This is an introductory course on the aesthetics and history of cinema, approached from the crossroads of the present; a moment in which, beyond the crisis being experienced by the very concept of history as a totalising narrative, real suspicion is spreading about the ordering of diachronic time and the idea of progress. Specifically, the subject questions whether it is even possible to chart the history of cinema from our own time. And it does so in the hope that it is, or in other words, with the aim of telling the (hi)stories (plural) that together make up the history of cinema.  In a more general sense, it is also a subject about time, pure and simple.  Throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, the categories that have traditionally be used to structure a hundred years of cinema, all of which are based on stylistic dichotomies (classicism vs. modernity) or teleological parameters, have been called into question by the different movements of revisionist historiography that often transcend the cinematographic. Cultural studies, affective theories, media archaeology, the analysis of reception, cultural materialism, ecocriticism and gender and postcolonial studies are just some of these critical approaches. Historians have added the word ‘turn’ to their vocabulary (the affective turn, the archival turn, the materialist turn), graphically demonstrating the need to rethink the linear and evolutionist approach that has traditionally been adopted in relation to cinema. 

However, from localised places of resistance, collectives and minorities focused on microhistory and subaltern histories, alternative narratives from below, critical stances that oppose academic hegemony and university sufficiency have arisen.  How, then, can we approach the narrative of film history without automatically rejecting our heritage or falling into the trap of denialist cynicism, an exogenous and scientistic perspective, or a simple lack of curiosity? To what extent should the narrative of film history in a film school also be the narrative of our own memory? Are we part of that history we reject? In this sense, this subject on time in cinema is also a subject on our time in cinema. 

With the aim of addressing the possibility of history not only theoretically but also from an applied perspective, the subject proposes a dialogue-based methodology featuring divergent yet complementary voices throughout the different sessions. The idea is to construct a paradoxical and plural history that is open, rhizomatic, nonlinear, carnivalesque and metamorphic. In this sense, we will follow the path laid down by Nicole Brenez when she warned that ‘cinema never ceases to tear itself apart, to deepen its fractures, to vary the powers of the discontinuous and its double, to work on the caesura and to allow defection to work.’

The subject seeks, in a practical way and through daily shooting and editing sessions, to explore the mechanisms by which fiction is activated and developed. Halfway between the basic work carried out in Avant-Garden and the production-based approach proposed by Zinefabrika, this subject serves a transitional purpose in the journey that is the Master’s degree: based on observations of the real world, it poses questions and formulates hypotheses to weave together characters, situations, atmospheres and stories. The subject therefore focuses on how the time of a shot begins to condense as a promise of something else, something that students will have to specify through their daily deliverables.

This subject invites you to explore manual black and white, negative and reversible development procedures in the laboratory. Using material filmed at the school, you will learn about the specificities of each development process. You will also come to understand how the chemical substances used interact with both the structure of the film and other key aspects for ensuring adequate conservation. This subject is common to both the Film Preservation and the Filmmaking itineraries.

‘Technique has a bad name,’ wrote Richard Sennett. ‘It can seem soulless. That’s not how people whose hands become highly trained view technique. For them, technique will be intimately linked to expression.’  Based on these ideas about sensory and technical knowledge, about ‘the hands of the filmmaker’, Zinefabrika proposes viewing production as a means of creation based on limits and limitations. 

Zinefabrika is an extended workshop on the films we can make, because the most important thing is to do by learning and to learn by doing. Focusing on students’ end-of-course projects, the workshop analyses ideas and films from the perspective of production, taking for granted that this task is also an act of creation. At the end of the day, the aim is to ensure that students’ films are the result of the circumstances of the present, and by doing so, to lead a more general change away from clichés that view production as the simple execution of a standardised plan that is similar in all films. From this viewpoint, Zinefabrika explores issues linked to budget, funding, team building, shooting plans, the compilation of dossiers and production strategies.

This subject emerged from an invitation extended to three filmmakers with very different trajectories and outlooks to systematise and share the tools of their respective creative processes. Despite the fact that each project has a different origin and requires a specific formalising approach, the following question is posed: is it possible to identify any constants in the process of creating a film? 

