadcrumb

  1. SLLF - School of Languages, Linguistics and Film
  2. Film Studies
  3. Postgraduate
  4. MA in Film
  5. MA Documentary Practice Pathway

Documentary Practice Pathway

Read about the MA in Film as well as how to apply

Our pioneering programme guides you to find and tell the stories that matter to you. You'll explore the practice and theory of documentary film while you develop your unique voice as a filmmaker, accumulating excellent production and documentary-making skills. In addition, you'll learn specialist research skills that will aid your career.

  • Develop your distinct creative voice and create a solid portfolio of work
  • Train as an all-rounder with great production skills and film-funding experience
  • Learn from respected filmmakers and internationally renowned academics

What you'll study

If you want to become a documentary filmmaker then our Documentary Practice Pathway is the perfect course for you. If you're interested in factual film research or film theory then our programme is also a perfect fit.

We train you to be an all-rounder. You'll gain valuable expertise in:

  • directing 
  • production managing 
  • camera operating 
  • recording sound 
  • editing 

You will learn how to pitch your projects and how finance and festivals work.

You'll explore the many ways in which documentaries can be made, from the observational documentary to visual essays. You’ll consider documentary ethics, activist filmmaking, fact-fiction hybrid filmmaking among other forms and approaches, as well as examining current research by prominent filmmakers, theorists and historians.

Intensive practical workshops with respected film-makers, group sessions and one-to-one guidance will help you find the subjects for your work, hone your working methods and develop distinct shooting and editing strategies as you create a solid portfolio of work. All the while you'll refine your own unique visual language.

The practical learning is supported by a number of optional modules in film theory and philosophy that will help you develop a deeper understanding of the medium, and advance the rigour of your thinking.

Our Department has several PhD practice-led projects in film and you’ll have the opportunity to develop your postgraduate research interests.

You’ll also be studying film in one of the great cinematic capitals of the world: London was the location of most British studios and it remains the centre of the UK film industry. We’re a short tube ride away from the British Film Institute (BFI), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and the film archives at the Imperial War Museum.

 

Compulsory Modules

Documentary Theory & Practice

A practical filmmaking module. Documentary in its simplest of forms is a recording of an act. The film camera is first and foremost a recording instrument, whether it captures 'life caught unawares' or a fictional scenario. This module examines the history of 'non-fiction' filmmaking in the 20th and 21st century through the understanding of documentary styles and genre. Political, social, ethical and historical issues will be addressed through the engagement of theory and practice. In this module you will make your first 8 -12min documentary film. You are free to choose any subject and mode of documentary. It doesn’t matter that you have never made anything before, we will teach you the technical basics and you will learn through the act of making. Some of the best films made on this module have been made by students who had never made anything before. Their work has been selected to film festivals and a student won best student film at the Soho London Film Festival with her first ever film. Assessment: 1 film; 1 essay.

 

 

DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION PROJECT

A practical filmmaking module. This module challenges some of the key tenets and ideas of documentary film (such as transparency, truth, reality, and representational practices) with a view to pushing the boundaries of the documentary form. We will explore different modes of documentary practice, including the performative documentary, artists' moving image documentary in the gallery, the animated documentary, archival and found footage film and the essay film. These non-traditional modalities of nonfiction are designed to enhance and reconfigure your own documentary practices, and enable you to test out new theoretical, aesthetic and rhetorical strategies in your production work. To make the most of the module, you are encouraged to read extensively around documentary film theory and practice, thinking through the myriad formal, political and ethical ways the moving image encounters and represents the lived world. Assessment: 1 film; 1 essay.

 

Elective Modules:

Feminist Film Philosophy

Feminist Film Philosophy examines the relationships between feminist thinkers and film from a variety of perspectives. Tracing the history of women's critical writing about film in terms of aesthetics, ethics, politics and filmmaking, the module develops a sustained engagement between women and conceptual, philosophical questions prompted by film. This will range from Maya Deren and Virginia Woolf, to Luce Irigaray and Iris Murdoch; Kathleen Collins and Sally Potter, to bell hooks and Audre Lorde. The module will draw on a range of filmmakers , feminisms and philosophers in order to explore the various ways in which philosophy and film can be brought together to create a distinctive strand of feminist film philosophy.

 

Production Design: History, Theory and Craft

This module examines the creative practice of production design in cinema, specifically in relation to architectural construction and set design. It takes a historical approach to design as an industrial practice shaped by technology, artistic and design movements, and the discipline of architecture. It proposes critical approaches founded in theory and practice to find ways of analysing film decor and identifying how it contributes to our understanding of film texts. The artistic and technical challenges posed by film design will be examined though close case study work and the completion of a 4,000 word essay.

 

Film Archaeology

The origins of cinema, key moments of transformation and recent challenges to its form in the wake of digital technologies are the subjects examined in this module. Far from being simply a conflict between the magical tradition of Méliès and the documentary account of the Lumière brothers, cinema archaeology reveals the connections between various nineteenth century inventions concerned with movement, perception and transmission, and the advent of cinema. The course explores the various cultural influences that have contributed to the idea of 'cinema' at a particular time, such as those from painting, literature and theatre. Perhaps more significant are the moments of crisis brought about by the prospect of adding to film, such as the qualities of sound and colour. Most illuminating of all is film's competitive relation to its 'rivals': television, video, digital production and youtube. The course examines the question of whether film is a specific medium with enduring qualities, or whether its component parts are remade with every decade.

