31 FILM DIARY – HANNAH BONNER – SPRING 2024

Dear Diary: On Diaristic Films

Spring 2024

Instructor: Hannah Bonner

Description of Course
Diaristic Films will engage any student who loves watching and discussing movies! In this course, we’ll watch movies together like Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving, Jonas Mekas’ Walden, Agnes Varda’s Diary of a Pregnant Woman, Carl Elsaesser’s Itinerary of Surfaces, and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, as well as read diary entries from Audre Lorde, Heidi Julavits, Virginia Woolf, and Sheila Heti’s New York Times Alphabetical Diaries. We’ll tour FilmScene and talk to renowned film makers and professional writers to learn about their careers. We’ll discuss how diary films blend the personal and the political, the mundane with the sublime, as well as keep our own diaries throughout the course of the semester. Students can also play in NWP’s brand-new multimedia laboratory to create their own diaristic videos instead of written papers if they so choose.

Learning Objectives 

• Courteous conversation
• Close reading skills
• Asking thoughtful questions
• Close listening skills
• Research
• Establishing a weekly writing habit

Textbook/Materials

• All reading material and films are available on ICON.
• All students must purchase a physical notebook/diary for the class

Course Grades
Final course grades will be assessed based on your performance in the following activities:

• Participation 25%
• One-Page Description of Final Paper 5%
• Annotated Bibliography 15%
• Rough Draft 2-3 Pages of Final Paper 15%
• Class Presentations 15%
• Final Paper 25%

Attendance & Participation:  Regular and prompt attendance is mandatory for this course. Since a substantial percentage of your grade will be based on class attendance and participation, it is in your interest to attend every class and to arrive with significant contributions to make to discussions. Participation in this class includes making lists of issues for class discussion and giving prepared, oral responses to questions on textual and visual materials.

Attending class is not the same as participating. Your final grade will reflect a combination of both attendance and participation. If you attend every single class period, but don’t participate, the best you could receive would be a low C. Participation can include but is not limited to raising your hand to respond to a prompt, asking a question, generating questions for the class on the readings, volunteering to read aloud, sharing passages from the reading, being the daily notetaker, etc.

Students are expected to engage in class discussions daily. If you have social anxiety and talking in class does not feel comfortable, please talk to me and we can figure out a way for you to earn participation points in a different way. Please do NOT wait midway through the semester to address participation.

Attendance and Absences:

Students are expected to attend all classes and arrive on time. That said, occasionally everyone needs to miss class, whether it is due to illness, family, or personal emergency, or even being overwhelmed by work for other classes. Therefore, I allow each student TWO absences without penalty. You do not need to provide any excuse for these absences, though if you know ahead of time you will be missing class, an email is always appreciated.

There may also be other circumstances in which a student must miss class because of illness, military service obligations, religious holy day obligations, University-sponsored activities, or “unavoidable circumstances” as defined by CLAS. I will excuse these absences only if you provide proper documentation and make up all missed coursework.

University regulations require that students be allowed to make up examinations that have been missed due to illness, religious holy days, military service obligations (including service-related medical appointments), or other unavoidable circumstances or University-sponsored activities. Students with UI-authorized activities must discuss their absences with the instructor as soon as possible. Religious obligations must be communicated within the first three weeks of classes.

Statement on Equity and Anti-Racism: In this course, we will be reading or watching texts that explore gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, power & abuses of power, violence, etc. I am committed to developing an anti-racist pedagogy, and in every class, we will be discussing work by writers and filmmakers of many different backgrounds, identities, and perspectives. Fundamental to this process of learning and inclusivity is maintaining a spirit of respect in our language and body language. It is ok for us to engage with difficult texts and to engage in potentially uncomfortable conversations: this is part of learning. And, at times, we may not know how to fully navigate those conversations. Remember, we’re here to listen to these authors, one another, and to foster an environment where everyone feels seen and heard. However, language that is racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, or ableist harms and excludes students, and will not be tolerated. 

Communication: UI Email
Students are responsible for all official correspondences sent to their UI email address (uiowa.edu) and must use this address for any communication with instructors or staff in the UI community. For the privacy and the protection of student records, UI faculty and staff can only correspond with UI email addresses.

SPRING 2024 Calendar of Course Assignments

This is a tentative calendar and is subject to change. Updates will be posted to ICON and/or shared in class.  Students are responsible for tracking course activities, readings, and  assignments. The master calendar, which includes university holidays and other important deadlines, can be found here: https://registrar.uiowa.edu/academic-calendar

*This schedule is a living document and subject to change based on the interests and pace of the class. Deadlines for assignments and the overall breakdown of grades in the class is NOT subject to change.*

UNIT ONE: DIARIES, SKETCHES, NOTES

The Aphorism. The Fragment – all of these are “notebook-thinking”; are produced by the idea of keeping a notebook. One could trace history of thought / art in relation to the forms of transcription: letter manuscript notebook. The notebook has become an artform…Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn’t write to others any more; one writes to oneself – Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks 1964-1980

