This course is divided into two parts. In the first part, students approach the subject from the perspective of cinema by practicing film analysis (see corresponding project). In the second part, they learn to combine text and image to stage their experience of the world.
During the 1ère session, the teacher presents the theoretical concepts allowing to deconstruct what a comic book is, following the previous reading of articles by the students at home. The next two sessions were led by professionals: one by a former student who had done his thesis in comic format and came back to share his experience, and the other by an Italian researcher and artist who had done a thesis in geography on comics. During these sessions, apart from these presentations by professionals, the students are invited to familiarize themselves with drawing, to let off steam in front of this unusual medium of expression. The teacher takes the opportunity to insist on the fact that it is not artistic skills that will be evaluated, but the ability to appropriate a new medium to exercise and stage one's individual view of the world.
The project is then built with the teacher who proposes a general theme each year (e.g., the theme of displacement, crossing borders, etc.) and validates the adequacy of the students' project proposals, if possible autobiographical, with this theme. For example, this year a student chose the theme of confinement to think about the exploration, she approaches the story of her mother's life who lived through the war in Lebanon in relation to confinement. The next step is to explore with the teacher how to link the chosen topic with visual representations or drawings. The productions must combine text and image (comic strip, photo novel, collage, etc.) of at least 5 pages in A3 format. This rendering must be accompanied by a 2-page reflective file on the exercise and presenting the state of the art, the methodology and the bibliography of their project.
Half of the course evaluation is based on the film analysis done in the first part of the course and the other half on the individual written work and the comic book produced. The students understand quite quickly that the evaluation of the second part does not concern their artistic traits, but rather their ability to play the game. The teacher evaluates the acquisition of practical/methodological tools, the capacity to mobilize in a coherent way the articulation between texts/images and the reflexivity/relevance of the remarks. The students have at their disposal the evaluation grid and criteria for the comic strip and the written report.
