Application

Xiaolu Guo: Fall 2020 Writer-in-Residence

Xiaolu Guo is a novelist, essayist, and filmmaker. She grew up in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, which she left in 1993 to earn an MA at the Beijing Film Academy. She moved to London in 2002, and in 2013 was named one of Granta’s Best of the Young British Novelists. She has made a number of films including the feature She, a Chinese (2009)—a response to Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1967 La Chinoise—which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival. Her 2011 feature UFO in Her Eyes is a cinematic adaptation of her novel of the same title, about upheaval in a small Chinese village following a UFO sighting. Her 2018 documentary feature Five Men and a Caravaggio was inspired by Walter Benjamin. In 2019, the Whitechapel Gallery in London held a complete retrospective of her films. Her third novel, “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers” (2008)—the first of her books to be written in English— was nominated for the Orange Prize and has been translated into 26 languages. Her memoir, Nine Continents, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 2017. Following in Barthes’ footsteps, her most recent novel is titled “A Lover’s Discourse” (forthcoming in 2020).

Fall 2020 Course

Visual Narrative: Writing for Film and Television

JRN 3650-3650H: Fall 2020

Wednesdays, 2:30 – 5:25

This course will inspire young writers interested in visual narrative. We will focus on the role of the screenwriter and examine various methods of developing a dramatic screenplay. In-class workshops will address the construction of dialogue, characters, scenes, and stories, as students learn to edit and critique their own and others’ work. We will look at the difference between original screenplays and adaptations, examining works by writer-directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Wong Kar-wei, Jane Campion, and the Merchant Ivory team. We will also explore ways of writing for television genres and discuss the keys to success of series such as Twin Peaks, and Fleabag, with other examples from Europe and Asia. During class, we will watch film excerpts and discuss the relationship between text and image. Required readings will include excerpts from various screenplays and novels. Each student’s final project will be a cinematic writing piece (15-20 pages), which will be workshopped in class.

To apply for Xiaolu Guo’s course, you must file an application before your registration date. If you have any questions, please contact the Harman Director, Professor Esther Allen: Esther.Allen@baruch.cuny.edu

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