From home-made family videos to reels, selfies, and memes, we seem to be producing an increasingly larger audiovisual archive of our lives. How can we engage with these materials critically? How can we work with them aesthetically and narratively, to tell the story (or a story) of our lives? And how the elaboration of an ‘intimate videography’ might enable us to address broader issues around identity, gender, ethnicity, and race—including collective histories of loss, displacement, and trauma as well as love, pleasure, and resilience? The aim of this course is twofold. On the one hand, we will engage with a number to texts and aesthetic objects to examine the autobiographical as a concept, a form, and a genre. Specifically, we will ask: how have artists and filmmakers used the autobiographical—particularly through the audiovisual medium—to problematize notions of selfhood, authorship, and authenticity? And how do the visual and affective dynamics of the digital and the internet—commonly described in terms of narcissism—have further enabled and complicated the autobiographical form? Moreover, what does a feminist, queer, or decolonial autobiography in the digital space look like? To address these and other questions, our studies will include works by McKenzie Wark, Ann Hirsch, Amalia Ulman, Narcissister, molly soda, and others. 
 
The second component of this course will consist in the creation of an ‘intimate videography’—a 2–5-minute short film that can take the form of a video essay, a videographic autobiography, or another experimental format. Students are particularly encouraged to creatively engage with social media platforms. Throughout the course, we will engage in simple videographic experiments to learn basic editing techniques, that will gradually let us build the final video. The idea is for the reading, viewing, and discussion to inform the critical building of our personal digital videography. 
 
 

Location

(TR 2:00PM - 5:10PM)

For decades, feminist film theorists, art historians, and media scholars have been obsessed with an idea: the concept of the “male gaze.” But what exactly is the “male gaze”? The concept was famously articulated and defined by Laura Mulvey in the mid-1970s. Since then, interventions into debates about the gaze by black and queer scholars—such as bell hooks and Jack Halberstam—have problematized theorizing it solely around questions of gender. So, is the concept of the “male gaze” still relevant? 
 
This course will introduce students to key debates in feminist film theory, art history, and media studies—all disciplines that center around viewing practices and the ways we look at images. It will consider the ways in which the gaze of the viewer is informed by multiple and intersecting vectors of identity, through a variety of media that spans: narrative and experimental feature-length films, shorts, documentaries, animation, and video art. The course will be global in scope and incorporate the study of artists and filmmakers such as: Sharon Hayes, Cheryl Dunye, Lizzie Borden, the Yugantar Film Collective, Chantal Akerman, Ngozi Onwurah, Julie Dash, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Greta Gerwig, and Cauleen Smith. 
 

Location

Online Room 31 (ASE) (MTWR 2:00PM - 4:40PM)