Rouzbeh Rashidi
Experimental and Personal Filmmaking
Block seminar, English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Tuesdays, 16-19.30h, weekly, 7 sessions: 2.5, 9.5, 16.5, 23.5, 30.5, 6.6, 13.6.2023, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 004

Registration on Moodle starts on the 17th of April / Anmeldung auf Moodle beginnt am 17.4.2023: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=1861
Moodle Enrollment Key / Einschreibeschlüssel: filmmakers

Taking as a central reference Rouzbeh Rashidi's decade-long Homo Sapiens Project and how this initially personal endeavour has acquired much wider resonance and relevance with the pandemic, several practical and theoretical outcomes will emerge from this course. Research into specific filmmaking practices and techniques will result in mentored individual and collective moving image works. This course mainly concentrates and nurtures the new importance and relevance of personal experimental moving image in the pandemic/post-pandemic moment—moving image as a personalised 'memory' and 'perception' subject to ongoing reordering and updating. 

The seminar combines a hybrid approach (practical + theoretical + screenings) with group and individual work. Through viewings, lectures, 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 and their perception of the world around them. The course will consider how essential films and filmmakers explored film and video material and conceptual possibilities to reshape our notion of film. 

In addition to looking closely at the images in these works, students will also listen closely to how sound design has frequently played a role in the impact of these creations. Analysing these pieces concerning form, content, and context will help students understand how experimental filmmaking has produced lyrical, distinctive, and aesthetically radical work and provide a stimulating foundation for creating their practical work.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: Students' regular attendance is highly encouraged, and active participation in all phases of the learning and producing processes is recommended. 

Rouzbeh Rashidi (born in Tehran, 1980) is an lranian-lrish filmmaker. He has been making films since 2000, at which time he founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran. Rashidi has always worked entirely away from mainstream conceptions of filmmaking, striving to escape conventional storytelling stereotypes. lnstead, he roots his cinematic style in a poetic interaction of image and sound. He generally eschews scriptwriting, seeing the process of making moving images as exploration rather than illustration. His work is deeply engaged with film history and primarily concerned with mysticism, philosophy, esotericism, cosmology, phenomenology and hauntology. The films are wildly experimental, often surrealist, magical realist, mysterious and associated with the Remodernist movement. His oneiric imagination unifies them, distinctive working methods, and the dreamlike experience of watching them.