CIN201H5

The Video Essay

In his 1948 essay “The Birth of the New Avant-Garde: The Camera Stylo,” the French filmmaker and film theorist Alexandre Astruc imagined the motion picture as a new kind of pen, a new way of ‘writing’ philosophy, so much so that he claimed that if Descartes were alive today he would have written his Discourse on Method with a 16mm camera. The time has come to take Astruc more seriously and to consider sound and images not only as the source of traditional essay writing but as the way in which essays are themselves are composed. Thus, this course is designed to introduce students to the practice of audio-visual criticism. In place of the traditional written essay, students in this course will learn to make video essays out of the films and videos they are analysing. In the course, we will also consider the history of the essay film as philosophical questions about rhetoric and logic. There will be no written essay assignments in this course. Instead, students will produce video essays on particular themes, both collaboratively and independently.