 

Film Philosophy

This module explores the relationship between film and philosophy by examining how films raise philosophical questions. We will learn what philosophers have to say about cinema, and how filmmakers incorporate philosophical perspectives, but we will also explore how films can inform the ways we think about ourselves and understand the world around us. From how we experience cinema in our minds and bodies, to what scares us and how we assess right and wrong, this module will address the question of how films do philosophy.

 

Film and Ethics

This module provides an introduction to the relationship between ethics and diverse forms of cinema, tracing the emergence of a relatively new but increasingly influential approach to the medium. How can the interactions between documentary filmmakers, their subjects and viewers be understood in ethical terms? What is specific about the way narrative cinema frames the moral dilemmas and decisions around which it so often revolves? To what extent does the filmic institution render viewers ethically complicit in scenarios of suffering and violence? What is distinctive about the contribution of cinema to debates in ethical philosophy? And how do given films relate to the poststructuralist ethical preoccupation with the possibility of unconditional openness towards the other? Students will address these and other questions through analysis of a wide-ranging corpus of films and critical, theoretical and philosophical texts produced in Europe, North America and beyond.

 

Cognitive Film Theory

Cognitive film theory introduces the students to the main currents in this branch of film studies and outlines its main concepts, debates, and methods. We will be primarily interested in problems of film classification (definitions of fiction, horror, etc.) and audience engagement (narrative comprehension, emotional responses, character engagement, bodily reactions, attitudes/desires/beliefs/behaviors films elicit, etc.). To do so we focus on the relationship of this brand of theorizing to continental philosophy, analytic philosophy,  scientific method, dialectical theorizing, naturalism, and embodied cognition. Key theorists discussed include Munsterberg, Bordwell, Carroll, Plantinga, Smith, Tan, and Guerra and Gallese.

 

Documentary Theory & Practice

A practical filmmaking module. Documentary in its simplest of forms is a recording of an act. The film camera is first and foremost a recording instrument, whether it captures 'life caught unawares' or a fictional scenario. This module examines the history of 'non-fiction' filmmaking in the 20th and 21st century through the understanding of documentary styles and genre. Political, social, ethical and historical issues will be addressed through the engagement of theory and practice. In this module you will make your first 8 -12min documentary film. You are free to choose any subject and mode of documentary. It doesn’t matter that you have never made anything before, we will teach you the technical basics and you will learn through the act of making. Some of the best films made on this module have been made by students who had never made anything before. Their work has been selected to film festivals and a student won best student film at the Soho London Film Festival with her first ever film.

 

Documentary Production Project

A practical filmmaking module. This module challenges some of the key tenets and ideas of documentary film (such as transparency, truth, reality, and representational practices) with a view to pushing the boundaries of the documentary form. We will explore different modes of documentary practice, including the performative documentary, artists' moving image documentary in the gallery, the animated documentary, archival and found footage film and the essay film. These non-traditional modalities of nonfiction are designed to enhance and reconfigure your own documentary practices, and enable you to test out new theoretical, aesthetic and rhetorical strategies in your production work. To make the most of the module, you are encouraged to read extensively around documentary film theory and practice, thinking through the myriad formal, political and ethical ways the moving image encounters and represents the lived world.

 

Auteur Direction

Auteur Direction develops knowledge and skills in fiction filmmaking through workshop teaching. The practical work and the study of film supports the development of a practical project. This may be an individual work or a specific role within a collaborative production. The essay is a study of fiction direction in relation to either a body of work, a single film, or in terms of directing as part of a collaborative production process.

 

Directing Fiction

A practical filmmaking module. The film is made by a group and not an individual. The module has a mixture of group meetings and whole class lectures and workshops. For documentary and film theory students you can also make a documentary or experimental film. In this module you will learn and put into practice how you also present a project from pitch deck, to finished film. You will also learn about crowdfunding and have the opportunity to run your own campaign to raise finance for your production.

 

Film Activism

This module examines films that can be considered activist - a body of work that engages issues of social and political significance. These varied films are driven by the activism of their filmmakers, their protagonists and through the films' direct participation in activism. Using artistic, ideological, socio-cultural, historical, technological, and practical frameworks to examine activist filmmaking this course will explore how the cinema and activism interact. This is a theory/practice module and will include the production of a short film.

 

Scriptwriting: Social Justice and Crime

The aim of social justice to define and defend individual human rights as part of a just and fair society is a process of struggle. The abstraction of justice being is enacted and tried in actuality through law, both legislated and social. Story as a social codifier and film as a narrative form engages with the representation of social justice and this module takes up this engagement, supporting students in developing an individual narrative that is relevant to this subject.

 

Forms of Film Practice

Mainstream narrative cinema has always benefitted from the formal innovations taking place at the margins of film practice. The formal, aesthetic and technical experiments conducted by the avant-garde were soon appropriated by the commercial film industry. Risks taken in the documentary field have led to new attitudes towards truth and actuality. This module focuses on what forms film practice can take beyond fiction and storytelling. The module aims to broaden the students' skills-base by focusing on documentary filmmaking and artists' moving image, encouraging formal experimentation and an active critique of the ways in which mainstream cinema and conventional televisual formats construct meanings and representations. The module covers a range of practices, production procedures, technologies and techniques for concept development, and is structured to develop creative thinking, collaboration, crew dynamics and practical abilities. It is designed to ground the student in appropriate research and development methods along with practical and aesthetic skills to produce a short documentary or experimental film. Students choose from two short film project options: either a documentary portrait of a person, place or event, or a film that engages with process, concept and aesthetics, rather than with explicitly narrative content. In parallel, students produce an essay consisting of a close reading of a filmmaker or filmmakers working in a mode that relates to their short film production.