Our guest filmmakers will share their intuitions and notebooks and let us have a look at their computer desktops. They will also reflect on the way in which they approach their films (more intuitive in some cases and more systematic in others).   Methodologies of creation in no way aims to reduce creation to a set of guidelines or systems. Quite the opposite in fact; it is a proposal for exploring the mystery of creation and observing oneself in this absolutely singular (and to some extent impossible to share) process of giving shape to a film.

The focus of this subject is the technical skill of the filmmaker. It is not about technology, but rather about the knowledge (thinking, and also expression) that resides in the filmmaker’s hands, in the making of the film itself.  It is what the ancient Greeks called techné: skill, art or technique in the sense of practical knowledge and the ability to carry out a specific task effectively. At the same time, and as is so often the case in certain areas, the subject is also a field in which crops are rotated annually. During the 2025-2026 academic year, we will work on two projects: the haiku project and Anton Chekhov's ‘The Cherry Orchard’. Academic proposals change and transform from year to year, but six essential methodological principles that mark the boundaries of the kitchen garden remain unaltered: a) focus on discipline and technical skill (with a certain methodical obsession), b) trust in the thinking of the hands, always act first, c) marginalise the desire for self-expression, d) recover the knowledge of the imagination (and intuition), e) practice the art of getting lost, and f) learn to wait, with hope.

The aim of this subject is to teach you to develop film mechanically on a film developing train. This enables you to understand and appreciate every step of the photographic process, from the moment the image is captured to its materialisation in the form of a visible negative. Learning to master chemical substances, exposure times and temperatures will not only help you develop precise technical skills, it will also provide a unique emotional and artistic experience. This subject is common to both the Film Preservation and the Filmmaking itineraries.

This course will bring students closer to the basic tools and techniques for filming in analogue and digital format combining theory and practice: lighting, colour, photometry, optics, and camera. We will assemble the filming equipment in 16mm and super 8, load film and review the material available in EQZE. The course will also serve to clarify the doubts regarding the rules of use, reservation of equipment and availability of film during the course.

How does our "Hypothesis" project take shape? What method do we use to bring our abstract ideas into the concrete of a film? How does it give rise to its singularity? And how does the desire to work towards a film arise and sustain itself? These are some of the questions we can begin to think about in this course.
 
"Against the Blank Page" proposes an approach to film writing that moves the search for our film to a present time that expands, questions and complements the time of constant future potential to which the traditional development processes of our projects lead us. The course aims to present a method of creation that starts not from the written word but from the shot itself. The way to a film can already be a film. The idea is not to avoid the film script but to avoid the conventional and already over-trodden paths of film pre-production that can lead to blocking and alienation. The blank page and the work in solitude will be replaced by a collective and experimental audiovisual laboratory methodology that will generate approaches, dialogues, rehearsals, sketches, "B-sides" and other hybrids that will glimpse a singular path towards a possible and concrete form of the project.
 
All kinds of results will be accepted: short or feature-length experimental films, fiction or/and documentaries, installations and any other alternative in the interaction of images and sounds.  

The course will follow the path of the "Hypotheses" and their "Akelarres". The starting point will emerge from a shot containing a first concrete element of the project, be it photographs, recordings, interviews, texts, found materials, or any other testimony of the film to come.

Film history and film criticism are disciplines that are constantly engaged in a creative and critical process of rewriting. Filmmakers and critics do not create from scratch—their work is always, consciously or unconsciously, a response to previous artistic manifestations. In recent years, audiovisual essays have become a prominent example of this critical rewriting. In this subject we will establish relationships between different audiovisual essay formats and different periods, trends and ideas in film history and criticism. The subject also includes a practical exercise.

The Observatory  provides a space for training, practice and research in sound. It starts from the zero degree of listening to deny the existence of silent cinema, explore the impact of technology, the sound design of gestures and everyday objects, radio art, sound ethnography, sound art... In addition to pre-established themes, it can also adapt to the specific needs of group members at any time, linking into practical work and projects under development.

