Creative Non-Fiction Cinema—Representing The Real

The possibilities and contradictions of documentary practices are our starting point for an investigation of historic film and video works that use formally inventive strategies to represent, re-think, interrogate, or effect reality. Students will engage in video production processes, exploring issues such as power relations between maker, subject and viewer, the ability and limits of an image to act as evidence, flows between ethnographic practice and colonial ideologies, and the truth-telling possibilities of fictional invention. Students will screen, read, write, discuss, and complete conceptually focused production exercises using video, photography, text, and/or sound. No prior experience needed. Graduate-level research expected, parameters developed individually.