Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0288 - Writing for Film

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 across cultures and languages 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 Shirin Neshat, Pedro Costa, Anri Sala, Isaac Julien, Mona Hatoum, Abderrahmane Sissako, Yamina Benguigui, John Akomfrah, Johanna Vaude and Jean-Pierre Gorin. 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. Students may work in 16mm, Super 8 film, digital media or across multiple formats.

Multiple Cultural Perspectives Independent Work Field Trip Fee: $50 Lab Fee: $65 Students are expected to spend approximately 8 hours per week on work and preparation outside of class time.