I'd like to apologize to Rafael and to Dan, for glib replies to serious topics.
Rafael, the topic of the course sounds fascinating, and there are many films I would recommend, but harking back to a previous topic on the list, many of them are nearly unavailable, esp. in the 3dwld, especially if your nation has censorship policies.
Brakhage's work ***is*** available on dvd, and he is a formalist supreme. Sitney discusses him a lot. He in fact has an entire work devoted to Brakhage, which I haven't read. The one single work which best suits your course title IMHO is George Landow/Owen Land's (I wish he hadn't decided to change his name) _Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter_ . SItney, I believe talks about this film. PAS also coined ( I believe) the term ***structural film***, which of course is all about this same drift of thought. And in terms of phenomenology Tony Corad's _The Flicker_ You can't get much closer to the phenomenological bone than this. Films that use loops extensively like Landow's (and many of my own) sidle up to the trance state to which you allude.
As far as Audio-VIsual languages go - we are into Dan Shaw's question. I would re-phrase it in this case to create a question explicitly for film-philosophers: What are the benefits and what are the risks to calling film ***a language***?
If I think about narrative films, my thinking moves in one direction.
If I think about poetic, painterly, structural or conceptual work in film, I go in a totally different direction.
[My taste in philosophy is away from ***Is film a language?*** and toward ***What do we gain and what do we lose if we describe films with the analytic tools we normally use to describe language?***]
Likewise I move in two very different directions if I think about philosophy as ethics/aesthetics/metaphysics/political, social and moral philosophy on the one hand (all of which may be addressable by narratives); and ontology, epistemology or phenomenology on the other, which film as a ***pure*** medium (dontcha just love it when philosophers use these polemics so off handedly) as distinct from that other medium (the movies) (which is simply an elaboration on the photographed stage-play) can do. Film really can do work in philosophy.
Some philosophers think Wittgenstein never existed. Some think he's full of shit. Some take him seriously and have moved their philosophoical speculations and experiments to a less grammar constrained medium.
dan
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