Lecture and masterclass Creative Film Criticism (9-10 January, 2014)

Creative Film Criticism – Lecture and Masterclass with Adrian Martin

9 – 10 January 2014
More information and enrolment via NICA

Adrian Martin & Cristina Álvarez López – Lecture:

“The Audiovisual Essay: A Fusion of Old and New Paths in Creative Film Criticism and Analysis”

Over the past two years, the film critics and magazine editors Cristina Álvarez López (Barcelona) and Adrian Martin (Melbourne) have been collaborating on a series of audiovisual essays (on film directors, motifs, genres, ideas, specific movies taken alone or in tandem…), usually combining an edited video with a written (or spoken) text. The technological tools are the relatively simple ones that anyone can master on their laptop. Drawing on various traditions at once – from the ‘found footage’ film-poem to the illustrated lecture/demonstration – Martin & Álvarez find the audiovisual essay a fertile form to recapture moments and tendencies that have been exciting in film criticism’s history, linking them to new developments in digital culture. They will show various examples of their audiovisual work and speak about its underpinning of ideas from film criticism, history and theory.

 Adrian Martin – Masterclass:

“Film Criticism: Between Journalism and the Academy – Its New Contexts and Possibilities”

Film criticism, as I define and practice it, is an expansive ‘middle field’ that sits in-between two extremes – media journalism on one side, academic scholarship on the other – and draws on both of them for its resources. While the borders between the three activities (journalism, criticism, scholarship) have always been, in the best cases, porous – as we can see in the work of many great critics, from Manny Farber and Frieda Grafe to Serge Daney and Judith Williamson – today it is the Internet that sets a new ‘level playing field’ for the different kinds of writing/speaking about and responding to films. Reflecting on my experience as a writer, teacher and editor/publisher of film magazines (especially on the Internet), I will set the scene of where film criticism is today, and what I can do – rejecting the many gloomy prognoses of its professional death and decay in a corporate media landscape. We can make film criticism what we want it to be!

More information about time, location, registration, assignments, readings, etc. will be announced soon. Lecture and masterclass are organised in cooperation with NICA.

Adrian Martin is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Goethe University, Frankfurt, author of six books and several thousand articles and reviews.

Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic, video artists and co-founder/co-editor of the Spanish on-line film magazine Transit. Her writing has appeared in LOLA,Screening the Past, Caiman, and in books on Paul Schrader, Philippe Garrel, Max Ophüls and Chantal Akerman.