Blog written by Patricia Zimmermann, codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and professor of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College

Last night in the intimate Iger Recital Hall at Ithaca College in upstate New York, baritone Brad Hougham and pianist Deborah Martin reminded me why I love programming the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).

Collaboration. Interdisciplinary exchange. Big, messy ideas. Problems to be resolved. Brilliant colleagues. Learning to see, think and hear in new ways. Figuring out how to get new audiences for experimental works.  Music. Projected images. Risk.

After a long day of teaching in Ithaca College’s internationally recognized School of Music, Brad and Debbie arrived to do a master class with 50 FLEFF interns.

The purpose of Hougham’s and Martin’s visit to Iger last night: to explain why they are pairing The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) with the Ruckert Lieder (Mahler)-- two pieces of modernist music at opposite ends of the musical spectrum-- for the opening night concert of the Finger Lakes Lakes Environmental Film Festival on Monday April 11 at 8:15 p.m in Hockett Recital Hall at Ithaca College.

Hougham started with a question: what’s the theme of this year’s FLEFF? 

Checkpoints! 

He explained that he, Debbie and Jairo Geronymo, a Brazilian Berlin-based pianist who will also be performing, developed the concept to checkpoint these different musical styles against each other--Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Gustav Mahler's Ruckert Lieder.

Both emerged out of the early years of artistic modernism that disposed of classical symmetries and representations. The Rite of Spring premiered on May 29, 1913, to riots from the audience (somewhat disputed by historians, who debate whether it was the music or the experimental ballet that ignited the crowd). Mahler died two years before, in 1911: a historical period where music jumped into new ideas, scales, tonalities, dissonances, structures.

As higher education becomes more and more corporatized with so many dulling-the-senses administrative meetings on policy and curriculum, it’s easy to lose touch with what made us all endure the grind of graduate school in the first place: a love of getting lost in complex ideas beyond the self with others.

I often marvel at how FLEFF forces me to slow down and interact with colleagues across the Ithaca College campus in their professional, more public, more national intellectual and artistic capacities—not as professors on some committee, or teachers overwhelmed by grading research papers. But, rather, as intellectuals and artists alive with risky ideas in conversation with the world.  It is an incredible privelege. My music school colleagues' insights into music and their incredible concerts transport me to a place I would never have imagined without them.

Phil Wilde and Ann Michel of Insights International, who are also the FLEFF’s producers and internship coordinators, experimented with projections of ambient media of clouds in a digitally-altered red sky as the students arrived for the interns practica. 

Multimedia concerts solve some very difficult outreach problems for festivals, classical music,  and experimental works: all face taxing challenges of attracting audiences beyond the committed and the converted. 

The alchemy of juxtaposing ambient experimental digital imaging, custom-designed screens built to be held rather than hung, and Stravinsky/Mahler performed live catapults all three into a one-time-only spectacle that pulls in curious, energized audiences. And it aggregates niche audiences into one big one:  classical music fans, experimental film/new media mavens, performance art, the curious, rockers, cinephiles. Some people come just to dress up. 

It’s not a film that will drop to live streaming a week later, a disposable, migrating commodity. It's not a pirated copy of a concert ready for MP3. It’s live and it lives. And it packs the concert hall. 

Wilde and Michel have collaborated with FLEFF and Ithaca College for the last 8 years on the Onward Project, an initiative to explore new commissions and new ways of projecting/performing new music for silent film.  Each project presents problems to be solved, new musical idioms to be learned, and new collaborations to gel.

They wanted to test out various ambient and archival images to see what would work for the multimedia projections on traditional screens and mobile screens cut in shapes evoking the graphic angles of early modernism for the actual performance on the opening of FLEFF’s 2001 edition, Checkpoints.

Harkening back to the historical roots of The Rite of Spring as an experimental ballet, FLEFF interns will enter the stage holding these screens cut apart in odd shaped triangles and distorted squares.

The Rite of Spring is primal and violent, the Ruckert Lieder are translucent and transcendent. The Rite of Spring is propulsive disjunction, while the Ruckert Lieder elaborate a unity of feeling. The Rite of Spring is dense, while the Ruckert Lieder evoke an image of glistening transparency.

