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Panels The symposium associated with the New Directions in Documentary Film festival features three panels in which filmmakers discuss the art and politics of the documentary. Each panel focuses on how the films selected for this festival embark in “new directions” across three realms: the auto/biographical, the aesthetic, and the political. A fourth panel features Wellesley alumnae currently working in documentary film. A reading list at the end of this page is provided for those who wish to learn more. Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 6:00 pm AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTARY Featuring Natalia Almada (filmmaker), Ross McElwee (filmmaker and Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking, Harvard University), Susan Meiselas (photojournalist), Robb Moss (filmmaker and Rudolf Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking, Harvard University), Alexander Olch (filmmaker), and Jessica Yu (filmmaker). Moderated by Colin Channer (Newhouse Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, Wellesley College). Ross McElwee’s 1986 Sherman’s March, in which the filmmaker positions himself as a character alongside the subjects he films, is well known to scholars of documentary film for its bold (and wry) use of personal expression. Since then, other filmmakers have pushed the boundaries of the documentary well past that of the film that “documents,” into the region where the film becomes a subjective interaction between filmmaker and history. In this panel, festival filmmakers Natalia Almada, Robb Moss, Susan Meiselas and Alexander Olch, and Jessica Yu join McElwee to consider the evolution of the auto/biographical form, the relationship between filmmaker and subject, and the challenges of making personal documentary. FESTIVAL FILMS TO SEE: Quarry Saturday, October 24, 2009, 11:00 AM WELLESLEY ALUMNAE IN DOCUMENTARY Featuring Debra Chasnoff ’78, Elaine Chin ’95, May Haduong ’00, Myna Joseph ’98, Jennifer Redfearn DS’03, Sonya Rhee ’98, and Jamila Wignot ’00. Moderated by Maria San Filippo ‘98 (Mellon Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies, Wellesley College) and Wini Wood (Senior Lecturer in Writing and Cinema and Media Studies, Wellesley College) Wellesley did not have courses in film studies that she could take when she was here in the 70s, wrote honoree and Oscar-winning filmmaker Debra Chasnoff in a recent email to the festival organizers. Yet Wellesley graduates have consistently been drawn to the cinematic form, whether as a mode of expression, a tool for political action, or a way to engage in sociohistorical discourse. These Wellesley alumnae speak about the ways documentary film emerged as the focal point of their intellectual and political energies. Oh, yes, and they’ll talk about what it’s like to work in the industry. FESTIVAL FILMS TO SEE: Man (Myna Joseph ’98) Saturday, October 24, 2009, 3:30 pm NEW DOCUMENTARY AESTHETICS Featuring Robin Blaetz (Associate Professor and Chair of Film Studies, Mt. Holyoke College), Su Friedrich (filmmaker and Professor of Visual Arts, Princeton University), Scott MacDonald (Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature, Hamilton College), Amanda Micheli (filmmaker),and Laurel Nakadate (filmmaker). Moderated by Margaret Carroll (Professor of Art, Wellesley College). Documentary has firm roots in the avant garde: artists working across media have regularly turned to the nonfiction film form to find new means of visual expression through the moving image. Still, avant garde and experimental films rarely make their way to a broad audience, a fact that panelist Scott MacDonald has worked to address through his well-known series of critical interviews with experimental filmmakers, including Su Friedrich. Robin Blaetz, also a scholar of the avant garde, is writing a book on women working in this mode—and women experimental filmmakers are amply represented in this festival. New work by festival filmmakers such as Laurel Nakadate and Liza Johnson demonstrate a new aesthetic in narrative and political modes; other films in the festival demonstrate the melding of narrative and observational modes. This panel will take into consideration these and other new relationships between image and message, or the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. FESTIVAL FILMS TO SEE: Quarry Sunday, October 25, 2009, 4:00 pm DOCUMENTARY AS POLITICAL ACTION Featuring Thomas Doherty (Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University), Christine Herbes-Sommers (filmmaker), Liza Johnson (filmmaker and Associate Professor of Art, Williams College), Philip Rosen (Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University), and Llewellyn M. Smith (filmmaker). Moderated by Tom Burke (Jane Bishop ‘51 Associate Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College). Since the Cahiers du Cinéma editors declared, in 1969, that all film is oriented toward the political, film scholars have examined the ways that the very structures of film are shaped by, and shape, the values of the culture that produces those films. Philip Rosen’s Marxist film scholarship has been instrumental in developing this understanding. Documentary film can bear more direct relationships to the political, and has increasingly been used as a form of political action and intervention, as American cultural historian Thomas Doherty has demonstrated. The filmmakers on this panel have been directly engaged in producing films that reshape public thinking: Llew Smith through ongoing negotiation of public television documentary’s “history lessons,” and Liza Smith as an artist whose images of life after civic devastation work to resist the saturating images of contemporary media. FESTIVAL FILMS TO SEE: Secrecy For further reading: Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. 2d ed. NY: Oxford UP, 1993. Barsam, Richard. Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992. Beattie, Keith. Documentary Screens: Non-fiction Film and Television. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Blaetz, Robin, ed. Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. NY: Routledge, 2000. Chanan, Michael. The Politics of Documentary. London: BFI, 2007. Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. NY: Columbia UP, 2003.
—–. Hollywood’s censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration. NY: Columbia UP, 2003. Editors. “Documentary Now” special issue of The Velvet Light Trap, no. 60 (Fall 2007). Gaines, Jane, and Michael Renov, eds., Collecting Visible Evidence. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Grant, Barry K, and Jeannette Slonowski, eds. Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Wayne State UP, 1998. Hildebrand, Lucas and Lynne Sachs, eds., “Experiments in Documentary” special issue of Millennium Film Journal no. 51 (Spring/Summer 2009). Holmlund, Chris and Cynthia Fuchs, eds., Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay Documentary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Kahana, Jonathan. Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. NY: Columbia UP, 2008. MacDonald, Scott. Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009.
—–. Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008.
—–. A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, volumes 1-5. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988-2006. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. —. Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Rabiger, Michael. Directing the Documentary, 3rd. Ed. Focal Press, 1998. Renov, Michael, ed. Theorizing the Documentary. London: Routledge, 1993. Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Rosenthal, Alan and John Corner, eds., New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed., NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Rothman, William. Documentary Film Classics. NY: Cambridge UP, 1997. Rothman, William. Three documentary filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Saunders, Dave. Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Vaughan, Dai. For Documentary. University of California Press, 1999. Waldman, Diane and Janet Walker, eds., Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. |
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