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.

In our current postcolonial society, the process of globalisation itself and the financial inequalities and climate imbalances coming with it, led us to rethink and question concepts as “identity”, “citizenship”, “nation” and opened the way to the emergence in the public sphere of a multiplicity of “diasporic public spheres” “imaginary worlds”, “able to contest and sometimes subvert the imaginary words belonging to official and business-like mindsets” (Appadurai, 1996). Within this perspective, we would like to explore all those film histor(ies), which, since the 1960s to current times, have experimented with cinematic codes in the pursuit of a deeply personal, formally experimental, and politically challenging language, able to question dominant and disciplinary gazes on class, gender, race and sexuality. We will be looking at ethics of imperfection, practices of self, process of becoming common through cinema. Throughout the course there will be optional writing and creative tasks.

Week 1 – Feminist cinema (the male gaze, feminist realist debate, avantgarde as counter-cinema, various artists )

Week 2 – Queer cinema (blurring the boundaries of documentary, fiction and video art, subjectivity as a frontline strategy, hybrid mix of poetry and politics, memory and history, bodies and emotions, various artists i.e. Derek Jarman, Jack Smith…)

Week 3 – Black cinema in the UK, US and France (post -avantgarde, collective fillmmaking, Melvin Van Peebles, Spike Lee, Isaac Julien, Sankofa, Ceddo, Black Audio Collective /John Akomfrah

Week 4 – Third cinema and “imperfect” cinema in Latin America & Africa, Palestine, Kurdistan (Group Medvedkine, Glauber Rocha and the aesthetics of Hunger, Fernando Solanas and the idea of the South, Ousmane Sembene and the use of griot,Michel Kleifi, Yilmz Guney etc…)

Week 5 – Independent political documentary in India and slow cinema in South-East Asia  (Lav Diaz, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Week 6 – Indigenous and Aboriginal cinema

1x Universal Credit bursary place is available for this course. Please see our bursary policy here.

This course is delivered via online distance learning. Students will require their own computer or other internet connected device.

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[Image: Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)]