This course will investigate contemporary films, audiovisual media works, and electronic media creations that explore and/or reflect such issues as ambient aesthetics, self-mediation, and new techniques of everyday life.
This course focuses on the shaping and crafting of a nonfiction video. Students are expected to write a treatment detailing their project. Production techniques focus on the handheld camera versus tripod, interviewing and microphone placement, and lighting for the interview. Postproduction covers editing techniques and distribution strategies. Students then screen final projects in a public space.
The aesthetic dimensions of "Black film" tend to be subordinated to historical, social and political lines of inquiry. And histories of "art film" tend not to include works by Black artists. This seminar foregrounds questions of form and style in film and video works by a wide range Black artists in order to develop new ways of understanding the complex, mutually constitutive relations between Blackness and the moving image.We will pursue two general categories of work. One includes experimental practices by Black film and video makers. We begin in the era of segregated "race film" production of the 1910s-40s, considering moments of stylistic experimentation in the narrative films of Oscar Micheaux, Richard Maurice and Spencer Williams. We then discuss later film and videomakers who work more consistently and explicitly in experimental modes, including Barbara McCullough, Ben Caldwell, Ulysses Jenkins, Kevin Jerome Everson, Arthur Jafa, Christopher Harris, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Lauren Kelly and Robert Banks, Terence Nance, Khalil Joseph and Cauleen Smith. The second category includes film and video works by Black visual and performance artists who exhibit in gallery and museum contexts, such as John Akomfrah, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Kalup Linzy, and Wangechi Mutu. Along the way, we will discuss intersections with vanguard practices in related art forms (jazz, literature, theater), curatorial efforts (Black Radical Imagination program), and movements between the art world and the film industry (Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen).
The ancient and multivalent image of the underground has crystallized over the last two centuries to denote sites of dissaffection from - and strategies of resistance to - dominant social, political, and cultural systems. We will trace the development of this metaphor from the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s and the French Resistance during World War II to the Weather Underground in the 1960s-1970s, while also considering it as a literary and artistic concept, from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Ellison's Invisible Man to Chris Marker's film La Jetée and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.Alongside with such literary and cinematic talkes, drawing theoretical guidance from refuseniks from Henry David Thoreau to Gu Debord, this course investigates how countercultral spaces become - or fail to become - sites of political resistance, and also how dissenting ideologies give rise to countercultrual spaces. We ask about the relation between social deviance (the failure to meet social norms, whether willingly or unwittingly) and politcal resistance, especially in the conditions of late capitalism and neo-colonialism, when countercultural literature, film, and music (rock, punk, hip-hop, DIY aesthetics, etc.) get absorbed into - and coopted by - the hegemonic socio-economic system. In closing, we will also consider contemporary forms of dissidence - from Pussy Riot to Black Lives Matter - that rely both on the vulnerability of individual bodies and global communication networks.
Interpreting what we mean by animation broadly, this course will investigate computational moving-image making through the lens of experimental animation. We will take as our point of departure the films of Rettinger, Ruttmann, Fischinger, McLaren, and Breer, but will also draw upon artifacts and 'animated lines' taken from further afield: found footage / artifact films of Jacobs, dance drawings of Brown, kinetic sculptures of Bit International, early plotter art, avant-garde music notation, and contemporary techniques of motion and performance capture. This course will develop theoretical lines of inquiry that run in two directions: an excavation of a "pre-history" of contemporary new media graphic techniques and a reinterpretation / re-invigoration of our understanding of early animation. Film production, hand-animation or computer programming experience are welcome (but none are perquisites for the course). Students will be expected to complete regular short "sketches" of techniques towards a final short animated film.
Since the 1970s, movies have become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. This course explores a range of issues related to the digitization of cinema’s production, distribution, and exhibition, including the cultural contexts and aesthetic practices surrounding these technological shifts as well as their experiential and political dimensions. In particular, we will explore such topics as digital cinematography’s relation to cinematic realism, emerging trends in editing practices, the political implications of digital special effects, and the ways that other digital media influence cinematic techniques. Texts discussed include works by Lev Manovich, Stephen Prince, Kristen Whissel, Hito Steyerl, Steven Shaviro, and Vivian Sobchack. Screenings include works by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Agnes Varda, Bong Joon-Ho, Michael Bay, Brad Bird, and Leos Carax.
Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of virtual reality, this class will explore and interrogate each stage of production for VR. By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical experiences, students will design, construct and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new strategies and interactive logics for placing images into virtual spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging VR “canon” that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative “VR cinema.” Film production and computer programming experience is welcome but not a prerequisite for the course. Students will be expected to complete short “sketches” of approaches in VR towards a final short VR experience.
In the 1940's the American avant garde cinema gained a new identity with the work of filmmakers like Maya Deren, and Kenneth Anger. Working primarily in 16mm, exhibiting mainly in non-commercial theaters, pursuing new models of sexuality, perception and political action, a generation of filmmakers formulated an alternative cinema culture and a new visionary aesthetic. This tradition gained further definition in the following, with journals, new critical discourses and a network of exhibition. Film modes moved through the mythic and dream-like cinema of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, the underground cinema of Ken Jacobs, Andy Warhol and Jack Smith, and the structural films of Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow and Ernie Gehr. The course will trace these develops and examine its legacy.
This course is intended to develop skills in documentary production so that students may apply for Documentary Production II. Documentary Production I focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of various styles of documentary will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the documentary genre, such as the ethics and politics of representation and the shifting lines between fact and fiction will be explored. Pre-production methodologies, production, and post-production techniques will be taught. Students will be expected to develop an idea for a documentary video, crews will be formed, and each crew will produce a five-minute documentary. Students will also be expected to purchase an external hard drive.
On the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 our course couples the study of revolutionary films (and films about revolution) with seminal readings on revolutionary ideology and on the theory of film and video. The goal will be to articulate the mechanics of revolution and its representation in time-based media. Students will produce a video or videos adapting the rich archive of revolutionary film for today's situation. The films screened will be drawn primarily from Soviet and US cinema, from the 1920s to the present day, proceeding more or less chronologically. We begin with newsreels and a "poetic documentary" by Dziga Vertov; they will be paired with classic readings from revolutionary theory, from Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to Fidel Castro and Bill Ayres, and from film theory, including Vertov, Andre Bazin and Jean-Luc Godard. Readings will acquaint students with contemporary assessments of the emancipatory potential of film.
