Fox Fridays: Experimental Cinema & Video Art Part 1

With a long history as alternatives to mainstream cinema, experimental cinema and video art enable visual artists to work with moving images without concern for specific storytelling. Experimental filmmaking and video art are often used in a similar way to how an artist may approach painting and drawing, or how a composer may approach writing music; the work is often created by the individual maker alone, in a solitary process, rather than with a crew.

In this two-part free workshop, the word “experimental” connotes both the specific history in cinema and art, and also delineates basic difference from storytelling and documentary practices. Participants will experiment with recording moving images, paying close attention to what appears within each picture frame (akin to painterly composition) and learning how to control the movement of the camera to achieve specific expression in the film. Both improvised and scripted approaches to filmmaking will be supported.

During Part 1 on Sept. 15, we will focus on filmic/visual ideas related to abstraction, dream, and landscape. Part 2 on Sept. 22 will focus on human body, including movement, stillness, proximity/distance, and the filming of the self. Participants do not need to have experience in filmmaking or art making of any kind. Participants may sign up for Part 1 (Experimental Landscape), Part 2 (Experimental Portrait), or for both sessions.

Takeaways

Students will produce two, short 4K digital films saved in the MOV format. A brief introduction to editing techniques will also be offered.

Cross-disciplinary Connections

Other disciplines directly related to this workshop include Film + Media Studies, Performing Arts, Creative/Experimental Writing, Music, and Dance.

Instructor

In a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses video, film, sound, music, performance, drawing and sculpture, the prominent US-based Polish artist and Sam Fox School professor Monika Weiss moves between the political and the poetic to explore questions of the body, history and violence. Her works have been exhibited in over 100 exhibitions around the world and are part of public collections and numerous publications internationally. Recurring material and conceptual motives include sound, water, the body, stillness, doubling and gestures of lamentation. Important across her oeuvre is a relationship to history and collective remembrance, which the artist’s work approaches in profoundly affective ways. Her synesthetic art resists closure as it explores states of transformation and oscillates, as Mark McDonald (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) noted, “between proposal and presence, the allusive and the tangible”. Since 2011, the artist holds a professorship at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and divides her time between her Brooklyn studio and her teaching. Recipient of numerous awards, in 2023 Monika Weiss was awarded the New York State Council on the Arts individual artist grant in support of her forthcoming public project at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near United Nations in New York.