Session 1: Introduction: The Active Spectator
Screenings:
1) “Friends,” Season 1, episode 15: “The One With the Stoned Guy” (Alan Myerson, 1995)
2) Homophobic Friends: The One With All the Gay Jokes (Tijana Mamula, 2011)
3) Apocalypse Pooh (Todd Graham, 1987)
Readings:
1) Clay Shirky, “Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus,” in Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Penguin, 2010), pp. 1-31.
2) Lev Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?”, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009)
3) Kjerstin Johnson, “I’ll Be There For You (But Not in a Gay Way): Homophobic Friends,” Bitch Media, July 14, 2011. (+ user comments)
4) Scott Mackenzie, “The Horror, Piglet, The Horror: Found Footage, Mash-Ups, AMVs, the Avant-Garde, and the Strange Case of Apocalypse Pooh,” Cineaction 27 (2007).
Session 2: Avant-Garde Precedents: From Dziga Vertov to Peter Tscherkassky
Screenings:
1) Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), excerpts.
2) East of Borneo (George Melford, 1931), excerpts.
3) Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936)
4) Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, 1998)
5) Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)
Readings:
1) Michael Pigott, “Rose Hobart,” in Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 15-24.
2) Scott MacDonald, “Sp… Sp… Spaces of Inscription: An Interview with Martin Arnold,” Film Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1995): pp. 2-11.
3) Erika Balsom, “A Cinephilic Avant-Garde: The Films of Peter Tscherkassky, Martin Arnold and Gustav Deutch,” in New Austrian Film, eds. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver Speck (Berghahn, 2011), pp. 263-277.
4) Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (MIT, 2001), excerpts.
5) Brigid Maher, “Smart Montage: The New Mobile Dialectic,” iDMAa, March 4, 2013.
Session 3: Transformative Media: (Political) Remix Video
Screenings:
1) Everything is a Remix, Part 2 (Kirby Ferguson, 2011)
2) Ressemblances dans les films Disney (2008)
3) Selection of Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency videos
4) White Knights and Bad People (Arielle Bernstein, 2014)
5) Further selection of mash-ups, supercuts, and queer and feminist vids and remixes, TBD.
Readings:
1) Laurel Westrup and David Laderman, “Into the Remix: The Culture of Sampling,” in Sampling Media, eds. David Laderman and Laurel Westrup (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1-12.
2) Richard L. Edwards and Chuck Tryon, “Political Video Mash-ups as Allegories of Citizen Empowerment,” First Monday 14, no. 10 (2009).
3) Chuck Tryon, “Hollywood Remixed: Movie Trailer Mashups, Five-Second Movies, and Film Culture,” in Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Rutgers University Press, 2009), pp. 149-173.
4) Francesca Coppa, Rebecca Tushnet, Kristina Busse and Alexis Lothian, eds., “In Practice: Vidding,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 2 (2011): 123-146.
5) Elisa Kreisinger, “Queer Video Remix and LGBTQ Online Communities,” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9 (2012).
Session 4: Some Lessons from Contemporary Art
Screenings:
1) Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1979)
2) 24 Hour Psycho (Douglas Gordon, 1993), clips.
3) Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly, Quiet (Lenka Clayton, 2002)
4) The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2010), clips.
5) Versions (Oliver Laric, 2009-ongoing), clips.
Readings:
1) TJ Demos, Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Afterall Books, 2010), excerpts.
2) Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, trans. Jeanine Herman (Sternberg Press, 2005), excerpts.
3) Darian Leader, “Glue,” in The Clock (White Cube, 2010).
Session 5: Work in Progress
In-class presentation and discussion of video proposals.
Session 6: The Video Essay
Screenings:
1) Chaos Cinema (Matthias Stork, 2011)
2) The Spielberg Face (Kevin B. Lee, 2011)
3) Falling: The Architecture of Gravity (Jim Emerson, 2009)
4) Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 2012)
5) Touching the Film Object (Catherine Grant, 2012)
Readings:
1) Kevin B. Lee, “The essay film — some thoughts of discontent,” Sight & Sound, August 8, 2014.
2) Matthias Stork, “In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema,” Frames Journal
3) Christian Keathley, “La camera-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia,” in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, eds. Clayton, Alex and Andrew Klaven (Routledge, 2011), pp. 176-191.
4) “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video” (cmsimpact.org)
Session 7: Work in Progress
In-class work on video essays & discussion of progress
Session 8: The Essay Film: Histories of Cinema
Screening:
1) The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes, 2006), extracts
2) Histoire(s) du cinema (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-1998), extracts.
3) Workers Leaving the Factory (Harun Farocki, 1995)
Readings:
1) Matthew Flisfeder, “Introduction,” in The Symbolic, the Sublime and Slavoj Zizek’s Theory of Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1-14.
2) Timothy Corrigan, “‘On Thoughts Occasioned By…’ Montaigne to Marker,” in The Essay Film: From Montaigne to Marker (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 13-49.
3) Douglas Morrey, “Histoire(s) du cinema,” in Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 219-229.
4) Thomas Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 2004), pp. 11-42.
Session 9: Work in Progress
In-class work on video essays & individual tutorials
Session 10: Final Assignment Presentations
In-class presentation and discussion of practical assignment rough-cuts (or, ideally, NEARLY fine cuts).