The only worthwhile film is one that “creates a reality and itself constitutes an experience.”
All else is “criminal negligence” – Maya Deren
If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays – Michel de Montaigne
RMIT Creative Writing and Media students collaborated on a range of writing, sound, and moving image works, to explore the kinds of affective and critical compositions that emerge in the play between the literary and cinematic figures of the essay and poem.
Throughout the semester we experimented with making works that engage with phenomena outside the strictly seeable or sayable. We explored the ways in which the essay and poem (in writing and moving image) allow us to make and think our way into non-representational spaces of Soft Choreography – flexibility, improvisation, experimentation, multiplicity, and thinking-feeling (Mette Ingvartsen).
We experienced a rich exchange between our diverse sets of skills, interests, and disciplines. We paid attention to transpositions and compositions across forms of fiction and non-fiction, image and language, essay and poetry. We contemplated the affective, feeling, abstract potentials of these forms, as well as their potential for deep thinking, and criticality.