Fact, Facticity and the Imagination

UG - Undergraduate

The title of the course takes from Raqs Media Collective's seminal text, Fact, Facticity and the Imagination that investigates how the documentary mode corresponds, manipulates and transforms facts. This reading folds, re-assembles and collages how we as image-makers can shape our imagination. We will explore these ideas through film screenings and readings from South and Southeast Asia. We will gather strategies that artists in the region have borrowed, invented and shared under various forms of censorship. Over seven weeks, we will be introduced to hybrid documentary practices that focus on satire, absurdism and surrealism. Students will work on one collective image-making assignment, and simultaneously develop a short time based work in response to at least one theme and technique gathered during the course.

We will begin by looking at incredible films and texts from Thailand, Cambodia & Myanmar that explore the idea of collective metamorphosis--of re-grouping, re-building and re-imagining as a counter-strategy against censorship. Using these learnings as a framework, students will make a collective zine over two weeks. They will meet outside class to develop a theme based on questions that emerge during discussions. This assignment is meant to create a generous space for collaboration, and experiment with image-making, writing and devising collective strategies.

Through the second half of the course, our focus will be on satire, absurdism and myth-making as devices of subversion. We will be introduced to films and writings from India, Indonesia & Sri Lanka--we will find complex methods of bending and folding time with memory, spirits, politics and humour. For the final assignment, students will develop a short time-based work by incorporating and responding to at least one theme, technique and mode of making discussed during the seven weeks. Students are encouraged to collaborate and employ any time-based medium.

By the end of the course, students will gather a deeply political and nuanced understanding of South and Southeast Asian cinema. Like artists in the region, students can borrow, invent and share vocabularies for their practice. With the uncertainty and distress in the world, this course offers strategies and possibilities of making work, of finding joy and gathering collective strength. The question we must ask is not what modes of filmmaking can we adopt under censorship but how many.