Writing for Film: Text, Performance and Memory in Transnational Cinema

Writing for Film: Text, Performance and Memory in Transnational Cinema is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by Baba Hillman. This course requires instructor permission.

Course Description
This production/theory course combines studies in writing, film and videomaking with an emphasis on the theme of migration in contemporary film through a study of the role of memory, language, performance and visual structure. The course will engage students across disciplines who are working with issues of displacement and exile, as well as students who are working with languages other than English or across multiple languages. We will study filmmakers and writers who are working in hybrid combinations of poetic, fictional and non-fictional forms and in a context of transnational histories. The course emphasizes Maghrebi film with a range of approaches by filmmakers who are questioning what it means to work in a transnational context and to negotiate conflicts between notions of the local and the global, notions of national identity and the postnational. The course includes a study of writers Sophie Ponchalet, Faiza Guene, Leila Sebbar, and Leila Houari and critical writings by James Clifford, Reda Bensmaia, and Carrie Tarr.A $50 Lab Fee is required. Instructor permission required.