Description:

Please join us for a workshop by Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts at the Block Museum:

Imperfect Cinema and the “Poor Image”

Thursday, May 21
12pm – 1:30pm CST
Zoom Virtual Event

Please RSVP to Sarah (sarah.mcginley@northwestern.edu) to receive a copy of the Zoom invitation

Dominant forms of cinema are structured around hierarchies of clarity and access: high-resolution images, wide theatrical releases, and now, immediate availability via streaming platforms. These hierarchies serve not only to deliver content, but to reinforce aesthetic values and mechanisms of distribution and production that require inordinate amounts of capital and ever-more sophisticated technology. This workshop will examine how filmmakers and artists have articulated alternatives to these values by upholding the political and aesthetic virtues of imperfection. From the unpolished counter-cinema championed by Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa in the 1960s to contemporary polemics around what Hito Steyerl and Laura U. Marks have called “the poor image,” participants in this workshop will be familiarized with a range of film and video works that advance anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist visions of art by foregrounding the material limitations of their production. Particular attention will be paid to specific formats, tools, techniques, and methods of distribution and archival preservation, providing participants with a vocabulary for identifying and analyzing the layers of meaning implicit in so-called sonic and visual “imperfections.”

Hosted by Comparative Literary Studies Program