Courses
Course of Study
To complete the Graduate Certificate in Videographic Criticism, students must earn 12 credits (= 4 classes) from the list of required and elective courses below —without any specific order.
For students with no previous skills in film editing, the online class Film-St 397 FE: Video Editing and Film Montage is recommended. Please note that this class cannot count for a certificate elective.
Required courses (both)
Film-St 650 Videographic Teaching: Pedagogy, Methods, Assessments (3 credits)
The course introduces students to videographic criticism as a tool for studying and analyzing audiovisual material, as a presentation format to share knowledge, and as a teaching method. Videographic Criticism is viewed throughout the course as a multiple and hybrid format that speaks to the diversity of audiences as well as of audiovisual culture. Students watch, work with, and assess video essays to develop an understanding of how they can be used to diversify our understanding of audiovisual material and decolonizing our gaze. Exemplary video essays are shown and their strategies analyzed. Apart from that, students engage in their own little videographic experiments that they will present in class.
Film-St 651 Videographic Practice: Techniques, Formats, Distribution (3 credits)
The course introduces students to the many practices of videographic criticism by looking at different techniques and the diverse formats that can be used for video essays and will learn about how to share and distribute them. Videographic research is explored as a form of practical aesthetics or artistic research that combines hands-on exercises and experiments with conceptual thought. Experimentation is used in order to counter predominant aesthetic ideologies and expand our audiovisual vocabulary. In the course of this class students make their own video essay by applying different techniques they have encountered and will publish their video essays online.
Elective Courses (at least two):
Film-St 660 Working with Sound (3 credits)
This course explores the role of sound in the video essay. Students will learn about the technical aspects of sound recording and editing, as well as the ways in which sound can be used to create meaning, critical distance, and affect in visual media. Topics covered will include the poetics and politics of the voice-over, the use of music, sound design, use of silence, gender issues.
Film-St 661 Working with Editing (3 credits)
This course explores the history and the different techniques of editing and montage as aesthetic, affective, and argumentative devices. Students will learn about the technological and philosophical aspects of editing, as well as different editing modes and styles, such as the split screen, the multiscreen, the spatial montage, and soft montage. New forms of montage as they can be encountered on social media platforms with their specific affordances are critically discussed and added to the palette of editing tools as tools for thought.
Film-St 662 Working with the Body (3 credits)
This course explores our engagement with film material as not simply an optical but a multisensory and embodied one. The bodies of viewer, researcher and video essay maker are understood as sites of knowledge production. Students will learn how to use videographic criticism as a performative practice in which not only the diversity of our bodies can be used as tools but which conversely can change and expand our notion of what a body is and can do.
Film-St 663 Working with Surfaces (3 credits)
This course explores screens, desktops, as well as other media surfaces and how they can be made productive, be discussed, but also changed within videographic criticism. Specific videographic formats such as the desktop documentary will be taught as critical intervention into our post-pandemic visual culture in which we are more surrounded by screens and media surfaces as ever before.