April: Thinking with Dub Cinema. As part of an ongoing conversation initiated with Kodwo Eshun (who will unfortunately not be present) this seminar will examine the intersection of dub music as sonic process and cinema as a visual and auditory medium, focusing on how dub, when applied as cine-sonic process, can offer a particular method for the representation of history within filmic narration. Building upon Greg Tate (1988) and Okwui Enwezor’s (2007) conceptions of the Black Audio Film Collective’s “Handsworth Songs” (1986) as “dub cinema”, this seminar will explore the implications of how and why dub’s methods of versioning, repetition, echo and delay might create a cinema with a “spectral treatment of historical footage” (Tate) as a means to represent “the scattered trajectories of immigrant communities” (Enwezor). We will watch films from The Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa, Philip Donellan, Pratibha Parmar, and listen to music from people such as Jah Shaka, Test Department, Throbbing Gristle, Black Sabbath and Oneness. May: Teaching and Research in South America and the Caribbean. This will include a session on my experiences teaching in Cuba at the International Film and Television School, a session on my research with the Zapatistas and indigenous filmmakers in Chiapas, and finally a series of group crits of the student's work. June: The Infinite Rehearsal. This seminar will look into the use of theatre as a means of creating a collective working environment for the production of a specific form of "direct cinema". Focusing on methods of improvisation, adaptation and translation we will draw examples from the films of Med Hondo, Jean-Marie Straub Danièle Huillet, Jacque Rivette, and The Living and the Dead Ensemble, as well as from the literature of Frankétienne, Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris, to see how different artists have approached “spiral retellings” and "infinite rehearsals" of preexisting narratives in theatre, literature and cinema. The aim will be to see how static and fossilised notions of authorship, directing, acting and rehearsal might be dislodged to open up the possibility for a form of free-improvisational cinema.