ARTH 300
Experimental Documentary Forms and the Archive Fall 2024
Division I D Difference, Power, and Equity

This course will introduce students to contemporary lens and media-based practices that experiment with the traditional documentary narrative form and archival source materials. We will explore how artists and film-makers critique, expand, and reimagine documentary notions of objectivity, truth and authenticity, and creatively contaminate the form with fiction, self-reflection, performance, and abstraction. Through readings from the fields of visual art/criticism, film theory, and critical archival studies, as well as viewing films in class, we will explore complex debates related to the production of historical knowledge, the politics of the archive and archival practice, issues within documentary photography and film, and the creative possibilities of using traditional and non-traditional lens-based media in historical research. By bringing together a range of exploratory practices, such as strategies of docu-fiction, visual auto-ethnography, and collaboration, we will reflect on the archive and the source document not as a passive collection of material, but as an active and ongoing performance in the construction of historical narratives. This course will broaden student understanding of the history of experimental and alternative film and media practices, and will familiarize students with contemporary discourse on archival and documentary methodologies that aim to question processes of categorization and interpretation related to underrepresented histories and communities.