Abstract for: More than art imitates life – An interdisciplinary systems thinking approach to bridge the causality gap in Film Studies

Film Studies as a discipline has always had strong connections with History and Sociology. Films are seen as containers of the sociological ideologies that surround their production and encoded in their narratives. The causal relationship between film and its impact on history is less apparent, and often explained away by reader response theories, where multiple interpretations of the film by the audience make the impact of the film challenging to evidence. This paper makes an arguably unprecedented bridging of Film Studies, Sociology and History, through the approach of systems thinking. It does this through the result of work of students on a course designed to give them the skills to evidence this causal relationship between film and life. The course is taught at Residential College 4, at the National University of Singapore where students are put in multidisciplinary classrooms and learn from a curriculum where systems thinking is a focus.