Crossmedial Exhibitions and Cinematic City
In a little over three weeks we’ll start again with our course The Cinematic City, on the representation of the city of Amsterdam in fiction and non-fiction cinema. Last year we did a fascinating pilot with KPN and Surfnet with use of 4G and IPads, which results where recognized by Surfet as Best Practices. See for this the Dutch spoken film on YouTube. We hope to repeat the experiment this year.
This year we will also work with so-called knowledge clips, in which my colleague prof. Bert Hogenkamp and I explain two basic texts, which students need to read before the course starts. Thus our course starts already on a higher level. For the knowledge clips, made by the Audiovisual Service of VU University, I was filmed before a greenscreen and also had my first experience of autocue.
At this moment we are in the fifth week of our yearly master course Crossmedial Exhibitions, this year dedicated to two exhibitions the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam: Anthony McCall Solid Light Films and Other Works, and Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory. For the Crossmedial Exhibitions course we had interesting meetings with various collaborators of EYE, involved in the two exhibitions mentioned: Mark-Paul Meyer, Claartje Opdam, Sanne Baar and Marnix van Wijk. We were toured around the two exhibitions in the Fall and last month. We also visited the interior of Desmet’s last cinema Parisien, now at the Filmhallen cinema in Amsterdam-West, and viewed Peter Delpeut’s delightful, operatic compilation film Lyrical Nitrate (1990). I indirectly collaborated to the Desmet exhibition by writing an article on the film posters in the Desmet collection and also gave a lecture on this. Lately, I was interviewed by Dutch television (NPO2) for the popular history program Andere Tijden [Other Times], which organised a special issue on Desmet. In addition to Desmet’s relatives and collaborators of EYE, I was interviewed as the ‘film historian’. Which I am. Apart from other jobs, that is. Such as the coordinator of the MA Comparative Arts and Media Studies. If you understand Dutch, here is a link to the program: http://www.npo.nl/andere-tijden/24-02-2015/VPWON_1236039
Ivo Blom 