"In its long history—what is often described as its pre- and posthistory—cinema has always engendered a multiplicity of sites and a multiplicity of images. Cinemas and film simply constituted the dominant iteration in the medium’s classical period. But cinema is no more tied to movie theaters and celluloid than sculpture is bound to temples and marble. In a word, cinema will be multiple or it will not be at all."
Elcott, Noam M (2016): The Phantasmagoric Dispositif: An Assembly of Bodies and Images in Real Time and Space. In: Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016). p. 42-71.
Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires.
– Jean-Luc Godard in: La Chinoise, F. 1967
Contemporary cinema is multi-faceted. New forms of film spawn—and require— new narrative techniques. What are the changes we observe in documentary filmmaking in the ditigal era? How to narrate a story by simultaneously playing your audio-visual content on several displays in the same room? How do web-based nonlinear films work? How to edit a film that has not been recorded with a conventional camera, but shot in 360 degrees? How does film work in public spaces? Or, in short: what is the impact of technical innovation, new formats and changing conditions of reception in digital film on storytelling?
In addition to studying traditional film formats, we also offer you a chance to focus on the narrative strategies and tactics required to react to shortened attention spans, fragmented reception, new presentation settings as well as cross-platform distribution. This includes engaging with new interactive formats and technologies of the moving image.
On your way to your personal master’s project, you will familiarise yourself with emerging and interactive audio-visual narrative formats. In your practical narrative work, you will acquire the flexibility and the skills to develop your own visual vocabulary independently and experimentally. As a graduate, you must be able to adapt to the ever-changing profiles of our trade. That is why your own project is at the centre of our programme and our teaching is based on individual tuition to best prepare you for your own independent work as a filmmaker.
You can benefit from the close ties between film and animation at our School. Animation is not just a film genre, it is a core skill for many social media applications, in graphic design, to create film-based teaching materials, and even for VR, 3D and 360-degree applications. It helps us to represent even the most complex information quickly and comprehensibly, to build worlds based purely on our imagination and sometimes even to illustrate the impossibility to capture our everyday reality in a documentary film.
