AA301

This course is designed to apply media theory to moving image practice. Throughout academia, binary positions that pit moving image as art against moving image as documentary now seem largely artificial. Regardless, for many the terms animation and documentary can conjure an odd pairing. This course examines how hybridized digital film - or animation as defined by Lev Manovich - shifts and broadens how the real can be depicted. Beginning with definitions of documentary by Bill Nichols and Julia Lesage, this course explores, through the lens of theorist Annabelle Honess Roe, how - absent indexical relationship between live action and reality - animation's material difference and a keen emphasis on soundtrack can provide a combination that both lacks and exceeds the visual indexical bond between image and reality.From Winsor McCay's 1918 classic The Sinking of the Lusitania through a host of educational and social guidance films to Dennis Tupicoff's His Mother's Voice (1997), to It's Like That by the Southern Ladies Animation Group (2003) to Marjane Satrapi's 2007 Oscar nominated Persepolis, animated documentary exposes as false the old ultimatum: either artistic or didactic, either aesthetic or political. Emphasis is placed on advanced skills in critical thinking, oral and written communication, and studio work in order to investigate how, within contemporary ethnography, animated documentary can be used to bring breadth and depth to representation of 'the other'.

Pacific Northwest College of Art

Portland