Module Information

The module provides students with key theoretical ideas and historical case studies to introduce them to the field of experimental documentary. It uses documentary as a lens through which to expose students to the field of avant-garde filmmaking and opens up new ways of thinking about politics and representation.

The module Avant-Garde to Documentary introduces students to avant-garde filmmaking through the lens of documentary, and also to the myriad ways in which documentary film has drawn on unconventional techniques that align it more with modernist aesthetics than with traditional notions of reportage and objectivity. In this sense the module maps out two intersecting, and often inseparable, histories, allowing students to gain insights into both documentary and avant-garde filmmaking. The module will follow a loosely chronological structure, examining the importance of the factual and everyday to modernist aesthetics of defamiliarisation and the foregrounding of cinematic materials. We will then examine a range of themes and approaches related to the phenomenology of the body, portraiture, science and nature, autothnography, and memory, before considering recent intersections between gallery art and documentary, particularly through the re-embracing of narrative and classical pictorialism, as well as the implications of diverse exhibition spaces and the economies of attention and distraction. Drawing on a range of art historical and documentary film theories, and questions of politics and ethics, the module will provide students with a solid grounding in two boundary-breaking areas of film production.