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The Film/Video Essay

Course: 
223
Instructor: 
Quarter: 
Spring
Academic Year: 
2008-09
Days: 
T
Times: 
6:00-9:00 PM
Location: 
Communications 121
Description: 
This is an example of a new course in Film and Digital Media that will serve to introduce graduate students (and advanced undergraduate) to critical methodologies in media studies. The methodological focus of this particular offering will be on “essayistic” approaches to scholarship and production, with an emphasis on the relation between experimentation, theory and praxis. In the broadest sense, the essay film is a hybrid form that fuses older established traditions with newer ones and derives much of its critical and creative energies from the collision of traditionally separated spheres: text and image, documentary and fiction, reason and desire, private and public, discipline and dispersal. Our investigations will particularly focus on the necessary intersections of creative practice and intellectual inquiry that essayistic media production-- “thinking in images”- requires The first part of this seminar will examine the different possibilities and debates that have described this particular form of production from its sixteenth-century literary beginnings in the works of de Montaigne through to twentieth-century theories and practices of “the essay." The majority of the course, however, will concentrate on the reincarnation of this literary form as the “essay film,” and in this context we will investigate the work of numerous 20th century film/video essayists such as: Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Gregg Bordowitz, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Harun Farocki, Agnes Varda and others with an eye towards the forward trajectory of these traditions. Students will produce a series of short critical written essays and a media object, based on individual research interests.