Urban Scavenger

This course fulfills the "Category III: Film/Photo/Video Production" Film and Media Studies requirement and the "Creative Work" General Education requirement for the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
 
The Urban Scavenger course takes the camera as a tool for the excavation of ordinary things scattered in the urban spaces of a modern metropolis. With a focus on the archaeology of banality and the relation between the public and the private we will explore the iconography of London through the lenses of surrealism, psychogeography and material culture studies. The course will look at a variety of moving image practices but with a special attention to the genres of the film essay, film diary and vlog, covered concurrently in the partner City Symphony course. By closely integrating practical elements with theoretical sessions, we hope to draw connections between the discourse on urban consumer society and the images surrounding it, between collecting objects and editing, between the order of things and creating a political narrative.     
Students will be asked to gather shots on a weekly basis responding to the discussions during the theoretical sessions. The shots will be uploaded to a dedicated video blog and commented on by the whole group throughout the term. Towards its end the footage collected by the students will be revised and they will be encouraged to use it when editing their own essay film.    
Methods of instruction will include screenings, in-class presentations and analyses, filming sessions, field trips to unusual London locations, crits or review sessions and editing supervision.