Research themes

While the department has research expertise in a wide range of areas, our work is centred on global screen cultures. Staff work across global cinemas and media, and their work covers a wide range of geographic areas (from Europe to Asia, Scandinavia to South America).

The Department seeks not only to celebrate global cinema and media, but also to approach it critically, asking how ideas of 'the global' have taken shape, how they are sustained today, and in whose interest. Our research foregrounds questions of film culture and institutions, exploring phenomena such as: media circulation (from the colonial period to the present); activist networks; histories of political cinema; and labour in production cultures from the mainstream to the margins. We work with research partners and collaborators from across the world exploring these topics (and many others).

From this basis, the Department has strengths in the following areas:

Documentary and non-fiction cinema

The Department has a particular shared interest in non-fiction film, including documentary, activist filmmaking, experimental cinema and artists' film and video, and emerging research areas such as scientific and educational film. These areas mutually inform one another.

Research by staff in the department explores topics such as: the relationship between human rights and filmmaking; cinema as an activist tool used by persecuted and subaltern groups; how art historical movements (such as Pop Art) have found expression in moving image works; the politics of mockumentaries; the historical role of forms of 'useful cinema', especially within a colonial frame; the theoretical and critical significance of interactive documentaries.

The environment, ecology, and the media

A second prominent strand of the Department's research explores the complex interrelationships between cinema and the ecosphere. This encompasses examples such as activist documentaries which raise awareness of particular ecological issues, films produced by organisations involved in land and resource management, artists' screen works which interrogate the dynamics of human/more-than-human interactions, and narrative cinema which engages with ecological concerns.

These films, however, are also placed within broader critical and political frameworks: of international geopolitical relations, of landscape management tactics (such as those associated with agriculture, forestry, fossil fuel extraction, and water provision), of philosophical understandings of human/non-human interdependencies, and of pragmatic and theoretical concerns about sustainability. As such, the enquiry that the Department undertakes in this field is connected into a broader network of research on the environmental humanities at St Andrews and beyond.

Moving image archives

A third dominant theme connecting work by staff in the Department concerns media archives and film historiography. Research not only involves exploration of archival materials and particular repositories, but a reflexive interrogation of the ways in which film history is constructed and articulated.

Staff in the department have made interventions into the archives of major Hollywood studios and their practitioners; into the traces and forms of silent cinema across the globe; into the political history and piecemeal evolution of European LGBTQ+ archives; into colonial archives both within Britain and elsewhere; into the fragmented archives of obsolete media; and, closer to home, into the history of film exhibition in St Andrews.