MassArt Student Screening May 9

Next Saturday, May 9 at 7pm, students from my Intermediate Video: Style and Practice class at Massachusetts College of Art and Design will be showing their films. Despite having full-time jobs, families, or other commitments, these Continuing Ed students have taken on ambitious projects - so ambitious, actually, that most of them exceed what can be done in one semester's work. So we decided to invite a few friends and hold it as a work-in-progress screening. (The public is welcome if you don't mind films that are still in formation!)

There are intriguing intersections in my students' lives and the themes of their non-fiction films, namely: life-threatening accidents that cause major changes, and women in the second half of life finding new direction.  Plus one piece that defies these two categories: a revelatory "exit interview" of a young white woman finishing a year as a VISTA volunteer in a Chinatown cultural group.

A Media Archaeology of Boston

Tomorrow night at 7pm at the Harvard Film Archive there's going to be a dig into 100 years of cinema representation of Boston - from early silent panoramas of the new subway lines to government films, Hollywood blockbusters, 8mm art pieces, 1950s commercials, and YouTube clips.  I co-curated A Media Archaeology of Boston with Jesse Shapins and Olga Touloumi of Harvard's Graduate School of Design and Ernst Karel of the Film Study Center.  It's the opening event of Cambridge Talks, an annual symposium that brings together scholars in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning.  This year's symposium theme is "Mediated Space."

Still a Monkey Dancer

My family and I went to the Angkor Dance Troupe's annual fundraiser last weekend, and I was happy to catch up with all three young people featured in my film Monkey Dance - Linda Sou, Sochenda Uch, and Samnang Hor.  All three are living in Lowell after finishing college, and giving back to their community in different ways.

I was especially pleased to see that Linda is now Assistant Artistic Director of the troupe, and Samnang is still dancing swa pol, the monkey dance - along with his new roles as Lowell High School algebra teacher, gymnastic coach, husband, and .... father!  He and his wife had a baby girl five months ago.  Congratulations to their family!

LOCALITY Show in San Francisco April 2-16

My short video 25th & Mission will be in a group show called Locality at the Mission Arts Center, 2183 Mission Street (between 17th & 18th), San Francisco. The opening party is April 2, 8-11pm, and the closing party is April 16, 8-11pm. Unfortunately I won't be there personally.

I made the seven-minute video, which will play in a loop on a monitor, during my first summer of three living in the Bay Area. The piece was inspired by my family's three-week stay at a friend's studio apartment (international tango artist Hung-yut Chen).

What begins as abstract fields of color gradually emerges to be a portrait of four tiny shops in a block of San Francisco’s Mission district. They are as diverse as the community around them: a Chinese-run laundry, a Salvadoran hair salon, a hipster tattoo parlor, an art gallery. As the camera hovers inches from its subjects, we realize that the seemingly disparate shops are linked not only by their location but also by their inhabitants’ loving attention to the beautification of the varied surfaces they work with.

Making Your Media Matter conference

I was in DC last week for the annual Making Your Media Matter conference hosted by AU's Center for Social Media. It was my first experience sitting in an audience of hundreds of people with laptops open, all surfing the web, emailing, and tweeting reports about the conference as it happened.

George Stoney (above), 87 years old and still making films, spoke on ethics in social issue film.  It was also great hearing from Alice Myatt from Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media about their amazing online database to help connect film projects with funders.

Most of the talk was about outreach for social documentaries. Ages ago, filmmakers would make a film THEN think about its audience.  In the past ten years or so, we've learned that it's good to start your outreach as you are making the film. But one of the big messages of this conference was that now you should start building the audience for your film before you even shoot a frame. Facebook, Twitter, and Blog away!

Sensory Ethnography at Harvard

Last night was the annual screening of works from the Sensory Ethnography class in the departments of Anthropology and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard.  It was an impressive and totally engaging four hours of films taking us from Sudan to Sibera, Quebec to Canary Islands, and Mumbai to Queens.

This full-year course, taught by Professor Lucien Castaing-Taylor and teaching assistant Jeff Daniel Silva, provides graduate (and some undergraduate) students from many different disciplines "intensive training in video production and film studies, with a critical emphasis on exploring alternative approaches to an ethnographic art practice."  This fall I served as Interim Lab Manager of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, which supports the course.

Several of the nine films really struck me.  Alex Fattal's Beneath Trees Tropiques took us on a 30-minute visit to an island in the mouth of the Amazon basin, where families survive in part by chainsawing down the forest where they live.  The film was visually captivating, from its opening — a sustained low-angle shot from a dugout canoe paddled by a restless teenager — to its metaphorical closing on an unusual beast hanging tenuously between two trees.  But more than the visuals, I appreciated the piece's warm humanity, capturing the subtle decision-making of fathers trying to support their families, teens choosing between studies and soccer, and women navigating their own roles in a world defined by men.  These very particular, yet universal, themes interacted quite interestingly with Alex's investigation into "the ethics of deforestation and documentary practice."

Alexander Berman's Songs from the Tundra introduced us to the "awkward modernity" of the Even people in Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula — a reality in which reindeer herding and ancestral folk songs intersect with Cold-War era tanks and three-year-olds playing computer games.  Fatin Abbas's Mud Missive looked at a group of potters in Khartoum, Sudan, and reflected on her own ideas of self and nation.

On the homepage of Harvard's Department of Anthropology, you can see a map of the far-flung research interests of its social anthropology graduate students (and mention of a chance to see more Sensory Ethnography works at the Peabody Museum on February 11).  Of all the films on faraway lands in last night's screening, it was Verena Paravel's 7 Queens that discovered the most exotic characters — on a long walk beneath the elevated tracks of New York's #7 subway line.  Maybe it takes a Frenchwoman to help us see our ourselves through an ethnographic lens.

One side note to this memorable evening: I was curious whether it was a coincidence that almost all of the screen time in these pieces, especially in the audio tracks, was centered on men and boys.  Does this say anything about how ethnographic makers gain access to a community?  Or is it just coincidence?

In any case, it was a wonderful conclusion to the fall semester at Harvard, coming after my last day of work at the Film Study Center and Sensory Ethnography Lab.  Congratulations to all of the students, and to Lucien and Jeff!  And welcome back to Harvard, Ernst Karel (who did great sound mixes for these films).

Family & School Partnerships

On the evening of Inauguration Day I went to CAYL Institute's annual gathering of people who work in and advocate for the field of early childhood care and education.  It was a festive event - a great chance for people from all over the state to catch up on what they are doing.

CAYL also gave a sneak preview of the Principal's Toolkit I am helping them produce, to help elementary school principals incorporate best practices with young children in their schools.  We showed a 7-minute video from the Toolkit - the section on Family and School Partnerships: