Postgraduate Studies

The programme’s duration is a two year divided into four semesters. A semester is sixteen weeks long. A course meeting for a minimum of four hours a week for the duration of a semester enables students to earn 4 credits. Students should register for a minimum of 16 credits each term and need to earn 64 credits to complete the programme successfully. All the students of SCCE need to take three common Foundational Courses, one each in the first three semesters, for 12 credits in total. They should also take four Elective Courses offered by the School or any other School in the University, one each in all the four semesters, for 16 credits in total. They need to take seven compulsory Core Courses from their respective discipline (in this case Film Studies) for 28 credits in total. Their MA dissertation in the final semester will earn them 8 credits. They may register for more credits on payment of extra fees.

M.A. Film Studies (64 credits)

**Electives also offered by Film Studies faculty:

• Lineages of the Contemporary
• Subject and Sensorium
• Psyche and Screen
• Images and Signs in Cinema

The Programme seeks to develop a film studies student as a committed intellectual well-versed in cinema, media, and other aesthetic movements of the modern period. Scholars and practitioners, graduating from the programme are aware of the cinematic histories of Asia (especially India) and the West, as well as the key political, cultural and social issues animating our times. It aims to foster a capacity for thought that is both historically self-reflexive and philosophically radical.

Thus, at the end of the programme the following attributes should be instilled in the graduate:

1: Awareness of aesthetic values and skills

• A sensitisation towards the form and medium of cinema.
• An awareness of the histories of cinema, media and other cultural objects/practices (i.e. dance, literature, art forms etcetera) as intertwined histories.
• Basics of photography, editing and filmmaking as part of elective courses.

2: Multi-cultural competence

• Relationship between cinema and culture, which prompts the competence to engage across forms, languages, cultures.
• Through various forms an entry into different languages, cultures through audio-visual medium-specific techniques such as subtitling, dubbing among others.

3: Research—related skills

• Assessment of all the courses, as well as the 8 credit dissertation produces a generative capacity for research in the students.
• This capacity includes training in identifying research questions, gathering and evaluating various kinds of primary sources and the use of varying methods to address the research question generated.

4: Critical thinking and analytical reasoning

• All the core courses within the film studies programme, including the foundational course of the school, common to all streams (critical cultural theories I, II, III) produce an awareness of and an appreciation for the construction of arguments, the modes of producing evidence, and critically evaluating differing perspectives, practices, and policies among others.

5: Disciplinary knowledge

• Demonstrate an awareness and understanding of key terms, movements, theories, and histories of Indian cinema and world cinema.
• Conversant in theories, histories and methods of cultural studies as they pertain to the study of film and and media.

6: Digital Literacy

• All the core courses of film studies rely upon the use of a wide variety of internet-based resources (audio-visual as well as written). In the teaching-learning transaction subsequently, students are expected to acquire the skills required to utilise these resources.
• Students are routinely encouraged to make presentations (using digital resources) as part of in-class assessment.

7: Communication Skills and self-expression

• There is an attention paid to communicative and expressive skills in film studies across two different media forms: (i) writing and (ii) the visual.
• The communicative and expressive skills (writing) appear in the assessment criteria of all courses as well through academic writing workshops that are held through the course of the programme.
• Skills in communication and expression through the visual mode of photography and film are taught in the two elective courses on filmmaking practice.
• Oral communicative and expressive skills emerge through course assessments based on individual or team presentations.

works