Documentary Film, Radio, Photography | Presentation + Production | Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Documentary Mondegreen

Ben Brown — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:24:29 +0000

“A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song .” I just was reading about this one: In Britney Spear’s song “If U Seek Amy,” the lyric All of the boys and all of the girls are begging to if you seek Amy can easily be misheard as All of the boys and all of the girls are begging to F-U-C-K me. Check it out here.

We’ve all played the game telephone, where you whisper a phrase in someone’s ear, and pass on the phrase that you hear, eventually the mishearing and imagination can create some lovely mistakes. What if we designed a project for our collaborative that was a “documentary” version of the game telephone. For example, we would start with a phrase. Perhaps, a myth statement? (I have an idea for one, but I won’t say it.) The first person would go out to produce a short piece of documentary media. It would be screened only to one person, who would write down the myth that they observed. Then the third person, not knowing the original statement, would have to create a new short documentary based on the new myth statement. Several iterations later, we screen the documentaries and the intervening myths in order.

Film Programme Submissions for Sheffield DOC/FEST 2010 Now Open!

UnionDocs — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:16:44 +0000

Filmmakers from the UK and from around the world are invited to enter their new short, medium or feature length films. If you are a debut filmmaker, student director or if you are established in the industry, your new films are welcome.

2009 saw the the best Doc/Fest ever with public and delegate attendance at record levels. But the film programme couldn’t have done it without the 1400 doc submissions we received during the viewing season. Our Youth Jury winner, Special Mention and Innovation Award winner were all selected from our submissions. We can’t wait to see what its in store for us this year.

This year Sheffield Doc/Fest will be accepting film submissions on DVD and, for the first time, via online platforms such as Vimeo and Daily Motion. Why post DVDs when you can get them up on line, save a few quid on materials & freight and help the environment in the meantime?! Special strands in the programme include Music, Sports, Gay and Arts docs and unexpected films are highlighted in the Anti-Docs strand. We are particularly looking for Cross-Platform films again this year. But as always, Doc/Fest is looking for new, exciting documentaries films on any subject, of any length. The Special Jury, best Green Doc, Innovation, Youth Jury Award, Audience prize and the Student Doc Award are all up for grabs this year. All submissions have the potential to be short-listed for the awards, but you have to be in it to win it!

Don’t forget: film schools are eligible for entry discounts. Get your Head of School to write to our programmer for the details. Submissions close on Wednesday 16 June 2010. There’s no time like the present.

For any questions about the film submission process, email film programmer Hussain Currimbhoy:hussain@sidf.co.uk and go to sheffdocfest.com/view/submitafilm for more details.

Don Siegel Tribute: Last of the Independents

UnionDocs — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:55:05 +0000

With a career spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s, Don Siegel is
something of a Hollywood legend. After two Academy Award-winning short
films, Siegel became a director of B-movies right as the Hollywood
studios were falling apart in the wake of antitrust suits and the rise
of televisions. He weathered all the changes in the industry and
throughout a long and illustrious career as both an independent and
studio filmmaker, he managed to create a unique style that is admired
to this day. In honor of Siegel’s legacy, we will be screening Thys
Ockersen’s Don Siegel: The Last of the Independents (1980). Shot on
the set of Siegel’s penultimate film Rough Cut (1980), Ockersen gives
us not only a privileged glimpse of the artist at work, but also
Siegel’s reflections on his own life and career. Ockersen’s film is
not commercially available, so please join us for this cinematic rare
treat.

Presented with Cullen Gallagher as part of Docs on Auteurs.

Cullen Gallagher is a Brooklyn-based critic whose writings have appeared in The L Magazine, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Hammer to Nail, Moving Image Source, Reverse Shot, The Brooklyn Rail, and Guitar Review. A graduate of The New School in New York City, he is currently pursuing his MA in Cinema Studies at NYU.

Two Ideas

Michael Hyatt — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:42:11 +0000

Race and Beauty in Gay Culture

“I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening when we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret to life.”

If beauty were the secret to life, how would you search for it? Would you wake up every morning, searching for signs of it in your face? Or would you go outside to find it elsewhere?

With this project, I would like to document the lives of black men affected by the negative images and symbols associated with the color black.

Detroit

Late last year Time magazine published a cover story: The Tragedy of Detroit.
Somehow, I managed to miss my hometown receiving such notable attention. Or perhaps my brain’s become so accustomed to hearing negative news about the city that I ignored it .

I’ve lived long enough only to watch the city decline. Once a metonym for the booming car industry, the city’s become synonymous with poverty, crime, corruption.

