Cost: £180
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Overview
On this online evening course you'll study films that question and critique dominant power, ideologies and institutions in society, providing views from the margins, not encoded in hegemonic norms.
You'll explore a range of practitioners and practices, and different geographical and political contexts.
The course focuses on creative and nonconforming film and video approaches. Approaches that reclaim 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.
You'll explore films which have experimented with cinematic codes in the pursuit of a deeply personal, formally experimental, and politically challenging language. Films that question dominant and disciplinary gazes on class, gender, race and sexuality. You'll look at ethics of imperfection, practices of self, process of becoming common through cinema.
Classes are held on Wednesday evenings, from 7pm to 9pm, over 6 weeks.
This course is run by the Open City Docs School, based in UCL's Department of Anthropology.
Who it's for
This course is open to anyone who is interested in the subject. You don't need any particular knowledge or experience to attend.
Course content
Week 1 – Feminist cinema
Topics covered include:
- The male gaze
- Feminist realist debate
- Avantgarde as counter-cinema
- Various artists
Week 2 – Queer cinema
Topics covered include:
- 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 including Derek Jarman and Jack Smith
Week 3 – Black cinema in the UK, US and France
Topics covered include:
- 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
Topics covered include:
- 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 and Yilmz Guney amongst others
Week 5 – Independent political documentary in India and slow cinema in South-East Asia
Topics covered include:
- Lav Diaz
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Week 6 – Indigenous and Aboriginal cinema
Course structure and teaching
This course will be delivered via online distance learning. You'll need to have your own computer or other internet-connected device. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please get in contact at shortcourses@opencitylondon.com
Cost
The standard price for this course is £180. The following concessions are also available:
- Students: £150
- UCL Students/Staff: £145
This course offers bursary places. Please check our Terms and conditions to see if you are eligible to apply.
Further information
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Course team

Ludovica Fales
Filmmaker and artist Ludovica Fales has been making independent documentary and experimental films since 2007, following on a BA-MA in Philosophy in Rome and Berlin. After an MA in Documentary Direction at the NFTS in 2011, she travelled around the Mediterranean area, across the Balkans and in the Middle East, making films and working closely and collaboratively with vulnerable communities around the world and using filmmaking as a conflict resolution tool.

Adele Tulli
Adele Tulli is a filmmaker and an academic researcher interested in documentary experimental practices, as well as in gender and queer studies and visual anthropology. In 2018 she has completed a practice-based PhD at Roehampton University in London, exploring subversive film aesthetics within queer and feminist contexts.
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Course information last modified: 9 Sep 2024, 15:36