Cinema of Nonfiction

THE FLAMBOYANT CREATURES OF CINECRITURE

Description:

This is a class about film and writing. Not screenwriting, not criticism. It’s a class that invites you into the juxtaposed aesthetics of these two art forms so that you, The Writer, are morphed by the text of film and the film of text. The class will allow you the opportunity to bungee jump or somersault into the trampoline of text and to dive into the swimming pool of cinema, where two genres of ingestion will reframe your practice as litterateurs and cinephiles. Together, we will glean from the gravitational center of a word–cinecriture–that was willed into existence by Agnès Varda from the depths of the French New Wave.

Cinecriture announced the asymptotic desire for a specifically feminine film-writing: a cinema that was as masterful as a modernist novel, while carving a space within it for a feminine aesthetic (whatever that might be.) From cinecriture’s direct descendents such as Marguerite Duras or Chantal Ackerman, to distant cousins such as Forough Farrokhzad or Shrin Neshat, to scandalous illegitimate offspring–Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Leslie Thornton–this course will explore the wild exuberance that cinecriture has been, continues to be, and can be.

This to say that we will watch and read for the range of relations that exist, or can be willed into existence, between the written word, the cinematic image, the written image, and the cinematic word. What has to happen, on the page and on the screen, for such substitutions to be more than just a language-game? How can we write cinema and film words.

Readings are split between literary texts (fiction, poetry) and exciting currents in film theory. Generating ways for these two impulses, the literary and the theoretical, to mutually inflect each other will be one of our tacit aims along the way. In addition to our close readings and viewings, this course will also incorporate generative writing assignments and peer critique of each others’ work every week.

DETAILS

All assigned texts will be available as PDFs in a shared Google folder
All assigned screenings are either available on free/library-card-affiliated streaming services, or will be uploaded to a shared folder
Questions? Ask away right here
Sign-up: https://luma.com/6qb7fk2n

Chromatography of a Memory

Title: Chromatography of a Memory

Description: Choose a single, powerful memory. In this class, we will resist the impulse to narrate it as a story. Instead, we will pull it apart into its constituent layers/parts: the sensory data, the emotional residue, the false implants, the cultural context, and the absences. Each layer will be written as a separate, parallel text (e.g., a sensory data log, an emotional map, a list of lies, cultural context, etc). In the end, what we create won't be a memory of a memory, but a new vehicle (say an Alfa Romeo, Bentley, Cadillac Vistiq) for our neurons to drive our present tense forward.

CINEMA OF NONFICTION

This course is designed to excite a chronic and incurable exercise in literary arrangement through analytical and thoughtful discussions of diverse and nonfiction texts in tandem with cinema. We will use theoretical and empirical techniques and logic represented and mastered in films and books to manufacture literary works of highly innovative, comedic cadence. The course will provoke an undeniable attachment not only to the language and sound of images, but also to the cinema of language. You will critique manically, perceive politically, think radically, and document rigorously your knowledge of writing and cinema in a journal. The ultimate purpose of this course is to extinguish your rigid definition of what constitutes fiction and nonfiction writing, and to push you to create literary and cinematic pieces that you wouldn’t have produced without the full immersive discourse of sound, film, performance art, poetry, narrative splendors, and other visual singularities. I hope you will achieve this apotheosis in the arc of this semester, the apotheosis of writing and cinema: to convert text from light to darkness and from darkness back into light, aiming for 30 frames per second in your own narrative voice.

VI KHI NAO + DIANA ARTERIAN’S TO-READ/WATCH PILES

The Last Fisherman: Shal Ngo

On Poverty: Alison Stine

Werner Herzog's: advices

Inside Outside: Thierry Mandon

Performance: Caravaggio

ZioHair Salon: Long Wolfcut

Meg Alison: Mythology of Whiteness

Meshes of the Afternoon

Zhang Xin: China's Real Estate Mogul/

falling in love with risk

nồi cám lợn ý tưởng | chiếp esoterica