Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0292 - Writing for Film

Writing for Film: Text and Image in Transnational Cinema and Installation. This production/theory class will introduce students to scripts and texts by independent filmmakers and installation artists who are questioning what it means to work in a transnational context and to negotiate conflicts between notions of the local and the global, notions of national identity and the postnational. These filmmakers are working in hybrid combinations of essayistic, poetic, fictional and non-fictional forms. Many of them work in a context of multiple languages and seek to express the rupture of cultural displacement, and the ways in which it impacts questions of representation. We will study works by filmmakers and installation artists including Pedro Costa, Anri Sala, Mona Hatoum, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, John Akomfrah, and Ousmane Sembene. The course will include workshops in writing voice-over, dialogue and visual text for the screen as well as workshops in editing image to text. Students will write and shoot two short projects and one longer project in film or video. Instructor permission required.

Independent Work