This program is not available for summer 2024 due to the 2024 Olympic Games.
Channel your inner Godard or Truffaut and break the rules of conventional filmmaking. Create original, experimental works while living in the City of Lights.
One of the most captivating cities in Europe, Paris retains its timeless legacy as an artistic, intellectual, and literary pacesetter. The Eiffel Tower, symbol of the city, dominates the skyline. North of the Seine, the Right Bank is home to monumental buildings, grand boulevards, and major museums, including the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou. The Left Bank (rive gauche) invokes a Bohemian and intellectual atmosphere with its university communities, cafés, restaurants, jazz clubs, and chic boutiques. NYU Paris is located in the Latin Quarter, the thriving historic and intellectual heart of Paris where students have the opportunity to benefit from the numerous cultural, artistic, and academic institutions of this celebrated neighborhood.
In this program you will become familiar with the unfamiliar. As you screen avant-garde films from some of the greatest French experimental filmmakers, you will learn the language of French experimental cinema. You will understand how the filmmakers have challenged conventions and then bring those techniques into your own films.
Field trips include visits to le Musee de Louvre, Jeu de Paume Museum, Musee d'Orsay and the Cinematheque Francais, as well as contemporary video art galleries.
"Without making an experimental film, I think I wouldn't have expanded my conceptualization of story as much as I have now."
— Saunder Boyle, Experimental Production Workshop,
summer 2018
Curriculum
Students will enroll in the following two courses for a total of 7 units.
Please Note: Students studying abroad on a Tisch track are not eligible to pursue an internship (except for Theatre in Ghana and Television Writing in London). Tisch programs do not provide work visas.
IFMTV-UT 1049 | 4 units | Instructor: Darrell Wilson
A production course in which students experiment with non-narrative approaches to content, structure, technique, and style. Themes and orientations include many possibilities, such as music, choreography, visual or audio art, investigations of rhythm, color, shape, and line; poetry, fragmentation and collage, abstraction, performance; and subversion of linear narrative and documentary conventions. Working in groups of four, you will direct and edit one performance-based project shot on location, and direct, edit and sound design one final proposed video. (Prospective students who wish to direct films are encouraged to obtain a list of proposal guidelines for each section from the professor before the semester begins.) Note: Films produced for Intermediate Experimental Workshop will not be eligible for awards in the First Run Film Festival if they are longer than 15 minutes, including titles. All films produced in Intermediate Experimental Workshop will be screened if entered in the First Run Festival, but those longer than 15 minutes will not be judged.
Note: Students should bring their own laptops and can access their Adobe Creative Cloud via their NYU Net ID.
Note for NYU Tisch Undergraduate Film and Television Majors: The maximum length for an intermediate film to be eligible for NYU Tisch Film festivals is 8 minutes.
This class is a critical examination of experimental film and video with and emphasis on makers in France. There are no criteria for an avant-garde film or video, only the expectation that by watching it a viewer will be introduced to a challenging, refreshingly unfamiliar language that, by the end of the piece, he or she will have begun to speak. This new language many be politically confrontational, aesthetically difficult, lyrical, or rhythmical, but no matter what the form, it will express the particular vision of the artist who produced it. Challenging as this work may be for any audience, a close viewing of these “avant-garde” pieces will expand on your appreciation of their poetry and complexity. Whether you call these films experimental, alternative, independent, personal or poetic, they share very little save for their adventurous desire to reawaken those dormant visual and aural sensibilities that may have been hypnotized into years of sleep by too much commercial, mainstream media.
Student Arrival: Thursday, July 6, 2023
Student Departure: Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Summer 2024
This program is unavailable for summer 2024.
Admissions
The summer 2023 application is closed. This program is unavailable for summer 2024.
Prerequisites:
Tisch Film Majors: Sight & Sound: Film (FMTV-UT 43) and Sight & Sound: Studio (FMTV-UT 51) or Sight & Sound: Documentary (FMTV-UT 80), Production Safety & Set Protocol
(FMTV-UT 101). No exceptions will be made for the prerequisites. Prerequisites will not be waived.
NYU Non-film majors: One Sight and Sound course, Fundamentals of Filmmaking I (OART-UT 560), or Fundamentals of Documentary Filmmaking I (OART-UT 580)
Visiting Students: College Level Experience in Film Production
Application: Please read the following application requirements before starting your application.
Note: Students should wait to receive their admissions notification and confirmation that the program is running prior to purchasing airline tickets. Students accepted to the program should purchase refundable airline tickets and/or travel insurance in the event the program is canceled or program dates are changed due to world events. It is strongly recommended that students purchase insurance for trip cancellation, flight cancellation, luggage loss or damage, as well as medical and accident coverage.
Students are responsible for arranging their own transportation to/from the program.
Students are responsible for any COVID-19 testing required to travel to the program location and to return home. For the length of the program, students will be enrolled in GeoBlue Health Insurance. Students traveling beyond the dates of the program are encouraged to enroll themselves in GeoBlue Health Insurance.
Housing for this program is mandatory. Please note: Your choice of room preference or residence hall preference (if available) is not guaranteed. None of the NYU Paris housing options are air-conditioned.
Visit the NYU Paris website for housing options and descriptions.