Week One (January 15th-19th)

• – Monday, January 15th – NO CLASS for MLK DAY

Week Two (January 22nd-26th)

• – Monday, January 22nd – Sadie Benning’s If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990) 9 min

Introductions; What is a Diary?; Review Syllabus

Tour of FilmScene at the Chauncy at 11:30am-12:30pm & 3:30-4:30pm (404 E College St #100, Iowa City, IA 52240)

NO HW DUE

Week Three (January 29th-February 2nd)

• – Monday, January 29th – Watch Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five-Year Diary, reel 22: A Short Affair & Going Crazy (1982) 24 min 21 sec; Watch excerpts of Megan Boyle’s THANKSGIVING 2023; blue loop, july (2014) dir. Mike Gibisser 5 min

Meditation on Loneliness in Ocean Vuong’s poem “Not Even This” in our personal diaries; Review Final Assignment;

HW DUE: Read Megan Boyle’s Live Blog (excerpts)

CLASS GUEST: Mike Gibisser

Week Four (February 5th-9th)

• – Monday, February 5th – Watch One Year Performance (1980-1981) dir. Teching Hsieh, Degrees of Limitation (1982) dir. Scott Stark,; Watch Cameraperson (2016) dir. Kirsten Johnson 1 hr 43 min

HW DUE: Read Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (excerpts); Read Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes (excerpts)

Week Five (February 12th-16th)

Monday, February 12th – Watch Tarnation (2003) dir. Jonathan Caouette 1 hr 28 min

HW DUE: Read “The Diary Film” by Laura Rascaroli Chapters 5 & 6

One-Page Paper due on ICON by Monday, February 12th at 5pm detailing the visual artist and the writer you want to engage with this semester in your personal archive/diary and the reasons why. How do they speak to your life? Your questions or concerns as a student? A writer? A human?

Week Six (February 19th-23rd)

• – Monday, February 19th – LIBRARY TUTORIAL on Annotated Bibliographies at University of Iowa Main Library (1015A)

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHIES DUE ON ICON by FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23rd by 5pm on ICON

UNIT TWO: EXPERIMENTAL DIARY FILMS

The essential problem of ongoingness is that one must contemplate time as that very time, that very subject of one’s contemplation, disappears. – Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

Week Seven (February 26th-March 1st)

• – February 26th – Watch Walden (1968) dir. Jonas Mekas (excerpts)

HW DUE: Read Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (excerpts)

Week Eight (March 4th-8th)

• – Monday, March 4th – Watch Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) dir. Camille Billops & James Hatch 55 min; Watch 54 Days this Winter, 36 Days this Spring, for 18 Minutes (2009) dir. Dani ReStack 16 min; Watch Diary (2022) dir. Gillian Waldo 16 min 21 sec; Hear Me Sometimes (2020) dir. Sofia Theodore-Pierce 14 min 14 sec; Itinerary of Surfaces (2020) dir. Carl Elsaesser 8 min; and The Red Tide (2022) dir. Sally Lawton 8 min 10 sec

CLASS GUEST: TBA

ROUGH DRAFT OF FINAL PAPER DUE FRIDAY, MARCH 8th by 5pm on ICON (2-3 PAGES)

Week Nine (March 11th-15th)

SPRING BREAK

Week Ten (March 18th – March 22nd)

Monday, March 18th – REQUIRED INDIVIDUAL MEETINGS ABOUT FINAL PAPER (NO CLASS)

Week Eleven (March 25th-29th)

• – Monday, March 25th – Watch The Blair Witch Project (1999) dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez 1 hr 21 min

HW DUE: Read Spencer Williams’ essay “Sight Unseen”

CLASS GUEST: Spencer Williams (Section 0002)

UNIT THREE: THE DIARY AS A MOTIF IN NARRATIVE FILMS

Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes? – Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Week Twelve (April 1st-5th)

• – Monday, April 1st – Watch Grizzly Man (2005) dir. Werner Herzog 1 hr 44 min

NO HW DUE

Week Thirteen (April 8th-12th)

• – Monday, April 8th – Watch Aftersun (2022) dir. Charlotte Wells 1 hr 36 min

NO HW DUE

Week Fourteen (April 15th-19th)

• – Monday, April 15th – REQUIRED INDIVIDUAL MEETINGS ABOUT FINAL PAPER (NO CLASS)

Week Fifteen (April 22nd-26th) – ICDOCS

• – Monday, April 22nd – Class Presentations on Personal Archives

Week Sixteen (April 29th-May 4th)

• – Monday, April 29th – Watch Mary Helena Clark’s Figure Minus Fact (2020) 13 min; Wrap up class; course evaluations; debrief on ICDOCS

HW DUE: Read Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary (excerpts); Attend one screening of ICDOCS

Week Seventeen (May 6th-10th) – EXAM WEEK

Final Papers due by May 6th at 5pm on ICON