What is micro-narrative?

“Micro-narrative” is a neologism created for the purpose of reflecting upon and revising existing norms, conventions and forms of practices in moving image creation. Through 13 laboratory meetings, students are introduced to key moments of experimentation in film, video, literary and art history to examine the power of intermediality in innovative art practices, and as facts of history. In response, students would create video and sound works that examine and respond to class discussions and to address new screen contexts outside the movie theatre. The course, conducted as a concept-driven workshop, also upholds a new mode of learning that abolishes the assumed distinction between a studio and a theory class.

We want to challenge, in particular, the popular assumptions and conventions of narrative in mainstream moving image practice, typically:

• bound by (causal) linearity;
• entrenched belief in realisms;
• assuming passive viewing contexts and a language of continuity and narrative absorption, whether in scene constructions or editing style; and
• equating perception/reception with story comprehension with an over-emphasis on progression and plot-development;

What will you learn?

The kind of “micro-narratives” student will experiment in class exercises and group projects will bear the following foci:

• attention to the anatomy of s scene and the full orchestration of fine elements of sight, sound and movement; immersive power of a single shot, i.e. maximization of intra-shot/frame possibilities
• re-definition of a scene, narrative process and narrative closure
• experimentation with temporal and spatial scaling, and multiplicity of time and space
• challenge mainstream cinema’s “singularism” (one focus, one main character, one main dramatic action, primary point of view, unified time and space in a shot)
• discovery of new modes of reception (against sheer narrative comprehension and interpretation)
• extension of screen practices to non-theatrical contexts
• fabrication of non-existing sounds and noises
• invention of possible worlds via the inter-play of image and sound

Case studies in histories and theories include the following:

• Early cinema: framing, single-shot structure, intra-frame narrative possibilities, cinema of attraction, tableau composition, experiments in continuity, cross-breeding between photography, painting, theatre, 19th-century novel and cinema
• Medium-specificity, the optical’photographic unconscious, ontology of the moving image (Walter Benjamin, Andre Bazin)
• Time & space; movement image Vs time image (Deleuze, Bergson)
• The New French Novel: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s objective literature and revisionist realism
• Tableaux and tableaux vivants as semiosis (Roland Barthes): tableau as form and composition, dialogues with traditions, spatial device and critical potentials (early cinema, in Western paintings, Raul Ruiz, Jean Luc Godard, Fellini, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Peter Greenaway, Peter Brooks’ Marat/Sade etc.)
• The “vignette” mode of narration in Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor
• “Parametric narratives” (David Bordwell) and serialism
• Raul Ruiz: anti-Central Conflict Theory, polyphony, multiple time and time scaling, simultaneity, permutation and combinatorials
• Sound image; soundscape; sonification (various sound works by contemporary artists)
• Single and multiple-channel experimental video works and installations by various contemporary artists: Walter Giers, Nam June-paik, Fabrizio Plessi, Franziska Megert, Jim Campbell, Mark Lewis, Isaac Julien etc.)