FILM 1277 Cinema After The Camera

This course looks at the new ways filmmakers construct, find, and assemble images. We will examine desktop documentaries, screen-based films, social media footage and archival images, videogames, virtual worlds, and contemporary uses of AI in film. This is a practical course with the goal of understanding how ideas of authorship, spectatorship, and evidentiary truth evolve when anyone can record, manipulate, circulate, or generate an image. We begin by asking what these new forms can do that conventional filmmaking cannot: (1) how do artists create work with pre-existing images? (2) can a videogame function as a location for a story? (3) is a film still a film if not shot on a camera? (4) can a digital environment encapsulate a physical space? (5) how does the manufacturing of images affect our relationship to photographic evidence? Films and texts by Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Andr Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Radu Jude, Peter Watkins, Maya Deren, and Kevin B. Lee. Students will utilize phones, screen capture, found footage, digital environments, and other forms of contemporary image-making to produce a series of exercises, culminating in a final 3 to 5 minute film. The course encourages students to think beyond the traditional boundaries of film and to experiment with what cinema might become when the camera is no longer the only way to make an image. Equipment will be provided, and no experience is required.