WA - MA Seminars (2022-24)

15-SM-1MA-ZU

15-SM-14

The first year of a two-year MA seminar. Its title is "The intercultural dimension in teaching English as a foreign language".

[15-SM-14]

Produced outside the major commercial studios due to their lower budgets and non-commercial motivations and values, experimental film and video are recognized as a distinctive mode of filmmaking and art practice. The post-war American experimental film deliberately opposed some Hollywood and independent feature productions and challenged dominant ideologies, continuously breaking the taboos and censorship of the mainstream (film) culture. Known for their inherently short, artisan and non-narrative format, experimental films and videos provide an alternative and unconventional viewing experience through their creative use of mise-en-scène, editing and montage, addressing issues such as landscape and movement, time and space, the body and the senses, race, gender and identity or the mechanics and materiality of the film medium.
In this seminar, we will discuss both critically acclaimed and some lesser known or rarely screened experimental films produced in traditional, digital and new (hybrid) media formats. Along the way, we will examine the key trends and movements in the history and present-day of experimental filmmaking, ranging from early psychodramas (Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson) or city (Hilary Harris, Godfrey Reggio), diary (Jonas Mekas, Lynne Sachs), structural (Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr) and underground beat films (Ron Rice, Jack Smith) to feminist (Gunvor Nelson, Joyce Wieland) and found footage films (Craig Baldwin, Bill Morrison), queer (Barbara Hammer, George & Mike Kuchar), slow (Peter Hutton, Sharon Lockhart) and ecocinema (James Benning, Fern Silva) or (multichannel) film installations.