LACS 24.25 Making Video Essays
This course introduces students to the art and scholarship of videographic criticism, the practice of using sounds and images to make arguments about film and television. We will take Latinx cinematic history as our subject and employ videographic methods in order to better understand Latinx representation, performance, stardom, and labor in Hollywood. The course will be equally split between learning this history and becoming acquainted with the theory and evolution of videographic practice. To understand how these two realms of inquiry intersect, students will create a series of video essays, workshop their creations with peers, and produce a final, sophisticated essay that demonstrates what they have learned.
“Making Video Essays” is an interactive, collaborative course in which students regularly share and receive feedback on their essays. To that end, we will work from a common body of films during the first part of the term. These will include seminal films in the history of Latinx representation in Hollywood that possess rich aesthetic potential for videographic critique. They are: the film noir, Border Incident (Mann, 1949); the Western, High Noon (Zinneman, 1952); the melodrama, Giant (Stevens, 1956); and the musical, West Side Story (Wise, 1961). After working closely with these films, students will have the opportunity to choose a different film that will form the basis of their final two essays.
Department-Specific Course Categories
Latin American Latino and Caribbean Studies