Master Class EXPERIMENTAL & PERSONAL FILMMAKING by Rouzbeh Rashidi
‘Experimental & Personal Filmmaking’ is a 5-day intensive immersive on-site program at BERLIN ART INSTITUTE from March 13 – 17, 2023 that exposes you to alternative film and video history, artist practice, and methods. In addition, it provides you with the knowledge to begin making your own experimental media.
Through viewings, lectures, discussion and reading, students will survey how filmmakers and artists working in film, video, and digital media have experimented with the moving image to push the boundaries of the medium and their perception of the world around them. The course will consider how essential films and filmmakers explored the material and conceptual possibilities of film and video to reshape our notion of what film can be. In addition to looking closely at the images in these works, students will also listen closely to how sound design has played a role in the impact of these creations. Analysis of these pieces, concerning form, content, and context will help students understand how experimental filmmaking has produced lyrical, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically radical work and will also provide a stimulating foundation for creating their own experimental work.
This course concentrates and nurtures the new importance and relevance of the personal experimental moving image in the pandemic/post-pandemic moment – the moving image as a personalized ‘memory’ and ‘perception’, subject to ongoing reordering and updating. (Text & photos by courtesy of Rouzbeh Rashidi)
Learning Outcomes
Taking as a central reference Rouzbeh Rashidi’s decade-long Homo Sapiens Project and the way that this initially idiosyncratic endeavour has acquired a much wider resonance and relevance due to the pandemic, a number of practical and theoretical outcomes will emerge from this course. Research into specific filmmaking practices and techniques will result in mentored individual and collective moving image works.
Artist’s Choice
For over two decades, Rouzbeh Rashidi has been developing a radical experimental moving image practice that explores personal vision, mutating the spaces and people that he encounters in his daily life into a phantasmal exploration of the transmuting capacity of cinema. These images become personalised ‘memories’ that curate the self and reality. The most consistent elaboration of this process has been the Homo Sapiens Project (HSP) which has been developing for over ten years. This very unusual ‘film diary’ that commenced as a ‘laboratory’ of cinematic forms has proven prophetically tied to concerns that have become prominent with the pandemic: the increased existential stakes of the personally-generated moving image; the crucial role it plays in navigating isolation and reimagining space, memory and time; and, simply, how to pursue an effective filmmaking practice when the traditionally collective act of making a film with others is no longer possible. Throughout the pandemic, the moving image – film but also social media and online communication – has become nothing short of an essential tool for personal survival. Nevertheless, Rashidi and HSP have always treated filmmaking as such, and exploring and imparting this attitude will be at the centre of this course
General Guidelines
This course is for artists from all disciplines, filmmakers and creative individuals, and anyone else hoping to either achieve a new understanding and practical approach, or build upon existing skills in the area of experimental cinema and artists’ moving image practices. All levels of experience are welcomed and encouraged. Sessions will not include instruction on how to operate a camera or editing skills but will instead rely on the intuition of each participant and how they would employ their means of production. All students will need access to a device to shoot video, for example, a smartphone or similar device. In addition, all students will be required to use basic video editing software programs; e.g. a smartphone editing app or suchlike on MAC or PC. Participants who are comfortable working with more professional cameras and editing software and have access to more sophisticated equipment are also welcome to use them, based on their needs.
Benefits, Methods and Topics of Teaching
- Participants will develop their ability and methodological skills in expressing themselves through sensory and audio-visual artistic approaches.
- Monitoring the students on a technical level in terms of capturing-device equipment, optics, editing techniques, and lighting techniques. – Reference materials (films, essays, books, web links) will be provided. Students will also have the opportunity to share their thoughts and concerns as creators collectively and open up discussions about their projects.
- Participants will become knowledgeable with many critical dialogues relating to the production and distribution of contemporary experimental cinema. They will also have the opportunity to incorporate these ideas into their own work through practical tasks, thereby developing their artistic practice.
- The course will also provide opportunities for exclusive access to materials from a series of internationally-celebrated film artists currently working under the banner of the Experimental Film Society: experimentalfilmsociety.com
- Most importantly, each student will make and take with themselves a short film as an artistic souvenir of this course, which will prove very useful in their future creative audio-visual practice.
Program
Rouzbeh Rashidi constituted these performative lectures and screenings/discussions over approximately seven years between 2015 and 2022. As will become apparent in teaching them, a spirit of exploration is at the heart of Rashidi’s filmmaking process. It is from an ongoing process of inextricably-linked thinking and creation that its core ideas of cinema organically emerge. Therefore, these performative lectures should be taken as a snapshot of a work in progress that is constantly gathering energy and momentum rather than a conclusive statement.
As he puts it, “I started making films in the year 2000. From the very first day, I thought of only one concept, which was the discovery of what cinema is in this new millennium. This question has continuously pushed me to experiment and investigate my filmmaking laboratory. I am not a teacher by definition; I am only a filmmaker and nothing else. But I teach my ideas and ways of making films to contextualise and support my own work and that of others. In addition, I find it very constructive to create literature and teaching methods about what I do.”
Monday, March 13, 2023
9:30 AM Reception at the BAI
Concepts of Cinema and Cinema Thoughts (performative lecture)
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
The Experimental Film Society Statement (performative lecture)
Wednesday, March 15, 20231, 2022
Screening, Discussion and Talk around the Films of Rouzbeh Rashidi
Thursday, March 16, 2023
Shooting, Sound Recording and Editing ‘Exquisite Corpse Collaborative Film’
This is a collaborative film inspired by a poetry game, the roots of which can be traced to the Surrealist/Dadaist Movement. Since 2020, Rouzbeh Rashidi and his students have made one collaborative film in his workshops and courses, culminating at the end of the classes. He designed a particular set of rules, methodologies, and mannerisms by which the film must be made. Participants will contribute a section to the final film, which will be screened and discussed at the end of the course.
Friday, March 17, 2023
Editing and Screening of ‘Exquisite Corpse Collaborative Film’
Hours: Each day from 10 AM – 4 PM (including several breaks & lunchtime)
Seats: Min: 6 | Max: 20 | Language: English
Fees: There is a one-off registration fee of €50. The participation fee is €850 per person (without accommodation).
The fee is VAT-exempt by the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery Higher Education and Research pursuant to Paragraph 4 No. (21) (a)(bb) UStG (German Value Added Tax Act).
Rouzbeh Rashidi (born in Tehran, 1980) is an Iranian-Irish filmmaker. He has been making films since 2000, at which time he founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran. Rashidi has always worked entirely away from mainstream conceptions of filmmaking, striving to escape conventional storytelling stereotypes. Instead, he roots his cinematic style in a poetic interaction of image and sound. He generally eschews scriptwriting, seeing the process of making moving images as exploration rather than illustration. His work is deeply engaged with film history, and primarily concerned with mysticism, philosophy, esotericism, cosmology, phenomenology, and hauntology. The films are wildly experimental and often surrealist, magical realist, and mysterious, and have been associated with the Remodernist movement. They are unified by his oneiric imagination, idiosyncratic working methods, and the dreamlike experience of watching them.
More information on Rouzbeh Rashidi on:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter