Program Overview

Our four-year BA Film Studies and Literature (including foundation year), will be suitable for you if your academic qualifications do not yet meet our entrance requirements for the three-year version of this course and you want a programme that increases your subject knowledge as well as improves your academic skills in order to support your academic performance.

This four-year course includes a foundation year (Year Zero), followed by a further three years of study. During your Year Zero, you study three academic subjects relevant to your chosen course as well as a compulsory academic skills module, with additional English language for non-English speakers.

You are an Essex student from day one, a member of our global community based at the most internationally diverse campus university in the UK.

After successful completion of Year Zero in our Essex Pathways Department, you progress to complete your course with our Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies.

Refine your critical skills and nurture your thinking about film and literature. Explore cinema and other media through cultural analysis, the impact of changes in technology and aesthetics, and cinema as a creative outlet, to discover how film developed in the modern world.

Film at Essex equips you with the theoretical and background knowledge to understand the dynamics of global cinemas. Plus, combining your studies with Literature gives you an understanding of how to engage with media across comparative contexts. We introduce you to some of the most significant works of literature and film which have sparked movements or represented a crucial conceptual or aesthetic turn, giving you keen insights into the far-reaching influences of these media.

You’ll have a range of optional modules to choose from, and you could choose topics such as:

• American film authors
• Film and propaganda
• World cinema
• Narrative and film
• Documentary film
• Psychoanalytic theory
• Shakespeare
• British romanticism
• European literature
• Writing of the American South
• The Western in literature and film

You also have the opportunity to take practical options in the second year, to develop your production skills and knowledge of the filmmaking process. From initial concept to research methods, addressing legal and consent requirements, filming, and editing, these options can give you an insider knowledge of what it means to work behind the camera.