This course is designed at one level to be a simple soup-to-nuts introduction to the techniques and technologies of video production, including the whole process from shooting to editing. However, at another level (and indeed I might well say that this is the more fundamental level), the class will be an extended exploration of a more finite number of aesthetic and theoretical issues in experimental media. Specifically, in this course we will explore the connections between experiments in different media, principally between experimental fiction and experimental film. We will be looking at the analogies between these different forms of experimentation, exploring the ways that these disparate experiments can inform each other, while equally considering the question of media-specificity and the ways that these formal experiments donıt or canıt translate. We will be reading, among others, fiction by Italo Calvino, Paul Auster, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Barth as well as a handful of theoretical texts including work by J.L. Austin and Fredric Jameson. Screenings will be designed to introduce students to the work of the pioneers of the experimental film tradition (Hans Richter, Man Ray, Stan Brakhage, &c.) as well as more contemporary film and video innovators (e.g., Craig Baldwin, Scott Stark, David Gatten).
The focus, as with all of my production classes, will be fairly narrowly on experimental work. You donıt have to know what that means in advance, but you do have to be ready to discard everything you know about film and to open yourself to the experimentation. (And donıt expect this course to be your chance to make that narrative script thatıs been sitting on your hard drive since you were an undergrad.)