This course, which takes place the first four modules, seeks to confront students with the nature of their film and the methodology of approach. Where does your film come from? What is it about? What emotion is it trying to arouse? Can it be told in images? How does the author want the spectator to feel at the end of the screening? From these and other issues, the course is intended to initiate – or get back to, in some cases – the processes of reflection and development of the work process that will culminate in the film. The course basically focuses on three points: first, working with the Starting Point or origin of the film as the soul of the creative journey; second, the need to expand the scope of this journey from concrete elements capable of adding complexity and depth to the film and, finally, the concreteness of the project from the writing stage.

Words are worn out, sunk under the weight of unconscious use. They come and go in a lazy drift, victims of inattentive use and learned inertia. This subject invites you to set fire to that dull tumult of dry words. It aims to rescue them from indifference, open them up, one by one, and place them in a text. But to do this, we must first cultivate a certain degree of linguistic craftsmanship. It is not about waiting for inspiration to strike, but rather about writing a lot and reading even more. Genius, the muse, pneuma, or the duende, as Lorca would say that ‘mysterious power that everyone feels and no philosopher can explain’, cannot be taught and has no instructions manual. Yet, as Baudelaire observed it ‘obeys, like hunger, like digestion, like sleep’. Therefore, the only way to reach it is through work, process, practice: immersing oneself in the technique, so that when it arrives, it finds fertile soil. 

Igniting the word is therefore about observing with open senses, searching for the precise word, the exact phrase, the necessary image. It is, in essence, a writing workshop that uses the ignited word to summon emotion.

Making a botanical film is above all a work of patience and affection. Taking as a starting point the methods of film without a camera and some tricks of the amateur gardener, we will create a collective filmic herbarium, from the collection of specimens to their projection.
 
This workshop is aimed at people from all backgrounds who want to explore alternative methods of filmmaking. Cinebotanicals are, after all, accessible proposals that allow the reuse of filmic support materials and tools to give rise to a piece whose control always remains in the hands of nature itself.

Using a case study format, this course engages students with complicated contemporary artworks in order to understand the primary issues and emerging strategies for the conservation of media art. Artists use a wide variety of audiovisual formats and technologies to create complex installations that are fascinating to study. Examples range from artworks using obsolete components like TVs (cathode ray tubes) to multi-channel synchronized works, works using game engines or custom code, or works that pull data from the Internet. These artworks typically contain many interrelated parts that must be deciphered and documented to ensure the artwork will function in the future in a manner that is faithful to the artist's vision.

The course combines curatorial and conservation perspectives in the study of several artworks held in the collection of a local contemporary art museum. Students research exhibition histories, consult institutional files, examine an artwork's component parts, and discuss the artworks with museum staff. In the process, a great deal will be learned about the interpretation, care, and conservation of artworks in museums and archives.

This workshop looks at the production of home-made photochemical emulsions. Although it is based on film archaeology, it explores many contemporary creative questions. It is a workshop for those interested in the history of materiality, although it will also appeal to filmmakers curious about film not just as a means of storing their ideas, images and soundtracks, but rather as a material that actively forms and distorts these ideas, images and sounds.

The last stage in the gradual acquisition of knowledge, skills and abilities linked to the processing of photochemical films. The subject introduces students to the techniques and workflows of a professional laboratory through the practical handling of specific technologies for developing (16 mm colour and black and white), colour correction and copying. By acquiring these practical skills, students also help maintain inter-generational knowledge of the film culture and industry that would otherwise be lost. Furthermore, those on the course can assume responsibility for processing the film materials generated at the school, thereby keeping the EQZELab service active.

This subject focuses on the audio-visual of artist in the context of the Basque Country. It takes as its starting point the fluid relationships of the moving image and the displacements between cinema and artistic practices, especially those that take places in the art system: museums, art centres and galleries, or in the outskirts of the cinema itself. Based on a series of case studies, viewings, outings and guests, the subject examines the local landscape of audio-visual creation.

Right from the very beginning, cinema has always been a colour medium, and many different processes have been developed to add a touch of colour to black and white images. From chemical tints and tones to manual painting, the development of Technicolor and modern emulsions, film has always used colour as a means of artistic expression. In this workshop we explore the original colour of film and the aesthetic possibilities that these techniques offer to filmmakers and artists.