Open Classroom: Goodbye to Language and Others

This Spring, join students and faculty from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies as we open classroom screenings to the public. This time, we’re highlighting Professor Daniel Morgan’s course Between Theory and Practice, which looks at filmmakers who were also critics and theorists: filmmakers who wrote about other films and filmmakers, about moving-image media more broadly, and, most of all, about their own work. 

Usually, 3D effects are built on a model of realism, producing an image of the world that feels roughly like the way we experience the world. The effects they generate—as when objects coming out of the screen at the spectator—are based around this underlying correlation. The films in this screening look at the technology and aesthetics of 3D cinema, and attempt to provide radically alternate models for experiencing space. Marc Downie creates 3D works that highlight the sudden emergence of the z-axis, drawing heavily on a flat presentation only to explode it through depth and abstraction. And Jean-Luc Godard, in Adieu au langage, not only dispenses with a resemblance to human vision but takes the very technical premise of 3D—the two cameras whose images are then combined into one—and radically separates them. The result of Godard and Downie’s work is a radical reimagining of what a 3D cinema could do, and still might be. (France/USA, 2014-2020, 90 min.) 

Daniel Morgan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. He has written extensively on André Bazin and other figures within the history of film theory, on contemporary trends in film and media theory, and on the broader implications posed by considerations of film form. His books include Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (2012) and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera (2021). 

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