My cousin, Aeros, graduated from the
Boston Museum School some years ago. She took a good number of film classes while she was studying various mediums (primarily installation and horticultural art) while she was seeing a film student (and now accomplished artist and professor)
Cliff Evans. Many of these fantastic classes were taught by filmmaker
Abigail Child, who's work I fell in love with while interning at the
Filmmaker's Co-Operative in NYC. Aeros was kind enough to pass along some of the course reader's she had kept from her classes with Abigail, right before I left for Prague.
These readers are comprised of seminal texts from situationists, futurists, sound-theoreticians, marginalized feminists, towering film theorists and post-modern critics, creating a sort of penultimate discourse that is of course fucking painfully tautological, seemingly incongruent, wildly erratic in style, and only culminates in that sort of "
french argument" system wherein one must tarry a wide loop before finally reaching an understandable thesis.
But, take my word for it, the loop is undoubtedly well worth it. Jeepers, I would have loved to have taken these classes myself. The same style of argument she uses to assemble her syllabi is what, in my opinion, makes her filmmaking such a brilliant example of cinema as disputation. The complexity of her sprawling structural montage of found-footage is as rich as each of these readers I was lucky to get from my lovely cousin to take with me to Prague...
