Tuesday + Thursday/ 6:00-9:00pm/ Room 125 Communications

Professor: Irene Gustafson
[831] 459 1498 / Comm 125
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Office Hours: Thursday 12pm-1pm and by appointment

This is an example of a new course in Film and Digital Media that will serve to introduce graduate students (and advanced undergraduate) to critical methodologies in media studies. The methodological focus of this particular offering will be on “essayistic” approaches to scholarship and production, with an emphasis on the relation between experimentation, theory and praxis.

In the broadest sense, the essay film is a hybrid form that fuses older established traditions with newer ones and derives much of its critical and creative energies from the collision of traditionally separated spheres: text and image, documentary and fiction, reason and desire, private and public, discipline and dispersal. Our investigations will particularly focus on the necessary intersections of creative practice and intellectual inquiry that essayistic media production-- “thinking in images”- requires

The first part of this seminar will examine the different possibilities and debates that have described this particular form of production from its sixteenth-century literary beginnings in the works of de Montaigne through to twentieth-century theories and practices of “the essay." The majority of the course, however, will concentrate on the reincarnation of this literary form as the “essay film,” and in this context we will investigate the work of numerous 20th century film/video essayists such as: Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Gregg Bordowitz, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Harun Farocki, Agnes Varda and others with an eye towards the forward trajectory of these traditions.
Students will produce a series of short critical written essays and a media object, based on individual research interests.

Our class time will typically include:
• One weekly screenings, seminar discussion, and on occasion lectures
• Students will be responsible for (1) in-class presentation

1.

SLEUTHING/ EXAMINING MATERIAL EVIDENCE

......T March 31

Introductions, in-class reading/performance of Montaigne essays,

“It is folly to measure the true and false by your own capacity” (1572) Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Works

Screening: Agnes Varda, The Gleaners and I (82 min., 2000) DVD1755

2.

......T April 7

Reading:
• Montaigne, Michel, “of experience” (1587) Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Works
• Ullrich Langer, “Introduction,” from The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, ed. Ullrich Langer (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
• Ian MacLean, ”Montaigne and the Truth of the Schools” from The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, ed. Ullrich Langer (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
• Holdheim, Wolfgang, “Introduction: The Essay as Knowledge in Progress” The Hermeneutic Mode: Essays in Time in Literature and Literary Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1984)
• s.d. chrostowska, “vis - a-vis the glaneuse” ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities, 12:2, August, 119-133

Screening: Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (31 min., 1955) DVD1669
Outside Screening: Adele Horne, The Tailenders (72 min., 2006) DVD6406

3.

......T April 14
Reading:
• T.W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” New German Critique, No. 32. (Spring-Summer, 1984)
• Astruc, Alexandre, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” The New Wave: Critical Landmarks Ed. Peter Graham, 1968
• Mitchell, W.J.T. “What Happened to the Essay?” from the Chicago Tribune on-line site
• Rascaroli, Laura, “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” Frameworks, Vol. 49, No.2 (Fall 2008)

Screening: Harun Farocki, How to Live in the German Federal Republic (83 min., 1990) VT9379
Outside Screening: Vanalyne Green, A Spy in the House that Ruth Built (30 min., 1989) DVD3953
Chip Lord, Awakening from the 20th century (35 min., 1999) VT6686

4.

THE ART OF STRAYING

VISITOR: CHIP LORD

......T April 21

Assignment #1 DUE

Reading:
• Sedgewick, Eve, “White Glasses” Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993)
• Paul Arthur, “Essay Questions” Film Comment 39:1 (Jan/Feb 2003)
• Philip Lopate, ”In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film” in Beyond Document ed. Charles Warren (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996)

Screening: Jem Cohen, Lost Book Found (37 min., 1996) DVD3954
Outside Screening: Alexander Kluge, Germany in Autumn (126 min., 1978) VT3516

5.

......T April 28
Reading:

• student papers: connelly, foster, moran, waldhorn
• Atkins, G, “The Return of/to the Essay” ADE Bulletin 096 (Fall 1990)
• Alter, Nora. “Translating the Essay into Film and Installation,” journal of visual culture 2007 vol 6(1)
• Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The Totalizing Quest for Meaning” Theorizing Documentary, ed. by Michael Renov [New York: Routledge, 1993]

Screening: Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage: from the firelight to the screen (40 min., 1982) DVD6656
Outside Screening: Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied (55 min., 1989) DVD 4826

6.

LETTERS

......T May 5
Assignment #2 DUE

Reading:
•hooks, bell, “Paulo Freiere” , from Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (NY: Routledge, 1994)
• Timothy Corrigan, “’The Forgotten Image Between Two Shots’: Photos, Photograms, and the Essayistic” from Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Duke University Press, 2008)
• Della Pollock, "Performative Writing," from The Ends of Performance, ed. by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (NY: New York University Press, 1998)

Screening: Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (100 min. 1982) DVD5252
Outside Screening: Isaac Julien, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (50 min., 1995) VT4988

7.

......T May 12

Reading:

student papers #2: connelly, foster, moran, waldhorn
• Benjamin, Walter, “Conversations with Brecht” Reflections
• Citron, Michelle, “That’s Wrong with This Picture?” Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions
• student presentation --- audio/visual work (15 minute presentation)

Screening: Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance (15 min., 1988) VT9883
Outside Screening: Michelle Citron, Daughter-Rite (53 min., 1979) VT 3183

8.

LISTS

......T May 19

Reading:
• Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle
• Sontag, Susan, “Project for a Trip to China” A Susan Sontag Reader
• student presentation --- audio/visual work (15 minute presentation)

Screening: Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (90 min., 1973) VT3428
Outside Screening: Jackie Goss, How To Fix The World (27 min., 2005) DVD7012

9.

HYBRIDS

......T May 26

Reading:
• Hayward, Eve, “More Lessons from a Starfish” Women’s Studies Quarterly Vol. 36, No. 3-4 (2008)
• Bordowitz, Gregg, “Operative Assumptions” Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices

Screening: Gregg Bordowitz, Fast Trip, Long Drop (54 min., 1994) VT3567
Outside Screening: Kidlat Tahimik, Perfumed Nightmare (93 min., 1977)

10.

THE COLLECTOR

......T June 2

Assignment #3 DUE
• in class student presentation/viewing/reading

Screening: Caroline Martel, Phantom of the Operator (66 min., 2004) DVD2749

ASSIGNMENT #1: 5-6 pages [typed, 1” margins max., no larger than double-spaced]
DUE: Tuesday April 21st at the beginning of class.

Write a 5-6 page essay on some object of inquiry. The form of this assignment is very open but demonstrate, or enact, your understanding of the essayistic impulse or stance.

Key concepts to consider:
The essay's particular rendering of the subject/object distinction (as a non-distinction)
The essay's particular mode of authority (where does authority lie- in experience, in science, in poetry, in processes of cognition)
The essay’s stance of doubt