FAMS Bruss Seminar Fall 2021 Final Project
During their Fall 2021 seminar, the students in Professor Amelie Hastie’s Bruss Seminar Writing Together: Film and Feminist Collectivity practiced collaborative and collective writing. The students’ final project included an epistolary exchange between members of the class in which the students sent postcards to each other via campus mail. On one side of the postcards were images chosen from films they watched over the semester, and on the other side, discussions of the films and readings they studied. “These postcards are our way of combining images, the written word, and the seminar’s theme of collectivity”, said the students. “Each of us, with our own images, ideas, and perspectives, interact with one another in order to create an exchange of experiences and to produce one unified piece of work: this is what collectivity means to us.” In Writing Together, students learned the importance of having multiple perspectives when analyzing a text, and these multiple perspectives allowed them to develop their ideas as a group and in conversation with existing ideas, ultimately generating a collective conversation. During the study period that follows the end of the semester, they created mobiles with the postcards and displayed them in the Frost Library, in the Keefe Campus Center, and in the Valentine Dining Hall.
Images came from the following films: One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (Agnès Varda, 1977), News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1976), Song of the Exile (Ann Hui, 1990), 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008), Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2020), A Death in the Gunj (Konkona Sen Sharma, 2016), A Girl at My Door (July Jung, 2014), But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999), Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985, Passing (Rebecca Hall, 2021) Night Cries (Tracy Moffatt, 1989)