Video Essays in Global Cinema

This hands-on workshop immerses students in the craft practice of academic video essaying through your own videographic analyses of major global films. The practicums will equip you with the basic skills required to begin your own video criticism. Video essays are a new and emergent field in film and media studies: The full range of digital technologies now enables film and media scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their objects of study: moving images and sounds (http://mediacommons.org/intransition/about). We will learn how to write videographically by using clips from movies as interpretive evidence for our analyses of the movies we watch.

Our goal is use films from around the world as lenses for studying history in its transnational and global contexts. Is there a universal film culture or does friction shape relations between global, transnational, and local film cultures? How do transnational film movements negotiate cultural domination? Together we will watch and analyze movies from Japan (Ozu), Palestine (Suleiman), France (Tati; Lamorisse), the United States (The Wachoskis) and Argentina (Martel) to see how filmmakers from the margins of global capitalism have used film technology to tell their own stories about how their people live their lives in contexts of local and global change.

Class time will rotate among three activities: 1) Feature Film Screening; 2) Seminar Discussions; and 3) Videographic Workshops. We will practice a variety of formal video editing and essaying exercises on the movies we watch: 1) a videographic pechakucha; 2) an unscripted voiceover; 3) a multiscreen composition; 4) a videographic epigraph; and 5) A video adaptation of a course article or reading. After we collectively experiment videographically, students will be encouraged to create their own video essays as final term projects.