Cultural Production: Filmic Process Working With 'Reality'

Aim

After completion of the course the student should be able to: - Present a project proposal at an advanced level, based on a project idea of the student’s own choosing. - Demonstrate continued development of and more advanced knowledge about documentary cinema from a historical-developmental view that includes films from the beginning of cinema through to recent examples, with a focus on the artistic production within this broad historical range. - Make use of the typologies of documentary modes of representation as laid out in contemporary film theory, and apply the knowledge to films seen and to films made. - Demonstrate and apply advanced knowledge of the production work-flow used in documentary film making from the perspective of a professional involved in a project. - Verify progress made through the development of a production logbook, used in conjunction with course evaluation and reflection to self-critically judge the strengths and weaknesses of a production’s process.

Content

The practical side of this course will include more advanced work on developing: film ideas from short pitches to developed treatments; shooting scripts and production plans; different interview techniques, camera and editing styles; and finally, a (limited) focus on funding and distribution, and what to do with a finished film. Students will be free to develop their own film idea, and will produce promotional materials, and target possible and relevant festivals and/or viewing/distribution channels. The film historical arc of this course will be broad, starting literally with the ‘first films’, proceeding through the development of the term ‘documentary’ itself, and continuing through subsequent developments in the field up to more recent times. Moving through different modes to genres like the compilation and essay film, the course will focus more and more toward what Michael Renov discusses in his book, The Subject of Documentary, as ‘the turn to the subject,’ or works that take into account a ‘history of subjectivities’ that much of documentary film and video has been invested in for the last twenty years or so. This will bring us up to contemporary periods that take up identity politics, and other cultural studies and critical theory oriented areas of production as subjects of documentary exploration.