Forms of Film Practice
Mainstream narrative cinema and factual filmmaking have always benefitted from the innovations taking place at the margins of film practice. The formal, aesthetic and technical experiments conducted by artists and the avant-garde soon become appropriated by the commercial film industry. Risks taken in the documentary field lead to new attitudes towards objectivity, truth and the depiction of others. This module focuses on what unorthodox forms film practice can take across and beyond the traditional categories of fiction and non-fiction. The module aims to broaden the student’s skills-base by encouraging formal experimentation and an active critique of the ways in which the cinema and other televisual formats construct meanings and representations.
The module covers a range of practices, production procedures, technologies and techniques for concept development, and is structured to enhance creative thinking, collaboration, group dynamics and practical abilities. It is designed to ground the student in appropriate research and development methods along with practical and aesthetic skills to produce a short generative experimental film. Each week a screening or selection of short films will be followed by either seminar discussion (peer critique and involvement in evolving film productions) or practical workshops.
Over the course of the module students will consider and work with: the long take, the embodied camera, space/site, the physicality of performance on camera, sound and voice, text, anti or counter forms of narrative telling, sampling and image collage, and multi screen. Rather than the conventional pre-production research, development and planning phase, the module favours action research, in which process is privileged over product, with a series of weekly short-turnaround practical assignments acting as prompts for generating new material to factor into the final film submission. UG students are to work in small collaborative groups of 3-5. MA students are encouraged to work collaboratively in groups, although solo projects are permitted, by arrangement with the module leader.
As a guide, at the module outset students are asked to choose from two film project options, 1 and 2: either a portrait or description of a person, place or event, or a film that engages with process, concept and aesthetics, rather than with explicitly narrative content.
