Module description
Avant-garde cinema also goes by other names: underground cinema, experimental cinema, and artists’ moving image. It describes, in short, films made by artists. This module examines a wide variety of films made by American and European artists from the 1920s to the 2010s. Like a number of early-twentieth-century painters, artists making abstract films in the 1920s, regarded their films to be closer to music than to narrative cinema. Well into the twentieth-century, avant-garde filmmakers continued to draw on new developments in other areas of art practice for their own practice. Not all avant-garde films are short films, but many are. They have often been abstract, or non-narrative, or have been organized in ways that require us to completely rethink our understanding of narrative. Over one hundred years of filmmaking, avant-garde cinema has also developed its own types or modes of filmmaking. In this module students will engage with a diverse range of avant-garde films by engaging closely with their formal strategies and techniques. Topics include (but are not limited to): abstract film and music, Dada and surrealist film, city films, psychedelic films, the London Filmmakers’ Cooperative, women’s filmmaking, black/queer histories, found footage remakes, and experimental ethnography.
Assessment details
- 1000 Word Exercise (30%)
- 2500 Word Essay (70%)
Educational aims & objectives
Teaching pattern
Ten lectures, ten three-hour screenings and ten one-hour seminars.