The music will be intercut, pointing and checking against each other. Dialectics pulse in both pieces. Stravinsky was a Russian living in exile in Paris; Mahler, who suffered profoundly as a Jew in Austria, an internal exile in his own homeland. The Rite of Spring was designed as a ballet but the aggressive syncopated rhythms were undanceable. The sadness and translucency of the Ruckert Lieder suggest what Brad Hougham dubs “smiling through tears.”

As Martin elaborated, contrast between works can “amplify their modalities and strategies, bringing a more dynamic and visceral understanding of musical complexities to an audience. “ The Rite of Spring’s violent energy, dissonances, and polyrhythms amplify more when paired with the Ruckert Lieder’s ethereal, wandering, probing lines. 

Martin pointed out that music leading up to The Rite of Spring was inching towards “crossing over the line” to work with a whole new palette of rhythms, tonalities, forms.  Stravinsky jumped completely over the line with The Rite of Spring, according to Martin. And, as a result, he wrote one of the defining compositions of 20th century music in the west. 

Explaining the subtleties of the Ruckert Lieder, Hougham pointed out that if Stravinsky dove full head-on over the line into an uncharted musical domain, Mahler carefully placed one foot over the line, gentling stretching and morphing the lieder form. With its long lines, the Mahler's melancholy Ruckert Lieder “intermingle an overarching profundity with familiarity,” noted  Hougham.

While Martin and Hougham explained the music and performed it, Michel and Wilde projected different images to test out what might work for FLEFF’s opening night performance. Some abstract processed images from Microcinema’s ambitious and one-of-a-kind  ambient media that evoked the contours and jagged lines of early modernist art. Some archival film distorted by blurring and slow motion, in loops, of lovers walking in a forest.

Here’s what made me shift from being completely anxiety-ridden and nervous about putting together this multimedia concert that took the almost inconceivable idea of pairing Stravinsky with Mahler ‘s lieder and then making new kinds of screens for projection: Debbie and Brad performed for us in that little recital hall. They gave the interns a way into this gorgeous, complex, evocative, disturbing music.

Martin played some sections of The Rite of Spring on the Steinway in the room, demonstrating the way in which dissonant chords were mounted in complex, syncopated rhythms influenced by modernist interest in primitivism. She pounded out these chords. She played some of the more melodic parts of the score, demonstrating the contrasting elements of this music. She then played a range of ostinato sections (passages where the music idiom repeats), and showed where shifts and turns happen. 

Hougham sang  Ich atmet' einen linden Duft!/I breathed a gentle fragrance. His left hand waved at the piano, motioning how the piano accompaniment wafted in counterpoint to the musical line of the song.

Wilde and Michel keep experimenting with the abstract projections and slowed down archival images washing the screen behind the performers, working on the right mix. I was struck by how the interns got to see the process of collaboration, how experimentation means trying something out, discarding it, trying again, listening, thinking, brainjamming ideas with others.

Hougham and Martin reminded me that the greatest musicians  are so much more than virtuosos (both Brad and Debbie are that, and more). Truly brilliant musicians possess an ability to open up a new world of complex sound and image to us. They invite us to cross that line Martin and Hougham talked about to take a risk with them. 

Elegant virtuosos like Hougham and Martin go to the edge of their performances, someplace that is unknown, a bit scary, but gorgeous. 

And they ask us to join them in this uncharted place of smooth melodic lines, dissonance, and abstracted projections. And to get lost in it.

                                                                  * * * * * * *

THE CHECKPOINTS CONCERT FOR FLEFF 2011 is MONDAY APRIL 11 at 8:15 p.m. in Hockett Recital Hall, Ithaca College.  Dress is formal, or your version of it.

Blog post written by Patricia Zimmerman, professor of cinema, photography and media arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.

While democracy protesters jammed into Tahrir Square, the Egyptian government cut off and then opened up the internet and Facebook, and British students from the anti-cut movement mounted large demonstrations in the streets of London, the Documentary Now! Conference at the University of Westminster on January 28-30 staged some emerging, key debates about scholarship, exhibition and practice of documentary.

