EXPERIMENTAL FILM & MEDIA

This course provides an overview of experimental film and video since the early 20th century European art movements (abstract, Dada, Surrealism), including the emergence of American experimental film in the 1940s, post-World War II underground experimental films, structuralist films and early video art in the 1960s and 70s, post-1960s identitarian experimental work, the emergence of digital video in museums and online in the 1990s to the present. The course surveys and analyses a wide range of experimental work, including the artists Hans Richter, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Martha Rosler, Vito Acconci, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Julie Dash, Isaac Julien, Matthew Barney, Ilana Harris-Babou, and others. The course will study the structural, aesthetic and thematic links between mainstream and avant-garde cinema, theater, and art movements, and will place the films in their economic, social, and political contexts.