Cinematic Migrations (Spring 2020)

Instructor

Renée Green

Units

u 3-3-6, g 3-3-3/3-3-6

Lab Fee

$ 75

Credit

hass-a

Schedule

TW 7pm-10pm

Location

e15-070

Cinematic migrations will be a multi-faceted look at the role of cinema’s transmutations over time and its worldwide and circuitous shift, which include the integrations of its form into online video and television, spatial installations, performance and dance, as well as its appearance in many formats and portable devices. The course explores how cinema has been transformed by a combination of operations, including the “production of subjectivity,” contextual and theoretical shifts, in addition to the many changing formats and forms of diffusion. Recurring questions will be: “What is generated?” “What is evocative?” and “How do we care?”

Desire for cinema perhaps existed before its creation. Questions regarding this speculation and the variety of ways this longing has been addressed in the past and present form the basis of inquiry in this workshop. Cinema can now be thought in the present as the umbrella term used for the variety of moving image and time-based forms that currently circulate and which have intersecting, yet specific histories of emergence.

Through immersive viewing the course will include explorations of the emergence of cinemas on local and national levels that have migrated through the world to varying effect. Included for exploration will be works that challenge and embrace cinematic genres. We will be screening and discussing films, works, and writings by filmmakers, artists, and film collectives including: Apichatpong Weerasethkul, Harun Farocki, John Akomfrah, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Alexander Kluge, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Renée Green, Karim Aïnouz, Lucretia Martel, Lars von Trier, Atom Egoyan, Jia Zhangke, Abderrahmane Sissako, and others.

This class is open to undergraduate and graduate students. Additional work is required at the graduate level, which includes a variable unit option. 

Students taking a production-based ACT class will be charged a $75 lab fee after the add date on a semester basis. The fee covers the cost of student production materials used as part of the class. SMACT graduate students are exempt from the lab fee.