ENGL 27
Documentary Today Winter 2023

Today is a puzzling moment for documentary filmmaking. Never have there been so many ways to engage the world through media. At the same time, the profusion of image-making tools is dizzying. In a world crowded with digital fakes, biased software, and polarized audiences, when can we trust our eyes? We’ll explore these and related questions as they’re raised by contemporary work (less than three years old), much of it focused on the war in Ukraine. This course has no prerequisites. After a brief overview of basic film analysis, we’ll branch into readings of particular films and recent writing on media technologies. Required work will include six to eight hours of weekly viewing, and a similar amount of reading. Classes will meet thrice weekly.