Anthropology, Cultural studies, Film and media studies, Gender studies, History, Sociology, Visual arts
Fields of Vision: Memory, Identity, and Images of the Past
In cooperation with Open Society Archives and Visual Studies Platform, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Course Director(s):
Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives of the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Course Faculty:
Division of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, School of Cinematic Arts, United States of America
Film and Television Department, VŠMU, Academy of Performing Arts, Bratislava, Slovakia
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Division of Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
Iwalewa-Haus, Africa-Center of the University of Bayreuth, Germany
Open Documentary Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
This course focuses on the construction of memory and identity narratives through images. Its seminars and workshops are designed to complement each other while developing participants’ abilities to analyze and communicate with and through images which is a required competency nowadays both inside and outside of the academia. The course explores narrative constructions of personal and collective identities and representations of the past (particularly the traumatic events of the twentieth century) by addressing works made in various media – modern art, documentary and fiction film, TV broadcasts, multimedia and web-based projects.
The study of images generated, circulated, and stored on a variety of media, and their social embeddedness takes many forms. Our course enhances participants’ skills for decoding the changing mechanisms of meaning-making and new practices of image production, interpretation, and social use.
Our program brings together theoretical and methodological courses on various media with practice-based discussions which include workshops by an internationally acknowledged documentary filmmaker and a prominent visual artist. During the seminars and workshops the participants also discuss dilemmas brought by participatory media, new practices of curating, and interactive media production. The intensive program targets advanced graduate students and junior faculty who seek to acquire new interpretative skills in a creative interdisciplinary environment. The participants are expected to apply the new knowledge in their own future work on designing new courses, developing new collaborative research projects, and also start creative artistic projects dealing with historical materials.