History and aesthetics focused on the specific forms of cinema. The subject has a dual, dialectic structure in terms of both content and methodology. It focuses on both the poetics of film and on the histories of film. In relation to the former, it introduces key issues in film theory, with a firm focus on establishing relationships, searching for connections and links to other art forms or philosophical questions. From this perspective, the subject aims to lay the groundwork for certain concepts that will be developed, explored in more complex depth and/or contradicted in Poetika subjects. We will study questions such as the difference between imaginal and imaginary, notions of realism and representation, the dichotomy between tongue and language, and approaches based on phenomenology and reception theories. From a methodological perspective, the aim is for all questions analysed to emanate from the formal operations of cinema itself at the limit of its own existence. In relation to the histories of film, the subject aims to be a space for analysing the problematic aspects of the concept of history itself, introducing the question of how to chart the history of film, based on some of the most important critical writings of the past twenty years. This second dimension takes the form of monographic conversations with film historians. The two parts of the subject are taught in parallel, with constant connections and cross-covers being established.

This course suggests an approach to Basque film. Beginning with an historical contextualization in order to provide the background of the birth and development of Basque film up to the present time, it will carry out a chronological and thematic review of the history of Basque film and will present the most notable Basque filmmakers from its origins to the present day, with particularly close attention to the three (or more) generations of Basque filmmakers who are currently active.

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 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). This year, our guest filmmakers are Claire Atherton, Hlynur Pálmason and Marie Losier.

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.

This subject combines the skills, abilities and methods of the good gardener: careful observation of the environment, walking, selecting a territory, cultivating hybrids and exotic species, grafting and editing, waiting, imagining the passer-by/spectator, projecting a film for the future, taking it out of the hothouse and, when spring is on the way, placing it back in its natural surroundings. The subject includes sessions of theory and analysis, fieldwork and individual tasks, because ultimately, the work requires the filmmaker to commune with the place. Students on the Filmmaking course will have to propose, produce, make, edit and exhibit a film, a garden of images and sounds that will be placed back in nature in spring. The subject is articulated through the participation of five teachers throughout the first months of the course, as the film gardens take shape.

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.

‘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.

Making a botanical film is first and foremost a work of patience and care. Taking as a starting point Stan Brakhage's off-camera filmmaking methods in films such as Mothlight and The Garden of Earthly Delights, we will explore some techniques and processes for the creation of a filmic herbarium.  

Somewhere between the techniques of filmmakers and botanists, we will address the collection of specimens, methods of working on film and the preparation of materials for exhibition, with the aim of creating a collective piece and, above all, to open up the methodology to new proposals.

This workshop is aimed at people from any background 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.

In this workshop we learn how to develop film mechanically on a film developing train. Developing film allows you to understand and appreciate every step of the photographic process, from the capture of the image to its materialisation into a visible negative.  
 
You will learn to control chemicals, exposure times and temperatures and you will develop precise technical skills, but it is not only a technical exercise, it is also an emotional and artistic experience.
 
In addition, by learning this technique, you join a long tradition of artists and technicians who have developed and perfected the art of analogue photography and will gain a richer perspective on the tradition of the medium, from the hand developing workshops to its professionalisation and final mechanisation.

The camera obscura (La Chambre d'ombres) is an absolutely unique project that includes a publication and a film of the same name, both by Camilo Restrepo and produced by EQZE. Its origins go back to a seminar that Camilo Restrepo gave to EQZE students in the 2019-2020 academic year. After completing the seminar, the filmmaker was invited by the centre to produce a work related to the object of study of the workshop: the questioning of the context in which an image, a representation or a vision of the world arises, and the impact that these have on reality. Having completed those two works (a book and a film), The Camera Obscura (La Chambre d'ombres) returns to its origin in the form of a workshop, closing the circle that began four years ago.

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. Students will produce short reports for the partner institution on the artworks studied. The reports will include a description of the work (content, aesthetic, and technical aspects), a statement of risks, and a set of recommended conservation strategies.

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.

This subject offers EQZE students the opportunity of taking on an exploratory role (creative, researcher, curator) within archive-related film and audio-visual practice, bearing the three tenses of cinema in mind: the past, linked to memory; the present, linked to action; and the future, linked to planning and foresight. This philosophical proposal aims to prompt students to think about historical and contemporary cultural and political problems from the perspective of the conceptual framework offered by the concepts of profanation (Giorgio Agamben) and the creative act (Gilles Deleuze).

The aim is to observe, reflect on and question the 'ritual' uses of archives in order to then subvert them through critical and/or playful practices. We will also analyse the practices of audiovisual creation, research and curation as potential means of expressing creative ideas, in the sense attached to them by Deleuze. From this perspective, students taking the subject are invited to question their own practices and ideas and view them as potential spaces for resistance or 'counterinformation'.

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.

The subject aims to prompt a reflection on language, performance and action, both in their specificity and in relation to the limits that define them. Special attention will be paid to the meeting points between different knowledge areas of artistic practice, the exploration of register and performance, action, the indicial quality of the performative register and its transformation into other languages, from drawing to sculpture, text, documents and video, etc. This will enable the definition of a landscape that will allow us to become aware of the body as a sign, as well as the positional value of language and its performative dimension. The embodiment of corporal signs, sounds, words and their transformative and political potential.

Seventy years ago, filmmakers and critics everywhere started to use the French term mise en scène as shorthand for the process of direction. The term remains useful today, but only if we expand its definition far past its classical, theatrical & pictorial origins, and consider the many changing dimensions of audiovisual history, including sound and digital post-production processes. This course is not devoted to the analysis of complete films, nor to the standard interpretation of themes and meanings in cinema. Rather, it is dedicated to looking closely at concentrated parts of films & other new media pieces in order to discern, as best we can, the way that their makers conceived the approach, the logic, the structure, the organisation of elements in the work (which is never exactly the same from one work to the next). How is the style and form of an audiovisual work (in film, TV or digital art) conceived from the inside out?

The Observatory is involved throughout the first trimester of the academic year, providing a space for training, practice and research in sound. 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.

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.

In the origins of film, the cameras used to record images were also used to project them. The operator who worked the crank to capture the moment was also the person in charge of making the gear turn so that, once developed, the images could be projected onto a screen. At what point did these two functions (and these two cameras) separate? And, above all, what were the consequences of this? Why is it that the profession of projectionist is now (and has been practically since the mechanisation of the reel drive and the creation of distribution circuits) so far removed from that of camera operator? The statement made by Henri Langlois, founder of Cinématèque Française, that his film camera was his projection camera, highlights the importance of reclaiming the art of projecting.

The workshop starts with an introduction to the equipment used for sound recording, mainly using the materials available at the school. Students will acquire both technical and practical knowledge. The second part focuses on how to coordinate the workflow in order to send and receive audio files, edit them and deliver the mix. The overall idea is to help students become familiar with the tools used to improve and enlarge the creative space.

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.