Courses / Graduate

Spring 2017

  • Graduate Topics in Film: The Time of the Image

    240 - 002 | German 265 | CCN: 32949

    Anton Kaes

    4 Units

    This research seminar will focus on the photographic image and its relationship to time, movement, and memory. We aim to explore the manifold transitions between photography and cinema, from chronophotography in the 1880s and the Bauhaus experiments in the 1920s through the blurring of boundaries between still and moving images in intermedia art practices today. We will revisit the discussions about the relationship between photography, memory, and mortality and interrogate temporality as it animates the indexical constructions of the urban environment, nature, and the domestic sphere. Special emphasis will be given to the status and function of images of war and atrocities. We will read texts by Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, et al., and discuss works by Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, Robert Capa, Chris Marker, Hollis Frampton, as well as German artists Lázlo Moholy-Nagy, August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gurski, Thomas Demand, Harun Farocki, and Hito Steyerl, among others.