The conference opened with a screening of the feature length documentary  48 (2009) with Portuguese filmmaker Susana De Sousa. Composed entirely of still image portraits taken by various police and security forces of captured political dissidents during the Portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974), the film looks simple but isn’t.  As De Sousa noted, she contrasted the official history inscribed in the images with the unofficial history of the sound of the resistance. 

The voices of the prisoners, involved in different resistance movements both above ground and underground, describe their political work and how they survived physical and mental torture, including sleep deprivation where prisoners were kept awake for 18 days, endless bouts of dysentary, nails ripped off, bodies assaulted.

We never see current images of the political activists and internees who narrate their stories. Instead, we scrutinize the way the military and security forces rendered their faces into historical records. De Sousa explained that she decided to never show the people "because that would divide the film into times, the present and the past, and I wanted to bring the experience and memories to the present, in a more complex temporality with  the images.” The film does not focus on individuals, but instead  exposes the system of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, a history still repressed and silenced.

Organized by documentary scholars Alisa Lebow (Brunel University)and Michael Chanan (Roehampton University), the annual Documentary Now! Conference in London bills itself as a “conference on the contemporary contexts and possibilities of the documentary.” Lebow and Chanan have written extensively on the forms and function of the committed documentary. 

Both have championed moving documentary film studies away from its American/Eurocentric axis: Lebow has not only advanced queer documentary, but Turkish Cinema, and Chanan is a leading figure in writing about Cuban and Latin American Cinema. The conference bears their imprint, because its organization refuses to accept safe categories or traditional thinking about documentary. For example, smaller symposia often feature mostly senior, established scholars. But Lebow and Chanan programmed almost as many PhD students as senior level heavyweights.

In the context of the mammoth job-marketing, career-advancing conferences mounted by the likes of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) and the International Communication Association (ICA), the intense collegiality and think tank intensities of a smaller conference like Documentary Now function as a most welcome and much-needed respite.  Documentary Now offers a place to test out new edgy ideas, connect with scholars and makers pushing the envelope of scholarship, and engage in conversations about ideas rather than about program cuts, tenure battles, and the end of the humanities as we used to know it.

The three days of panels and presentations mapped the unresolved political and ethical issues contemporary documentary studies engages. An outstanding, provocative panel called “Dis/Embodied Voices” featured scholars Bella Honess (England), Patrik Sjoberg (Sweden) and Laura Rascaroli (Ireland) probing how the fracturing of sound, voice, image, portrait, face challenge the documentary referent as unified, suggesting documentary form as a philosophical, rather than representational, enterprise.  

Rascaroli advanced the idea of the “interstice”, a textual and extratextual space, a “crevice that engenders something new.” Sjoberg’s paper queried how “hidden subjects” –like faces covered by the burqa, the mask, the veil, or rotoscoping and animation of social actors, bring to documentary an argument about hidden, defaced, distorted, destabilized identities which foreground voice over image.

In a fascinating panel on “Television and the Everyday,” noted British documentary scholar and intellectual pugilist Brian Winston returned to the Griersonian documentary, threading the relationship between acting, direction, and the realist documentary project. Noting the “utter directorial failure” of the films produced by Grierson for the General Post Office, Winston observed how a film like Night Mail  “performed dialogue previously observed.” He contended that the failure of these British films from the 1930s to deal with fascism, war, and depression demonstrated how they ran “away from social meaning.”

A panel on "Musical Docs" raised issues of how music functions in documentary. Does it invoke and rework narrative deployments, where music connects with emotion, or can music function as another layer of textual complexity, challenging and reworking images? Julian Savage (Brunel University) explored how music travels between the exotic, the political, the colonial, the resistant, the postcolonial, and the imaginary in a documentary project about Tahitian music called Upa Tangi Reka. Tracing and tracking Tahitian ukulele bands, he argued for a concept of fissures between the colonized/ savage, the orientalist and the immersive.

