“The four-Week ‘Experimental & Personal Filmmaking’ is an immersive program 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 film and video’s material and conceptual possibilities 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 frequently played a role in the impact of these creations. Analyzing these pieces concerning form, content, and context will help students understand how experimental filmmaking has produced lyrical, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically radical work and provide a stimulating foundation for creating their experimental work.

This course particularly concentrates and nurtures the new importance and relevance of personal experimental moving image in the pandemic/post-pandemic moment—moving image as a personalized ‘memory’ and ‘perception’ subject to ongoing reordering and updating. ” (Text & photo 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 much wider resonance and relevance with 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. 

BENEFITS, METHODS AND TOPICS OF TEACHING

• Participants will develop their ability and methodical skills in expressing themselves in a sensory and audiovisual means of 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 in their own work through practical tasks, leading to development in their artistic practice. 
• The course will also provide opportunities to exclusive access to materials to 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 be proven very useful in their future creative audiovisual practice.

Min. seats: 5 | Max. seats: 30 | Language: English