Extraordinary Professor in Film and Visual Media in the Faculty of the Humanities, Prof Annie van den Oever, gave an open lecture titled Strangeness effects, visual media, and the art experience at our university on Tuesday 7 April 2015.
Van den Oever’s recent research on film theory, television, narration, media technologies, aesthetics, and the grotesque, is published internationally in Leonardo (MIT), Cinéma et Cie, Critical Insights, Film Philosophy, Image & Text, and the Dalkey Archive Scholarly Series.
During her open lecture, Prof van den Oever showcased a scene from the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest. Using this scene of Cary Grant’s character waiting next to the highway and then being attacked by a small airplane, Van den Oever explained how Hitchcock ? for one ? was able to use strangeness as an innovative artistic technique.
“Media itself is often only a means to us and not something we tend to study in itself,” Van den Oever said.
She also shed some light on how new technology of our times often lead to the further use of strangeness in either the new or old media. Especially when thinking back on our first time experiences with certain media, be it television, email or cell phones, we experience a novelty effect along with the strangeness.
A Crash Course Week in Film at the Drama Department
Students of the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts from the University of the Free State were exposed to a high demand course this past week when they were given a “crash course” in Early Cinema History. In the absence of the department’s Film lecturer DeBeer Cloete, who is currently completing his PhD in the Netherlands.
Department Head Prof. Nico Luwes invited none other than Prof. Annie Van Den Oever from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RUG) and Extraordinary Professor for Film and Visual Media at the Faculty of the Humanities of the University of the Free State to present eight topics regarding film studies, in two hour lecture slots per day over four days. The result of this quick, intense course of learning was a didactic driven “crash course” as Prof. Annie puts it that span history and theories of film for over a century.
The course introduced the students to the so-called birth and early history of cinema and opened their minds to see film in a different light than they had before. Franco De Wet, a second year Drama student remarked: “To be honest in the beginning I had no idea what was going on, but after reading the prescribed material and attending the lectures it struck me how incredible something like film, that our generation has been exposed to our entire lives, and that we take as a given, grew and evolved over time to what we know as film today”.
This quick learning environment held the attention of the students and there was a definite drive to acquire further knowledge from the texts Prof. Annie Van Den Oever and DeBeer Cloete made available to them on Blackboard. The students were given reading assignments every day which would prepare them for the following sessions the next. On the last day the students were given a pop quiz on the week’s work and the results were surprisingly high. This crash course allowed students a taste of what studying film for post graduate studies might entail and should be implemented in the curriculum more often, in the opinion of master student and teaching assistant of the course, Mark Anthony Dobson: “I think it is an innovative didactic, academic tool which helps students to realize in which academic fields of study they would like to pursue post-graduation. And in my case I ended up changing a few topics in my own study. What a Great Week.”
“Being a Master’s student one jumps at the chance of assisting ones Department in any task, just to escape the terrors of writing yet another paragraph or reading yet another article, even if it is just for a few hours. So when I was asked to assist with this past week’s lectures I jumped at the chance. Now as a student in the Performing Arts, one regularly has to deal with high demands from ones Director, Stage Manager, disappointed parents (who hoped you would study something related to a different kind of Theatre) and of course the ever looming opening night performance. But the crash course created a great week” - Mark Antony Dobson, master student and this week’s teaching assistant in the Dept. of Drama and Theatre Arts.