Other panels and talks explored the persistent ethical tensions in documentary.  At “Authenticity or Artifice”  British scholars and practicioners (Angus Carlyle, John Wynne, Pratap Rughani, Paul Lowe) explored field recordings, sound art, documentary narrative, and photography. A panel called "Critical Perspectives" looked at documentary through the lenses of philosophers Walter Benjamin and Roman Jakobson. Michael Renov’s (USC) plenary lecture, “The Compilation Film: The Chorus of Bits and Pieces,” revisited the long trajectory of films constructed from other films as metatextual practices with a nod to Jay Leyda.

But documentary, as envisioned by Lebow and Chanan, has moved well beyond the flat-on-the-wall, fixed analog forms that are the stuff of documentary textbooks. 

The complexity and proliferation of new media forms and interfaces not only extends previous documentary strategies, but also unhinges and troubles them. One senior scholar told me that new media and new technology functioned as just another form of “opium” but also conceded he/she would like to actually learn more. Elizabeth Cowie, an influential feminist film theorist, asked, in a spirit of intellectual generosity, how new media and installation can be considered documentary, in that their forms destabilize some central epistemological and definitional tenets.  

Keith Marley (Liverpool John Moores University) and Geoffrey Cox (Huddersfield University) presented an ambitious but somewhat aesthetically and conceptually undeveloped live video performance inspired by Vertov’s city film mixed with club culture as an alternative to a traditional academic paper. The panel “From Viewsers to Activists” investigated the internet, YouTube, and Britain’s video activist movent. 

The Open Space/New Media and New Documentary Forms Panel (which, full disclosure, I mounted and spoke at) looked at how new media, installation, and user-generated archives in Southeast Asia, a hub for new technology and digital arts,  have shifted documentary into a more collaborative, horizontal,  iterative modality where technology meets space meets people.

The panel featured Singaporean cutting edge new media artists Michael Tan and Jesvin Yeo from Nanyang Technological Unviersity (NTU), scholar/curator Sharon Lin Tay (NTU/Middlesex University), and filmmaker/curator Nikki Draper (NTU) discussing the Shaw Foundation/NTU funded new media curatorial project, Open Space/Singapore/Southeast Asia, mounted at the ICA conference in Singapore in 2010.

A closing session called “Video Activism Workshop” featured Ann Burton, from the Confederation of Trade Unnions in the UK,  as well as Richard Hering and Hamish Campbell from VisionOn.TV, a user-generated, citizen media site, discussing how social media, cheap video technologies, and Web 2.0 revise the definition of  “activist media”(note to readers: I’ll be writing another post on this panel, so stay tuned).

Documentary Now in London demonstrated that documentary constitutes one of the most malleable, shape-shifting, platform-crossing, politically-challenging forms of media. And it also showed that lively conversation and debate amongst a heterogeneous group of international colleagues offers maybe the most vital form of social media on the planet.

Blog post written by Patricia Zimmermann, professor of cinema, photography and media arts at Ithaca College, and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

The Big Question

Film studies online? Impossible, you say?

This winter term, I took the dive.  I gulped down the red pill and jacked into the matrix of online film studies.

And I am having one of the absolutely most transformative and best teaching experiences of my career as a film studies prof.

I have to thank Facebook for teaching me how to engage by asking questions and responding, rather than lecturing and having positions on everything…crazy, I know.

I nestled my intro film studies course into a participatory Web 2.0 environment.  I decided to teach online. Insane? Not quite.

I figure, if students can argue about the delicacies of self-amputation in 127 Hours and the obsessive intricacies of anorexic, self-scratching ballerinas Black Swan on Facebook, they can handle some discussion about Battleship Potemkin and other, well, battleships of film history.

I tossed out all of my graduate-film-school-in–the-1970s-cinephiliac-film must-be- seen-in-a-theater–on-35mm-film-preconceptions along with all of my dog-eared copies of Christian Metz and various imaginary signifiers this winter.

And I dove into teaching an intensive two week winter term course called Introduction to Film Aesthetics and Analysis for Ithaca College.  Online.  All of it. And, I’m having one of the best teaching experiences ever. 

Impossible?

Here’s some context.

