Enroll now as seats are limited:
Min. seats: 5 | Max. seats: 30 | Language: English
- 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.
Online Course EXPERIMENTAL & PERSONAL FILMMAKING by Rouzbeh Rashidi
“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.
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 with 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. Over the pandemic, through the film but also through social media and online communication, the moving image 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.
Your BAI Online Course Instructor
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.
Save the dates in your calendar
The live sessions for this course will be given on Tuesday September 12, 19, 26 and October 03, 2023, each day from 4 – 6 pm (Berlin time). You will also receive an email reminder for each video conference before it takes place.
Recording of Live Sessions
We record the live sessions so that they remain available for a logged in course participant until one week after the last session. Please check before booking a course the technical requirements as listed below.
Access to content
You will get access to the course content and lessons in our learning management system once you are enrolled.
Technical requirements
We will use the Zoom Meeting application for the live sessions. You need a stable internet connection. There are two ways to access the live meeting:
1. Via the Zoom app
Before joining a Zoom meeting on a computer or mobile device, you can download the Zoom app here: https://zoom.us/download
or on: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/zoom-cloud-meetings/id546505307
Otherwise, you will be prompted to download and install Zoom when you click our join the zoom meeting link.
2. Via Google Chrome Browser on https://zoom.us/join
If you are using Google Chrome to join a meeting, you will see a dialog box to launch the Zoom application.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362593-Launching-Zoom-from-a-web-browser
Here you find more info: https://youtu.be/hIkCmbvAHQQ
We will provide the Zoom Meeting ID before each meeting. BAI will record the live sessions.
For Windows, macOS, and Linux:
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-requirements-for-Windows-macOS-and-Linux
In addition to the Online Program, the Berlin Art Institute offers an international Studio Program, a Residency Program, Portfolio Courses, a Spring Academy, an Arts Incubator, a Friends Program, and the presentation and exhibition display 404 | BAI.
If you have any questions, please contact us at ecourses@berlinartinstitute.com
