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Documentary Evidence
course taught in the International M.A. in Film, 2004-2005 This course proposes to reflect on the presence of photographs and other types of documents such as newsreel, found footage or film stills in cinema since 1960. The insertion of such documents in feature films often results in a rupture within registers of representation or a break within the narrative flow. It may serve to further anchor the film into reality or on the contrary, to provide a surplus of fiction. Drawing upon film and photography theory with incursions into documentary, this course will explore the incidence of such inclusions on the aesthetics of film, focusing on such topics as the photograph as evidence, information, or memento mori.
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Between Screen and Frame
Onderzoekswerkstuk, taught winter 2004-2005 This onderzoekswerkstuk proposes to study the relationbetween photography and cinema, and the question of photography in films, through theoretical texts and individual feature and documentary films. While important theorists such as André Bazin Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes have reflected upon the proximity but also the opposition between film and photography, filmmakers often resort to filming photographs, integrating the device of the freeze-frame or/and featuring photo-reporters as film characters. How can we reflect upon and understand these features? Considered topics for reflection may include: photographs as clues in film noir, family photographs andthe creation of genealogies, reality versusfiction, truth and fakes, but also relation between art and film, and between documentary and feature film.
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Intermedialities
Research M.A. in Cultural Analysis, taught winter 2004-2005 The first seven weeks of Intermedialities will centre on the theoretical debates surrounding the concept of the medium in visual arts, in the historical context of the 1960s. We begin by exploring the issue of medium-specificity in modernist painting and its corresponding formulations in photography and film. Following this, Conceptual art and its particular attitude towards media provides the departure point for a study of intermedial relations between film, photographyand painting, envisaged in relation to both theory and specific works. In conclusion, we assess the reformulation of the very notion of the mediumand the limits of its conceptualisation notably in the light of the question of interdisciplinarity.
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Documented Evidence: A history of Photography 1839-1945
This course may be on offer winter 2005-2006 This course will provide students with an introduction to the history of photography. Upon completion of this module, students will be able to identify periods, individual figures and important projects developed throughout the history of this medium. Furthermore, by resorting to the particular angle of the photographic document,students will become familiar with some of the major theoretical issues of photography, namely beauty and the question of truth, circulation, uniqueness and multiplicity, use-value and exhibition value. They will be able to develop arguments and conduct research on further and more specific issues. Finally, students will become aware of the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of photography, and its relation to fields such as art, sciences, literature and film, away from a more naïve and simplistic view of photography as art. Inhoud This course proposes a survey of the history and theory of photography from its origins to the 1945 through the particular angle of the photographic document and the question of documentary practice. Whereas until the 1930s, the photographic document was perceived as a proof used for scientificmeans (the photographic collection of the Salpetrière in Paris), patrimonial survey (Mission Héliographique, 1851), or police investigation (Bertillon), and as such, was directly antagonistic to art, this changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the 1920s and 1930s, the work of August Sander, Walker Evans and others reconciled art and document into what Walker Evans named a “documentary style,” a style that took the neutral and clear aspects of the functional document and transformed them into aesthetic qualities. The posthumous celebration of Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris, by Bernice Abbott in the United States and the surrealists in France, is exemplary ofthis bringing together of art and document. From this point onwards, generations of photographers have continued, in different ways, to play on the double registers of art and documentary practice.
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Photography in Art since 1960
This course proposes to explore the uses of photography in art since the 1960s, focusing in particular on two interrelated aspects. One is the evolution of the use and place of photography as an art medium from the 1960s to the present. The course will explore the move from photography considered as a marginal and deskilled medium in conceptual art, in the 1960s; to its being used in the 1990s to produce images on a monumental scale that openly dialogue with history painting. In short, this evolution could be summed up as the move from small, black and white images to large-scale, colour photographs. These developments will the studied in relation to artworks but also in the theoretical and critical discourse that has accompanied this move, including artists’ statements and theoretical essays. Questions relating to the institutional status of photography, preservation, circulation of these images are also posed in relation to this issue. Within this historical and theoretical framework - and this is the second aspect- the course will focus on the appropriation by artists of documents, documentary and archives, in some cases by adopting these forms and in others by appropriating actual documents, documentary photographs and archives. These strategies are central in the use of photography in art from the 1960s to the present. This course will be given in Spring 2008
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