Context #1

Film studies is not one of those intimate, 10-15 person, sit in a circle, know your professor, talk-a-LOT-about-your-impressions kinds of experiences. The topography features a body of knowledge to learn, complex histories to understand, and methods for deconstructing films that require rigor. And reading. Lots of it.

At Ithaca College, our lower level film studies courses are large, like they are at most places that teach disciplinary based undergrad film. My Intro course had 155 students, with “small” (really?) break out sections of 32. I love the large classes. Programming films and ideas for a large, mostly eager, crowd entices intellectually.

But here’s the rub. 

I’ve only taught smallish classes a handful of times in three decades of teaching—a couple of 24 person seminars at Ithaca College, and then, some seminars on new media  during two different stints at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I’m one of those traditionalists, with lectures, books (more than one, and at least 100 pages a week ), and screenings on big screens, often in the local art cinema on 35mm.

So online, guess how many students I have? 5.

Yes, that’s not a typo. 5. 

I know them all. They are reading more than Julian Assange at WikiLeaks.

They write EVERYDAY. I can drill into their exegetical work on the readings as well as their analytical work with much more precision and care than when I have so many more students. 

In this context, I can coach them to become more sophisticated deconstructors of cinema, and more persuasive argumentative writers. I’ve seen these students make huge, huge leaps in just two days after absorbing detailed criticism from me in the form of track changes, a system I actually use when doing collaborative research with partners in different parts of the US.

Context #2

For the last two years, I’ve been working with Sam Gregory from WITNESS, the nongovernmental organization working with human rights participatory media,  on a large, on-going research project probing ethics in human rights social media. 

We’ve been thinking quite a bit about questions of representation in participatory online environments where images and words circulate, remix, morph, change. In these networks, images can not be controlled.

So questions of who says what to whom in what channel--traditional research questions of communication-- and how and why it said--the domain of traditional documentary studies-- shift a bit. When social media meets human rights meets advocacy campaigns in RL (real life), the body enduring oppression and the bodies recirculating its images in Web 2.0 landscapes end up functioning as equal parts of the equation.

Production and consumption, representation and exhibition, giving voice and sharing voices,  merge. And this blend is rife with ethical problematics. The human rights issues of protecting the dignity of the victim get amplified, as images can no longer be controlled, and representations are no longer fixed.

This research has prompted me to rethink how my students engage online with courses. 

What parts of what they do in a class should be public, open for circulation and commentary? What parts should be shared in a controlled environment open only to the class? What parts should be private communiqués between professor and student? 

Can thinking through the ethics of human rights social media and forms of engagement that connect to important advocacy campagins about rape in the Congo or water rights in Bangalore be mobilized to engage another group that is not part of the power elite, and can also be victimized by networks, i.e. undergraduates? 

Is there a way to organize a course to traverse these different kinds of publics, respecting the dignity of the student in a human rights framework? And is there a way to think of teaching as advocacy work for serious intellectual engagement? 

My tentative, provisional answer: yes

Context #3

The third context emerges from my sabbatical teaching at Nanyang Technological Univesrity in Singapore, a country besotted with bad press and postmodern orientalism.

At NTU, one week of every term is MANDATORY (yes, you read that right, MANDATORY) online education, called e-learning week. This week where faculty are instructed NOT to appear in their classrooms was not prompted by some marketing firm telling an institution of higher education to get with the dizzying apps of Web 2.0, or any dreams of creating a profit center to offset the Great Recession. 

A small country at the equator, Singapore also boasts of the best public health systems in the world. 

Connection, you ask? 

Well, it turns out that e-learning week is designed for emergency preparedness in case of  punishing monsoons or the need to quarantine to stall the outbreak of deadly diseases like SARS.

Full disclosure: I was quite skeptical about doing film studies this way. But this was a case study in the lessons of cyber-Buddhism. My students taught me something I would never have learned in an e-learning seminar--they loved it. 

They wrote more, argued more, watched more, dug in deeper, and engaged complex ideas in a more systematic way. They studied media produced around the war in Vietnam, which, in Southeast Asia, is actually called The American War.

