Film School Time / Time Wasted. Back and forth between cinema and classroom.

Film School Time / Time Wasted moves back and forth between the exhibition space, the cinema and the classroom. The artistic part of this PhD research in the arts consists of three film works — Reading Time (8 min, video, color, without sound), Times 2 (66 min, video, color, without sound) and Leçon d'objet (Object Lesson) (30 min, video, color, sound) —and/in the solo exhibition Time Wasted. The dissertation consists of two collections of texts: Film School Time: Essays and Time Wasted: Notes on a Course. In the text collection Film School Time: Essays, Herman Asselberghs connects an attentive reading of texts (by Roland Barthes and Dirk Lauwaert) and a careful viewing of films (by Jean-Luc Godard and Vincent Meessen) with his teaching at the art college. Through his writing, the film artist shows an attachment to a pendulum swing between critical immersion and amorous distance, in cinema and pedagogy. Throughout five essays, he emphasizes the importance of an experiential environment in which efficiency and functionality are subordinate to agile curiosity and focus on shared, reciprocal attention. Cinema and classroom here appear as collective sites for engagement with the world and possible resistance to institutional forces. In the text collection Time Wasted: Notes on a Course, Asselberghs explains in detail his research and film practice. He traces the making of and the thinking behind the film works, which came about, also together with students, within the walls of the art college where he teaches. In four chapters, he dismantles the expo and each film to make sense of both their processual creation and their precise effect. In an introductory reflection, he reflects on the time-space in which his doctoral trajectory took place. In both his film work and his writing, Asselberghs reflects on affinities and differences between cinema, classroom and exhibition space as settings that can generate attention. Central are the relationship between image, spectator and viewing environment as well as broader reflections on attention, school and the impact of digital media and screen proliferation today. The filmmaker-author-researcher draws inspiration from engaged pedagogy (by Jan Masschelein, Maarten Simons and bell hooks) in which freed time, attention, presence and and ideas of equality, reciprocity and dialogue in education are central. The classroom is seen as a dynamic, performative space where everyone participates equally in a community of study. Asselberghs draws parallels with his film practice, which he approaches as a collaborative enterprise of observation, concentration and exchange. Keywords: research in the arts, artists moving image, film studies, screen studies, art school, attention ecology, engaged pedagogy, essay film, exhibition making