ARTS 380T Between Art and Cinema (Not offered 2006-2007)

This tutorial will engage visual, kinesthetic, and narrative issues that emerge from new hybrid forms of contemporary art and cinema. Students will look at recent cinema and gallery-based video installation, and will read criticism that considers relationships among architecture, landscape, the pictured body, the body of the viewer, and the phenomenology of the moving image. Some of the topics to be considered will draw on recent scholarship about traditional cinematic forms: how can the picturing of space and motion produce feeling? How do the face and the gesture of the body register emotion? How does language relate to these visual and kinesthetic properties of the moving image? How does cinema use these elements in the service of storytelling and story structure? Other topics will pertain specifically to the ways in which contemporary installation art has brought these questions of space, motion, and narrative away from the forms and architectures of traditional cinema: How do contemporary video practices relate to histories of cinema, sculpture, and theater?
Format: tutorial. Each week, one student in each tutorial pair will produce a short work that responds to a particular assignment related to that week's screening and reading. Students will each realize five video projects, both in traditional single-screen formats and in multiple-screen installation formats. The class will also meet as a group for two critique sessions. Lab fee.
Enrollment limit: 10 (expected: 10).

L. JOHNSON