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VII. Documentary Film Summer School

The University of Lugano, Switzerland, in association with the Locarno International Film Festival, organise from July 30 to August 5, the seventh Summer School on the analysis of non-fiction films.

In a period marked by ever-increasing narcissism and a recurring need to anchor one’s identity to visual heritage, the relationship between cinema, biography and autobiography takes on extra significance. It is a complex relationship, existing as it does in a space of hybrid production, closer to the private and experimental sphere than to that of industry. Portraits, self portraits, filmed diaries, travel reportage, essay films, video letters, family films and video confessions have, since the sixties, obliged film makers and theoreticians to reflect on numerous aspects: the role of the author, the dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity and between private and public, the relationship between memory and the imagined and between authenticity and cinema mediation, etc. The biographical and autobiographical domain leads to the identification of a series of disparate materials which can be classified under the ambiguous title of “personal cinema”. Driven by very subjective reasons, motivated by a curiosity about the self and the other which calls into play the very roots of identity, tending towards exploration which is often obsessive, personal cinema represents, on one hand, a strong direct link to reality, and, on the other, a genre which crosses the border of literary tradition to become the privileged means of expression of an ego by now definitively bound to image.

With the contribution of acclaimed filmmkakers (Alina Marazzi, Jacqueline Veuve), renowned academics (Raymond Bellour, Christa Blümlinger, Francesco Casetti, Giovanni Cesareo, Vinzenz Hediger, Giuseppe Richeri) and professionals (Heino Deckert, Federico Jolli, Alessandro Signetto, Tiziana Soudani), the 2006 Summer School aims to examine the salient points of a very topical debate in which the relationship between cinema, biography and autobiography reveals a working outline that is wide ranging and multifaceted, with its boundaries in a constant state of flux.

The Summer School - whose scientific committee is composed of Francesco Casetti (University of Lugano and Catholic University of Milan), Maria Cristina Lasagni (University of Lugano), Giuseppe Richeri (University of Lugano) and Margrit Tröhler (University of Zurich) –is open to 30 university students from Switzerland and abroad, and offers them the opportunity to explore the techniques of analysis and the processes of creation and production of the documentary film through the following teaching activities:

Cinema, Documentary and (auto)biography

Workshops on the documentary film

Meeting the professionals of the documentary film industry

Round Table “The biographical and autobiographical documentary. In a feminine key”

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Deadline for application: Saturday, 1st July, 2006
The Film Summer School full programme may be found at the website.