From Ethnographic Cinema to the Avant-garde

Study and critical analysis of ethnographic cinema and its relationship with avant-garde cinema, proving itself a fertile territory and full of possibilities, but that continues on the margins, between art halls and museums and ignored by industry. Both ends touch each other. In the margins of usual production, creativity, dedication and social and cultural commitment survive.
Both extremes are modes of representation of our culture and have many elements in common: their marginality, their creativity, a community of practitioners and followers, their influence on the cinematographic narrative of the real and fiction, and their questioning, in some cases, of the classic narrative.

The goal of this seminar is to provide the student with a basic, but professional, level of knowledge of ethnographic and the- so called- experimental or formalist filmmaking. The seminar includes a practical exercise where the student can discover his or her particular way of seeing Catalan or Spanish reality. During class sessions, students and the professor will meet and discuss the history and situation of the contemporary ethnographic and Avant-garde filmmaking.