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Introductory course in experimental film

By: Jeremy Moss

An ongoing course I teach at Franklin & Marshall College. Different films or new selections each time.

 

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landscapesuicide

20Jan13

In what sense is Alice Wu's "Saving Face" an avant-garde film?

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    Jeremy Moss

    20Jan13

    Haha. In no sense at all. Must have been a mistake, its inclusion in the list ...

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Jeremy Moss

1Oct10

Great points. We spoke in my class a bit actually about Hammid and his photographic stamp/influence on Meshes and Deren's future work. P. Adam Sitney definitely rock starred Deren and Brakhage - persona running along form. And the fact that they prolifically wrote a lot about themselves, their work, and theories (thus causing others to write about them) helped get us to where we are today. I sympathize with your beef. Truly. Another problem is the availability of the avant-garde cinema course in US schools. It's most often a survey course that gets taught once a year at best. Meanwhile, "film history" courses get a series of semesters/quarters and do nothing (or barely highlight) to show avant-garde works (or documentary), equating the history of film with the history of mostly mainstream narrative cinema ... it's truly truly bull shit.

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Kenji

1Oct10

Well i think it's great you're covering European cinema, and with an excellent selection (to drop that would be a great loss), but you've hit a bug bear of mine, the imbalance favouring the US and Brakhage in particular. I'm no expert at all on avant-garde films, far from it, but i do think directors like Vertov, Ivens, Hammid, Epstein and Fischinger deserve more promotion too. On a forum thread on a Joris Ivens film i was saying i thought he wasn't getting a fair look in on courses compared with Brakhage, which was disputed. It's also common practice for Hammid to be sidelined, completely overshadowed by Deren; i think he and his earlier film Aimless Walk are very important to Meshes of the Afternoon at least.

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Jeremy Moss

1Oct10

I see what you are saying and agree. There is def something off giving Brakhage two weeks and early European cinema just one. I wish I would have called the course US Avant-Garde Cinema - that is the narrative and trajectory of the course. I think it's also an issue of availability and the very nature of a survey course, i.e. getting to the 21st century in 14 weeks, while most available films happen to be post-WWII.

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