documentary

I have some passing interest in horror (I teach a class on it), I am supposed to be an “expert” on fake documentaries, and my recent concern is user-made video. Thus, I feel some professional obligation to see (and then write about) films in the fake register that are either big-grossing or viral-wonders (i.e.... read more »

In Roland Barthes’ famous book about photography, Camera Lucida, the French theorist writes, “Ultimately, photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.“... read more »

I’m in Montreal, getting ready to give a talk “Remembering AIDS Online: Networking, Viruses, Virality, and Arteries” as part of Concordia University’s eighteen year old, multi-disciplinary, year-long undergraduate course and lecture series: HIV/AIDS Project. As my host and Project founder, Tom Waugh explains, the Project links students to internships, the community, and AIDS scholars and activists. I’m honored to be a part of it.... read more »

Here are some links to radical media actions:... read more »

I made a quick trip to NY to attend the celebration for NYU’s Culture and Media Program which I participated in somewhat unofficially in its earliest years by taking the courses Ethnographic Film I and II at the tail end of my Cinema Studies doctoral course work.... read more »

According to Ryan Bowles and Rahul Mukherjee, in their introduction to “Documentary and Space,” Media Fields Journal, Issue 3: “New forms, modes, and genres of documentary have sparked their own debates and raised their own particular issues. And it is perhaps this moment of changing modes, technologies, and practices that draws our attention to the importance of considering documentary space.... read more »

Who knew? The YouTube indie-movie Life in a Day is the freaky feel-good twin of the art-world movie The Clock:... read more »

The third day of my show PerpiTube: Repurposing Social Media Spaces brought this remarkable and unexpected video by Shu Lea Cheang.... read more »

In the past few days, I’ve seen two powerful film screenings featuring works that historicize AIDS in the 1980s: We Were Here (“the first documentary to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco”) and United in Anger: A History of ACTUP.... read more »

This past spring semester, I taught a course called Sustainable Television: Producing Environmental Media – I’d taught a version of the course back in January 2010 during Middlebury’s intensive Winter Term, and this year I ran it as a full semester course. The concept was the same: spend the term producing a magazine-style television program focused on environmental issues, produced collaboratively by students.... read more »