Semester:
Offered:
Professor, Vivek Bald
Thursday 12:45-2:45pm
In this course, students will watch, analyze, discuss and write about a series of documentary films tied to movements for social justice; they will also work in teams over the course of the semester to produce their own short issue-based documentaries. We will focus particularly on two historical moments in which social protest and new media technologies combined in generative and subversive ways: the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when hand-held sync-sound 16mm film cameras first became accessible – including to those engaged in or aligned with the Anti-War, Black Power, Xicanx, Puerto Rican, Asian American, Native American, Feminist, Labor, and Queer Liberation movements; and the past two decades, in which the ubiquity of cell-phone cameras, social media, and the internet as a streaming platform have helped fuel the rapid growth of new and ongoing movements for justice, including Black Lives Matter, #metoo, and the immigrant rights movement. As we consider each film and each moment, we will assess the makers’ goals and intentions, the choices they made in terms of how to shoot, edit, and narrativize different political moments and struggles, and how their films, historical or contemporary, resonate and create meaning for audiences in the present. Limited to 20.