IMPOSSIBLE to hide, and IMPOSSIBLE to not participate (well, I required participation by specifying the number of postings required on Blackboard. ) students just keep on writing, and writing, and writing. I learned that how I structured the discussion board questions made a huge difference: questions need to eschew easy, instrumental answers.

I also learned to just keep asking questions.  That’s my Facebook apprenticeship (shout out: my friend and writing collaborator Helen de Michiel pushed me to get on FB about two years ago. She told me to imagine it as a  “cocktail party” not a “soapbox.” Thanks, Helen!)

Lesson Learned

Since I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1970s, the discipline of film/media studies has pushed and pushed to frame cinema as a “text.” 

The convergence of semiotics, structuralism, Marxism and feminism argued films were constructions that obscured power relations, meanings, and ideologies. Doing a decoupage of a film, cutting it apart shot by shot to unpack its structure and meaning, was central.  

We were all a bunch of decoupage junkies. The thrill of the deconstructive kill.  But back then, it was really hard to do: you needed an archive with a flatbed editor. 

As film theorists Charles Acland, Barbara Klinger and Dale Hudson have pointed out, cinephilia has changed. Films  no longer function as rare objects in archives. Screens  multiply, shrink, blow up, expand, migrate.  

Films are finally, after all these years, TEXTS. Literally, figuratively and metaphorically.

Netflix functions as an archive, but then, so too does Amazon, Ubuweb, archive.org, and Facets Media. Films live on DVD and also get streamed. 

And, in the space of about five years, it's no longer a Hollywood-only environment—my students purchased  Fatih Akin’s Edge of Heaven, Deepa Mehta’s Earth, Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless, each for the cost of sending five text messages from London to Ithaca on Verizon. 

In film studies, we have moved from cinema as a place of aesthetic worship to cinema as an object you can collect, dig into, discard, trade, loan, slow down, speed up, take apart. 

Rather than lamenting the end of film rental budgets that often support modernist ideologies of artifactual fetishization, maybe we need to explore what possibilities this proliferation of images in a new technological dialectic might offer us. I doubt any of us film profs out there will have our once-ample budgets restored.

And, we can now move cinema studies online, and finally, three decades after the “linguistic” turn in film studies, film is finally, at last, a text. Students can buy them like textbooks or CDs of their favorite indie bands, do close readings, and learn the addictive thrills of decoupage as undergrads, all while jacked into their Macbooks. 

In my online class (full disclosure, it’s running while I type these words and students are posting on the use of color in Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad ), I can work much much more closely with students on developing exegetical skills to describe structures of arguments and deployment of facts.  

In a world of quick status updates and sharing feelings, systematic exegesis is, uh, undeveloped. A lost art. So is deductive, analytical writing, where one drills into a film (read text) and works through how it negotiates a concept or a history  derived from readings in a systematic way.

It’s not about whether you  “relate to” or “like” a work ( refrains I hear repeatedly from my hordes of first year students who are experiencing analytical film studies for the first time), but how you engage its structures, and find patterns,and think about meaning. 

These two skills—exegesis and analytical writing—constitute the most necessary professional skills for any job, whether in the entertainment industry or selling stocks. 

Both require time, detail, patience to learn, a pas de deux of trial and error, gentle coaxing and hard critique, between teacher and student. With less students, it’s possible to function more like an Olympic coach of a top athlete than as a police officer of syntax.  And my five students respond like world-class, elite mogul skiers, adjusting and recalibrating based on my constant feedback.

I will admit a few things to you. Teaching film studies online differs from the embodied version. They are not equivalent. They offer different gifts.

The online class  slants more towards very very close readings of both the films and the books. While it deemphasizes group viewing, it amplifies writing, an epistolary engagement rather than a performative structure. 

The students write so much more than they do in a traditional course. It’s harder. They can’t sit back and plug in their iPods and cruise FB and pretend to listen. They write in public on FLEFF blogs, they write in semi-private on discussion boards, they write to me privately with their assignments. Like my thinking about social media and human rights, it's a process of exchange and respect for what circulates.

I have a suspicion that they are learning something new about how to think about and how to see cinema in a way that differs from their multiplexed pasts. 

