 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Oral History as Documentary (New School
University), Fall '08
This course serves as a broad-based survey of innovative oral history projects: audio, film, and web-based. The projects will range greatly in terms of subject: Appalachia, 9/11, punk music, Hawaiian pineapple plants, AIDS, Women in Vietnam, Cherenobyl, Homelessness, and the Porn Industry. The course addresses interview techniques, project design, and ethics, and is appropriate for students interested in documentary and nonfiction writing, photographers and filmmakers interested in combining image with nonfiction narrative/storytelling, and anyone interested in beginning and developing an oral history project.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The New Documentarian (New School
University), Spring '09
This course takes a broad and rigorous survey of nonfiction/documentary media and movements--radio documentary, literary journalism, documentary film, photojournalism, oral history--and focuses on the art of nonfiction storytelling. We examine varied approaches to documentary work, uncovering the narrative possibilities that lie within each story. Consideration is given to burgeoning forms such as the graphic novel and the monologue. Students are challenged to develop and analyze stories, and to test their narratives by transposing them from one medium to another. Authors and artists studied include Joan Didion, Agnes Varda, Stetson Kennedy, Errol Morris, and Mary Ellen Mark. (3 credits)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
DOCUMENTARY PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE:
Place as Character (New School
University), Spring '10
This course introduces students to documentary work (film, print, photography, audio) in which landscape figures as central character. Most of this work probes the particular question: how does a landscape shape its inhabitants and determine their futures, and how—conversely—do people shape their landscapes as towering monuments of hope and/or revisionist records of the past? As city-dwellers, we will work to define “landscape,” both natural and manmade. Our theoretical readings will explore the way we navigate and remember space and architecture. Using the work of Susan Stewart, Elyssa East, Matthew Buckingham, and Barbara Kopple, to name a few, we will look at landscape-as-launching pad for nonfiction narratives that are mysteries, elegies, or social commentary/exposé.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Radical Revision (Private workshop)
This course focuses on organizing overgrown projects, serving as a boot camp for ruthless revision. Students will be given various directives and exercises to alter or excise. Working aggressively and consistently, we will free our narratives from immobility and infuse them with the spirit in which we first conceived them. More individualized than Experiments in Documentary, Radical Revision classtime will also involve in-class writing plus homework assignments tailored to students’ projects. Classmates will serve as support and counsel, and students will receive close readings of their work. Each week, we’ll also mine one inspired long-form narrative for clues, regarding voice and structure.
6 weekly classes
6-10 people
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
