In the minor you will learn how knowledge is produced through documentary film, covered by two main aspects. Firstly, you will study visual literacy that is required to critically watch and analyze documentaries. And secondly, you will develop the practical skills that are required to conduct research through filmmaking.
Crafting truth and knowledge through film
Overview courses
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Introduction Course: Learning How to Look
This course analyzes in detail the multiple ways in which documentary films craft and substantiate their claims to truths through audiovisual means. And we ask what happens when filmmakers deliberately break these disciplinary rules? In so doing, the course objectives center on the cultivation of audiovisual literacy and critical reflection on how we consume and interpret documentary film in our professional and personal lives.
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Showed trials: Truth telling in documentary film and court
This course focuses on truth and evidence in documentary film and court proceedings. More concretely, we explore the truth regimes of documentary film and court proceedings and study what happens when the two meet. We will pay special attention to the use of audiovisual evidence in international criminal courts and tribunals.
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AudioVisual Anthropology (AVA)
In this course, we will explore the history and variety of audiovisual approaches in anthropology and analyze how different forms of image and sound work as tools for cultural exchange and situated understanding. In the course, we will also investigate in detail the role of positionality of film makers in the way film is being made as well as our own positionality as a viewer and a maker. Specifically, we will watch and analyze new and classical work in anthropological filmmaking and collectively produce a short film motivated by ethnographic research.
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Seeing is believing: Film and religion and the construction of sacredness beyond the limits of representation and articulation
This course explores the limits of truth-telling and representation. Semantic and text-based approaches have a limited capacity to express the lived experience of people. Film offers a rich repertoire of audiovisual tools that offers many opportunities of representing realities that are difficult to express in language. In this course, such filmic representations are explored by analyzing the cinematographic and narrative elements of film. In addition, the course discusses the limits of filmic representation as well.
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Filmmaking in practice: pre-production, production and post-production
During the course, students create a research-based mini-documentary collaboratively. The course will be assessed through the mini-documentary and a reflection report in which students reflect on the cinematographic and narrative choices made in the documentary and their research activities.