And I have finally learned, after all the traumas and insecurities of graduate school,  that all those theorists from the 1970s had it right: film, and film studies, is a TEXT.

FULL DISCLAIMER

In case you're thinking I'm a cinematic heretic, l do believe adamantly in the power of cinema as a collective experience that can jolt your senses and mind like lightning in a theatrical setting. 

Of course. That’s why we became  film professors in the first place,  its why film festivals intoxicate us, and its why we so passionately and often desperately want to invite our students into a larger conversation about cinema that exceeds the limitations of commercial blockbuster intoxications. 

Maybe online film studies teaching can function a bit like e-harmony, a sort of online dating service with conceptual ideas about cinema that are bigger than you, but that you eventually want to meet in the flesh. Or on celluloid!

Blog posting written by Patricia Zimmermann, professor, cinema, photography and media art at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

What Makes Me Mad

We need more top ten lists of the best documentaries of the year. 

Enough of this entertainment industry pablum about the rise of the theatrical documentary.  Most of the documentaries celebrated in these reviews are American, use narrative arcs and characters, and draft genre conventions to minimize complexity, abstraction, and explanation. 

Here’s my challenge: we should multiply and amplify as many lists as possible of the best documentaries of the year. And not just the wanna-be-theatricals-coopting-community-as-outreach-until-the-feature-is-greenlighted films.

This is that endlessly fun time of year when e-blasts from Variety, the New York Times, The Village Voice and Indiewire announcing endless top ten lists percolate like mustard seeds popping in hot oil in a wok in my inbox. 

Okay, I’ll admit it: I love the lists.  

They rank up there with the Academy Awards as beloved film rituals that mean everyone I know will want to chat about film rather than the Republican coup d’etat in Washington.   How glorious:  at my local haunts, Island Fitness and  Gimme Coffee, the talk shifts from Obama and nautilus and  sustainable coffee to…cinema.  Heaven!

These lists jab me with guilt about films I saw earlier in the year that drifted away from memory. And then they flood me with regrets about other films that I never got around to seeing or that only had a short run at Cinemapolis in Ithaca. Netflix can’t remedy the exhilaration of a packed house and popcorn.

But something really, really bugs me about these lists. They overflow with commercial American industry narrative films with big budgets for marketing even though the films pirate the ambiguities of episodic plots and exploration of philosophical ideas from international art cinema. So please, DO NOT TALK TO ME ANYMORE about BLACK SWAN!

Professional film reviewers joust to outdo each other to write the most pithy one-line descriptions advertising their penetrating wit and puns. They always seem to toss in a film that only rarefied people who go to film festivals in Rio, Seoul, Mumbia or Berlin can see. 

What I Did About It

So, I am fighting back.

I'm reverse engineering these lists. I ‘m crowdsourcing top ten lists, call it participatory listmaking, or the end of the US centric cinematic empire of the top ten list. 

I popped out a status update on Facebook asking my friends for their picks for groundbreaking and game-changing documentary of 2010. Then I culled the lists and put them in alphabetical order.

If you want to know what the films are about, just click on the link. If you want to add a film, just slide it into the comments section of this blog, or find me on Facebook. 

Oh, I forgot to mention something. On my lists, the films don’t have to be theatrical. They just need to be game-changers. 

The Results

Bhutto (Duane Baughman and and Johnny O’Hara, USA, 2010), submitted by Elisabeth Hoffman, Northwestern University in Qatar

Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, USA, 2010), submitted by Terry Huynh, Los Angeles

Exit through the Gift Shop (Banksy, USA/UK, 2010), submitted by Jason Longo, self-employed Director of Photography

His and Hers (Ken Wardup, Ireland, 2009) , submitted by Matt Fee, Ithaca College

I’m Still Here (Casey Affleck, USA, 2010), submitted by Emily Gallagher, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York

Last Train Home (Lixin Fan, Canada/China/UK, 2010), submitted by Elisabeth Press, Open Plans, New York

Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, USA, 2009)  submitted by Patricia Zimmermann, Ithaca College

Tears of Gaza (Vibeke Lokkeberg,Norway/Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2010) , submitted by Bjorn Sorenssen, Norwegian  University of Science and Technology

The Regretters (Marcus Linden, Sweden, 2010), submitted by Patrick Sjoberg, Karlstad University, Sweden

Waiting for Superman (Davis Guggenheim, USA, 2010) , submitted by Dave Prunty, Ithaca College

Post written by Patricia Zimmermann, professor of cinema, photography and media arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Agriculture and Cinema?

