UvA online Open House

This year, you won’t be able to attend any busy on-campus events with lots of people. But our online Open House is the perfect way to get to know UvA study programmes and university life from the comfort of your own home.

Every study programme has an Open House page with videos, FAQs and live events. On the main Open House website you can discover all our programmes,explore the city and campus, and get inspired during our theme weeks.

Time-based media

Moving images and sound are part of our most cherished cultural heritage. They capture time and place, and shape memory and history. They are also fleeting: they unfold in time, and are affected by time. Environmental factors, material decomposition, but increasingly also technological obsolescence threaten their long-term accessibility. In the dual Master's programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image, we consider how we can deal with such threats.

Aside from focusing on the question of how to preserve audio-visual materials for future generations, the programme is also concerned with how we present both historical and contemporary moving images as sources of information, works of art, media (historical) phenomena, or as objects of entertainment, to broad audiences and to more specialist ones.

Why study Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image in Amsterdam?

• The Netherlands, and the city of Amsterdam in particular, is an ideal base for the study of audio-visual preservation and presentation as key to the work of media archives, film and contemporary art museums, festivals, distribution agencies, broadcasting companies and film studios, for which Amsterdam is a hub.
• The Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image programme is unique in Europe due to its combination of the in-depth study of critical issues and practice-based learning, its international orientation, and its broad outlook.
• You will have the chance to study different types of moving images and sound, focusing alternately on cinema, broadcasting and media art (all in their analogue and digital manifestations) and in relation to each other.
• The programme collaborates with a range of national and regional institutions, such as Eye Filmmuseum (the Netherlands’ centre for film culture), the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (the national broadcast and media archive), LIMA (Dutch platform for media art) and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). Importantly, these organisations host site visits and supervise interns, and they also contribute to the programme’s courses and the development of an up-to-date curriculum.
• From the academic year of 2020-21 onwards, the programme will collaborate closely with the programme in Archival and Information Studies (also part of the dual Master’s in Media Studies cluster), meaning that you will have access to the shared expertise of both programmes while also enjoying track-specific, small-scale, specialist teaching.
• By following this collaborative programme, you will be prepared for a professional career in a number of related areas such as, for instance, recordkeeping, collection management, preservation, or presentation. You will become familiar with the present-day reality of different types of archival institutions, which are increasingly concerned with comparable issues of access, use and sustainability.

Student profile

As a student in the Master’s programme in Presentation and Preservation of the Moving Image you are expected to have the following knowledge, insight and skills:

• You are interested in the ways in which individuals, institutions and communities engage with their (media) historical past, present and future through practices of collecting, preserving, curating and programming.
• You are able to conduct a research project independently, formulate clear and functional research questions, collect relevant primary and secondary sources, and analyse them from a well-defined perspective. You have previously written at least a BA thesis, or conducted a capstone project with a considerable written component.
• You know how to construct a coherent argument, building on prior research in the field, and credit your sources in (academically) agreed-upon ways. 

Degree certificate

Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image is an accredited degree programme of the dual Master’s in Media Studies. Upon successful completion of the programme, graduates receive a legally accredited Master’s degree in Media Studies, and the title of Master of Arts (MA).