Animation offers an abbreviated story of the trajectory from cave paintings to digital pixels. As exaggerated as this claim may seem, it reverberates in a range of moving image practices that surround us and thus worthy of further exploration. This workshop explores the distinctiveness of animation in the age of the moving image. With this brief in the works, we will see how scholars deem animation proto-cinematic since it precedes film and anticipates digital. It’s a zigzag route from drawings and optical toys to pixels and codes with no straight story in place about the rise and persistence of animation, approaches that will dominate our seminar. That filmmakers have been enthralled with animation even while facing the dominance of narrative cinema inspires the theoretical questions in this course. The rich variation of animation practices, varied in both size and scope, allows for no settled definition except to direct us to look closer at the variedness in which time and space move and bend in the arts of animation.
To grasp the historical and geographical variations of animation are both challenging and intriguing, additional vectors that chart other ways to mark distinctiveness. For heuristic purposes, the syllabus carves cartography of different practices of animation, which will be remapped along conceptual lines at the end of the course.

A number of readings will be provided before the workshop and shall reflect on the screenings and more.

Dates: 

• 19th June 16:00-18:00: screening followed by a brief discussion;
• 20th and 21th June 10:00-13:00 & 14:30-16:00: morning seminars and afternoon screenings followed by brief discussions;
• 22nd June 10:00-13:00: morning seminar.

Lalitha Gopalan is an associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies and South Asia Institute. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of Film Theory, Feminist Film Theory, Contemporary World Cinemas, Indian Cinema, Genre Films, and Experimental Film and Video. Her current book project explores various experimental film and video practices in India. She is the author of Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002) and Bombay (London: BFI Modern Classics, 2005), and editor of Cinema of India (London: Wallflower Press, 2010).

Early Bird (Ends 27th of May): Students: 25€  ||  Academia: 50€  ||  Other professionals: 75€
Normal: Students: 25€  ||  Academia: 100€  ||  Other professionals: 150€