Pre-cinema and Roots of Experimental Cinema

Subject guarantor:

Jitka HEJTMANOVÁ

Name of lecturer(s):

Jitka HEJTMANOVÁ

Learning outcomes of the course unit:

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Dominique Willoughby

100% attendance

Head of Cinema Department of the University Paris 8 and acknowledged French film-maker will make excursion into prehistory of cinema and one of its roots.

Experimental roots of cinema - experimenting the moving images.

The invention of moving images in 1833 by scientists (who became artists) came from experimentation of the human vision, some 60 years before the invention of photographic cinema by Edison and the Lumiere brothers. They gave a number of original inventions and cinematic artworks by way of graphic ( drawing, engraving, painting) and photographic ( sequential photography, chronophotography, photo animation) methods.

Recent researches and restorations of this body of works show that many important issues of the motion synthesis and film art - technical and aesthetic - have been explored much earlier than what traditional film histories told us, such as loops, abstract moving geometry, phantasmagoria, photo animation (stop motion), colour animation, complex relation between still and moving images. Many of these issues where to be rediscovered and developed in the avant-garde film, experimental cinema, animation. Furthermore today some of these original techniques and handcrafts are revisited by artists and animators, in the context of the ongoing digital mutation of cinema and moving images.

Dominique Willoughby will present a body of works and documents ranging from the 19th Century to recent international works by experimental film makers, in order to illustrate his researches in film archaeology, in connection with the avant-garde, experimental practices of cinema through the following silver and digital ages in 20th and 21rst Centuries.

A reconsideration of the classical camera/montage cinema models will be discussed to the light of these researches.

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March 1, Friday

9:30 am - 4 pm

100% attendance

in Projection room, FAMU main building

Smetanovo nabrezi 2

Course web page:

Note:

Dominique Willoughby is a film maker and Professor at the Film Department of Paris 8 University Vincennes Saint - Denis. He has realised a dozen of experimental and didactic films, published several studies about experimental and graphic cinema, including a book: „Le Cinema Graphique“ Editions Textuel, Paris 2009.

Further information:

This course is an elective for all students of this school

Schedule for winter semester 2012/2013:

The schedule has not yet been prepared

Schedule for summer semester 2012/2013:

Date	Day	Time	Tutor	Location	Notes	No. of paralel
01.03.2013		09:30–16:00	HEJTMANOVÁ J.	Učebna 3 Lažanský palác	Head of Cinema Dept. of the University Paris 8 Dominique Willoughby. Projection Room. In English	paralelka 1

The subject is a part of the following study plans:

• Fotografie EN - bakalář (optional subject)
• Fotografie EN - magistr (optional subject)
• Cinema and Digital Media - Cinematography (qualification subject, optional subject)
• Cinema and Digital Media - Screenwriting (qualification subject, optional subject)
• Cinema and Digital Media - Directing (qualification subject, optional subject)