What do agricultural economics and cinema have in common?

Stumped?

Two words.

Cynthia Phillips.

And five more... the Global Social Change Film Festival (GSCFF) slated to unspool in  Ubud, Bali, Indonesia April 13-17, 2011.

For Cynthia Phillips, the founding director of this new festival, the challenges of food security, world hunger, poverty, and sustainable futures lead directly and logically to film and media for social change. 

A New Film Festival in Indonesia

The Global Social Change Film Festival and Institute focuses not on film markets, deals, auteurs, landing big movie stars, discoveries of the next breakthrough genius, or launching the next new wave.

“We’re about creating spaces for dialogue around these films,” explains Phillips. “We want to connect filmmakers and activists for community building.”

To this end, the festival plans to convene filmmakers, activists, and audiences for meaningful discussion in Bali, an island renowned for its embrace of the arts, slower pace, and open culture. With only 8 feature films screened in open air venues over 4 days, the festival is making a strong statement that extended dialogue matters.

Phillips hopes that filmmakers will explore how to build audiences beyond festivals by linking with activist groups. And she hopes that activists will learn more about the possibilities of a range of media.

In an international media landscape crammed with film festivals in nearly every city on almost every theme imaginable, the GSCFF possesses an impressive clarity of vision by answering real needs. According to Phillips, the festival focuses on “ addressing the needs of filmmakers to become more effective at outreach, and addressing how activists can become better storytellers.” 

It’s a large mandate—but scalable. For Phillips, one word keeps everything in focus: outreach.

From Economics to Outreach

Phillips sports an unusual background for a film festival director. 

After getting her PhD in agricultural economics from Michigan State University, she pulled together a team to record a convening by the USAID on hunger and poverty in Africa. That lead to a stint in Singapore working in international marketing for American Express. And, now, she’s a high profile, high energy strategic planning consultant for a range of high end clients like One Degree Media, 2020 Fund, and others via  her C. A. Phillips Company.

Along the way, she did some programming for the Sedona International Film Festival in Arizona around sustainability issues and locally sourced food.

That experience ignited her interest in solving a key unresolved problem lurking underneath the utopian, user-generated, all-tools-are-accessible-everyone-can-do everything, Web 2.0 media ecosystem: how do we build audiences for beautiful, well-produced social change films?

Staying on Point

The Global Social Change Film Festival seems to be unpacking that gnarly audience and outreach question in innovative ways. It’s honoring the nongovernmental social media group Engage Media in Jakarta, Indonesia with a special innovator award. It’s giving a special activist award to the Women and Children Crisis Center of Tonga.  And it is honoring Indonesian filmmaker and social activist Nia Dinata.

During the day, the Institute part of the festival will offer a range of pointed workshops on pressing, unresolved, but necessary topics like Commercially Viable Social Change Filmmaking and Distribution, Hybrid Models of Distribution, and Film, Audience Building and Social Action and Environmental Film.

Challenges and Dialogues

However, challenges lurk despite this clarity of vision, marketing savvy, and ability to pull in partners like the Global Fund for Women, Global Girl Media,and First People’s Worldwide. All films need to pass through the government review board for approval, a time consuming process but one that GSCFF respects as part of the media regulatory environment in Indonesia. It’s also hard to pull together resources in a tough economy for a first-time film festival.

Drilling down into details like how to get different activists from around the Southeast Asian region to Ubud for workshops, the endlessly optimistic and undaunted Phillips observes “People are always asking me why start a film festival festival in this tough economy? “ 

Her answer is simple: “I tell them we need to creative a space for dialogue about social change media and activism and outreach.”