Led by artists and academics Ludovica Fales and Adele Tulli, this course looks with a curatorial approach at those strands in the history of global cinema that question and critique dominant power, ideologies and institutions in society, providing views from the margins, not encoded in hegemonic norms: exploring a range of practitioners and practices, and different geographical and political contexts, the course focuses on creativeand nonconforming film and video approaches, that reclaims cinema as a praxis of dissent and resistance, a medium with the radical potential of challenging and disrupting the status quo, and a home for the marginal, oppressed, and subaltern identities and bodies. 

Please note thet this course will now be delivered via online distance learning, and students will require a computer or other internet connected device.

An evening course exploring documentary filmmaking as storytelling

Please note that this course will be taught Online.

Course dates: From the Tuesday 15th February to Tuesday 8th March 2022 and runs from 6.30pm until 9.00pm.

This course is for documentary practitioners who want to critically frame their filmmaking in order to produce thought-provoking films that have social and cultural implications. It also addresses a broad range of conceptual methodologies that offer a good springboard for practice-led research (e.g. practice-based PhD, visual ethnography, experimental filmmaking, video art, etc.). Although no prerequisites are required, it is generally recommended that participants first do the “Documentary Storytelling” course. At the discretion of the tutor, participants can bring their own material for discussing their research.  

By blending fact and fiction, some films draw on the stylistic traditions of both documentary and fiction films in various ways, at one time distancing its spectators from objective truth while on the other shedding a light on a kind of intensified reality. If the history of documentaries as a film genre is a history of addressing the question of what constitutes the representation of social reality and the fictional narrative film is an attempt to create an imaginative conception of what is called reality, recent contemporary examples have been challenging this divide in multiple ways, pushing the boundaries of the two genres to the extreme and merging one into the other. Nevertheless, far from being just a contemporary phenomenon, the blurring of these forms—documentary and fictional narrative—is a creative and interpretive challenge that filmmakers have been concerned with since the early days of cinema.

According to classic works like Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) and Currie’s The Nature of Fiction (1990), fiction essentially involves imagining whereas nonfiction essentially involves believing. However, more recent works like Friend’s “Fiction as a Genre” (2012) and Matravers’ Fiction and Narrative (2014) have challenged this conception of the fiction/nonfiction divide., opening a debate both in the community of academics and practitioners. This course would like to explore the interstices between the two, exploring a metaphorical truth, one that resonates without relying solely on empirical representation, opening serious questions about truth and our positioning towards it.