Students are actively encouraged to identify and pursue original and independent lines of research which will inform their own professional advancement in the field; and their understanding of complex and emergent areas in exhibition, film form and distribution, digital platforms and technologies, education, festivals, archives and curation.
Our approach to final project development enables each student to test and to refine their research ideas, and generates a deeper awareness of the process of idea development and research. Students learn how to pitch their ideas, often to invited industry professionals, and are encouraged to think critically about how to use feedback. Close individual supervision enables the programme directors to work with individual students and with groups to identify where embedded research within institutions or work with mentors benefits research.
Some of our students’ recent research projects include:
- Less Can Be More: why the visibility of the film curator plays a crucial role in the digital world today BLOG POST
- Understanding Cultural Intermediaries in Transnational Film Exhibition: a comparative study based on Chinese Visual Festival (2017 London) and China New Force (Paris)
- Curating Community: refining curatorial judgement through activist exhibition
- Invisible Women – How can curators address the issue of gendered gaps in the archive through exhibition and practice?
- Television Representation: A Case Study on SlayTV and British Audience Responses to LGBTQ+ and Ethnic Minority Characters
- Remnants and Traces of Trauma: Exhibiting Archive Film as Ephemeral Commemoration
- Short film: the definition and re-definition of a format
- The Exhibition of Film in non-metropolitan communities: Independent theatres and their viewers in Ontario’s Cottage Country. BLOG POST
- Addressing the Fantastic Audience in the Fantasy Festival or Event
- Emerging from Universities: Student Curators and Their Roles on Film Festivals
- An exploration into the contribution of Palestinian cinema (in production and exhibition) to the project of nation-building and community identity throughout occupied Palestine.
- Shaping the Future: How understanding the model of a fast-growing company, Indy Cinema Group, can help us consider key questions about the future of film exhibition
- Experimental film and exhibition spaces: how can the analysis of specific exhibition practices around experimental film help to inform an understanding of its relationship with its audiences?
- Exhibiting Chinese Cinema in the UK: applying an academic framing to a
- creative curatorial practice
- ‘There is no such thing as an Archon’: how dissecting Derrida’s Archive Fever through practical engagement with local holdings informed my archival practice
- On Root: Travelling Identities in Colombian Cinema
- Immersive Secrecy – an applied research study using the Secret Cinema project to inform my own creative curatorial practice
- Magic Lanterns, roaming illusions and ticking machines: pre- and early cinema apparatuses in Comrades (1986) and Hugo (2011).
- Remixing the Archive: an exploration into remix culture and moving image archives
- Tackling Trauma through Visceral Affects: a reflection on the definition of cinematic horror
- Panoramic Perception: an odyssey into the history of virtual reality technology
- Folk Gaze – a Chinese language film weekend: portfolio charting an applied curatorial project
- What is ‘feminist pornography’ and how can an examination of its exhibition and distribution inform our understanding of current debates around gender and sexuality.
- ‘Great Stories Have No Homeland’: a report on the growing availability of foreign drama TV in the United States
- Moving Audiences for ‘Moving Docs’ in Scotland
- What is the Hidden Door festival identity and how is it constructed?
- How to Become a Domestic Goddess: voice-over in the American post-war social guidance film
- Cinema and Learning for Life: How can the educators’ needs when using films in the classroom and the ambitions of different cinema education initiatives be used to create guidelines for teachers to apply across subjects in schools
- Encoding the Curatorial Signature: Curating the Witch
- The impact of place on my own curatorial practice: Limerick, the growing international, interdisciplinary filed of Screen Dance, its local and international audiences
- More Than Meets the Eye: portfolio analysing an accessible film-making event generated by the researcher and programmed as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
- “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. The death of cinema has been greatly exaggerated: the music documentary and collective spectatorship as a reaction to the individualisation of classic cinema and its audience.
- Chinese Cinema Outside China: the role(s) of film festivals in supporting Chinese films and filmmakers in the Western exhibition network
- How does film curatorship contribute to a reflective discourse about cinema: an applied research project about the cinematic exhibition of narrative film in a museum context
Study for a masters in Film, Exhibition & Curation at the University of Edinburgh 