Explore how others have pushed the boundaries of the medium as you make your own experimental film.

There are no available registration dates at this time.

SOLD OUT!!  Email [email protected] to be placed on a wait list.

NOTE: This class will be held in a live, online format using the Zoom platform.
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 1:30-3:30pm ET

Our 4-Week Experimental Film Intensive is an immersive program that exposes you to the history, meaning, and methods of avant-garde film and video, and provides you with the knowledge to begin making your own experimental media.

Through viewings, lecture, discussion, and reading, students will survey how filmmakers and artists working in film, video, and digital media have experimented with the moving image to push the boundaries of the medium. We’ll consider how key films and filmmakers explored the material and conceptual possibilities of film and video in order to reshape our notion of what film can be. In addition to looking closely at the images in these works, students will also listen closely to the way that sound design has frequently played a role in the impact of these creations. Analyzing these pieces with regard to form, content, and context will not only help students understand how experimental filmmaking has produced oppositional, political, and aesthetically radical work, but will provide a stimulating foundation as they approach the creation of their own experimental work within the class.  

© Chris Agnese

We will screen examples of experimental moving images from the European “city symphonies” and abstract films of the 1920s to the flowering of the American postwar avant-garde; from the advent of video art in the 1960s to the online videos and digital gallery installations of today. Other core topics will include the consideration of the meaning and use-value of the avant-garde, the issue of “artists’ film and video” as opposed to “experimental film,” and the thorny relationship between avant-garde and commercial filmmaking. 

Every week, one class session will consist of the instructor’s lecture and discussion of the assigned screenings, and one class session will be devoted to critiquing and workshopping participants’ projects. 

Participants will begin experimenting with video in the first week, and will have weekly video assignments. By the end of the workshop students will make one short experimental video of less than five minutes. 

Class meets Tuesdays & Thursdays, 1:30-3:30pm ET

Required: Experience in using a smartphone, DSLR or other digital camera to capture video. Basic proficiency with an editing software.

Please note that students might incur modest streaming fees for films watched at home. 

Images:  Owen Weaver

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Instructor: Gregory Zinman

Gregory Zinman is an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His writing on film and media has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and October, among other publications. He has programmed film and media art at the Film-makers’ Co-op, the Museum of the Moving Image, Asia Society New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, as well as at number of venues in Atlanta, where he lives. He recently served as a technical consultant for the 20th Century Fox release Ad Astra (2019) starring Brad Pitt, directed by James Gray. Gregory is currently consulting on a documentary about the future of computing for IBM. He is the author of Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (University of California Press, 2020) and co-editor, with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (The MIT Press, 2019).