How did this happen? It would be easy to pick up the old Time article and hear what the writer thought, but I would be interested in hearing from the people of Detroit. Current residents of the city and those – like myself – who’ve left.

The Myth of the Stage and its Audience

Will Martin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:34:31 +0000

Stage: n \?st?j\

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French estage abode, story of a building, state, from Vulgar Latin *staticum, from Latin stare to stand

…

2 a (1) : a raised platform (2) : the part of a theater on which the acting takes place and which often includes the wings (3) : the acting profession : the theater as an occupation or activity b : a center of attention or scene of action

———————-

au·di·ence: n

1 : the act or state of hearing
2 a : a formal hearing or interview b : an opportunity of being heard
3 a : a group of listeners or spectators b : a reading, viewing, or listening public
4 : a group of ardent admirers or devotees

The Myth of Maps

Will Martin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:33:49 +0000

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the ext of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the derts that are no longer thos of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real life.” – Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.

Our own mythologies

Katia Maguire — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:15:55 +0000

We move to New York to “make it.” But what does this mean? What is it about New York that inspires people to believe this is the place where they can realize their ambitions? How do these ambitions, modeled into stories and mythologies, relate to the way we actually live right now? How are our present selves affected by our future selves, which are of our own creation?

Silence

Katia Maguire — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:15:11 +0000

A critique we received from the Finnish students who came to visit was that our recent mythology pieces were too text driven—that we relied on text too heavily. Perhaps it was because our inspiration was Barthes’ text, but what would it be like to explore silence? What can we say without actually saying anything? What does silence mean for New Yorkers like us? What does this mean for a video project? How would this challenge us visually? How do you use audio to convey silence? What places would be explored?

DocuGame

Rahul Chadha — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:57:46 +0000

A clique of game designers has proposed the idea that the 21st century will be the “Ludic century.” This theory advances the idea that, much like the 20th century was dominated by the medium of film, the 21st century will see a shift to games as a means to learn, socialize, problem-solve, and think critically about society. I propose we create a docugame to investigate this relatively new medium.

The academic Cindy Poremba seems to be at the forefront of academic exploration of “documentary games.” In 2005, she wrote a paper with Ian Bogost (subsequently published in 2008) examining the idea of documentary games, and particularly to the idea of documentary in film. Academics seem to differentiate documentary games from “lens-based media” through their relationship to a data set that represents “reality.” In traditional film that data set would consist of light that is hitting film, resulting in the photochemical reaction that captures an image. But games are not constrained by this process, and video games in particular can run through “engines” that allow for a variety of documentations to be presented to the end-consumer. Poremba writes, “Documentaries excel in specific instances, but documentary games deal in real virtualities, possibility spaces in which mutiple instantiations for real world activity can exist.”

However, documentary games need not be bound to video games. The game designer Brenda Brathwaite is currently in the midst of creating a series, named the Mechanic is the Message, of six tabletop games, several of which deal with historical issues. She gained a lot of notice for her game “Train,” in which players are forced to deal with the logistics involved in transporting people to Auschwitz.

Exercises in Nonfiction

Joshua Gen Solondz — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:52:30 +0000

The following are two amusing activities for the UnionDocs Collaborative to consider.

1. THE TRUTH

We’ve been so eager in locating and analyzing myths in our culture that we’ve lost all touch with reality. A point had been raised by one viewer during our MOMA Q&A: our collaborative efforts, though well executed and commendable, felt detached and lacked a real sense of passionate urgency. Although the UDC has made an effort to question the representations of “truth” in their media when working on the collaborative project, it could be refreshing to step away from that self-consciousness and to temporarily put on a selfish hat. The groups can remain the same or they can change, perceivable subjectivity is key here. Activist documentary, political video art, propagandists, and video bloggers have all tread this territory. This activity would (ideally) serve as a fun reminder in why we work the way we do, why they work the way they do.

2. A Game For Eleven Nonfiction Workers

Split up into two groups of five (each refered to as a “House“), the remaining eleventh person as a third group (“Free“) . Free assigns a subject, location, budget, shoot and edit deadlines to both groups. Free can change the budget at any time. House members may switch with Free but Free cannot swap positions unless if a House member initiates the swap(with one exception, to follow). Swaps may occur only once a day. Once the shoot deadline has transpired then it is up to the Free to edit both projects. Free/House trade rules differ during editing so now Free can swap with any House member once per day but only when initiated by Free. During the edit period, House now controls the deadline but it can only be changed by a unanimous group vote. Once the final deadline passes on both projects, the works are screened without any further changes.