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Patrick J. Friel

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Patrick Friel (he/him) is a Chicago-based educator and film programmer. He is currently an Adjunct Instructor at Columbia College Chicago and has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the former program director at Chicago Filmmakers (1996-2007) and the festival director and programmer of the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival (2001-2015). In 2008 he founded the independent alternative film screening series White Light Cinema. He has presented freelance programs at many venues and festivals, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, the Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives, Cinematheque Ontario, and Anthology Film Archives. He was the managing editor of the on-line Chicago film resource Cine-File from 2008-2021. Friel has also served as a festival judge, festival pre-screener, film festival panelist, grant review panelist, guest speaker, symposium co-organizer, and has written for Film Comment, Cineaste, Afterimage, Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, and Senses of Cinema. He has an MA from Northwestern University and a BA from Indiana University.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Through screenings, lectures, and readings, this course will provide students with an introduction to key filmmakers and films of contemporary international art house cinema. In particular, this class will explore feature-length fiction films that revolve --thematically or structurally--around the idea of the psychological fugue state (a form of amnesia), and/or the fugal musical structure of theme-repetition-variation.

Films will be screened and discussed in their relation to national cinemas, cultural histories, genre, and primarily, film form. Through their critical writing, students will explore the ways those films and filmmakers utilize formal elements of cinema, narrative, characterization, thematic elements, and ideological perspectives, and demonstrate how those elements are used both for aesthetic purposes and to create meaning within a film

Class Number

1088

Credits

3