Imperfect Machines

I'm headed back from the Bay Area after an interesting event with Indelible Lalita at UC Santa Cruz's Center for Documentary Arts and Research. The gathering was called Imperfect Machines: Screening Bodies, Illness, and Disability and involved three films exploring themes of disability, illness, and intersections between physical and national bodies.

Emily Cohen's Bodies at War: a Colombian Landline Story uses stories of amputation and rehabilitation as a window to look at the legacy of Colombia's decades of civil war.  Beginning with a graphic amputation scene and continuing through physical therapy and prosthesis manufacture, the film traverses a rich social and psychological landscape.

Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa's short The Green and the Blue looks at the artist's mother's complex relationships with her plants, her family, and her pacemaker.  The greenery of her native Puerto Rico inspires her interactions with the world and sets a troubling contrast with the new machinery within her.

I really enjoyed meeting these filmmakers and talking with our moderators Megan Moodie and Nancy Chen. Thank you UCSC and CDAR director Irene Lusztig for bringing me and the film there!

Field trip to Cinelab

I took my Intermediate Film students from RISD on a field trip to Cinelab today. We arrived to the old mill building in New Bedford, which looked exactly as I had imagined over the past twenty-five years of working with them (remotely) as a student and teacher. I thought it would be a great opportunity for my students to see how their film is developed and printed - in one of only about a dozen or two motion picture labs still operating in the United States.

Brad Chandler took us on a tour of the facilities. It was definitely cool to see all of the love that goes into film, and all of the highly engineered, vintage analog and mechanical equipment they have kept running for decades. But I couldn't help but feel a sense of the impending extinction of the medium... it feels like just a matter of time before all the companies give up the ghost. It will be a great loss. I have truly enjoyed immersing myself and students in the discipline and beauty of cinema.

I've put a lot of thought into the question of Why Film? lately... what are the types of projects that make sense to shoot in celluloid, in the age of infinite digital possibilities? Here's what I've come up with so far:

• You’re interested in the particular aesthetic - the grain, the color response, the beauty, thesoftness
• You like the physicality: chemical rather than digital process means something to you... holding the film in your hands
• You’re making a reference to photography
• You want to shoot black and white with full richness
• You're trying to evoke a historical period
• You’re referencing a film genre (such as Noir)
• You're incorporating archival material and generating your own to match
• You like the process or workflow, and want the discipline that the preciousness of film requires: you have to conceive of things ahead of time, it’s expensive so you have limited stock, you can’t see what you are getting.
• You’re interested in the chance factor (also double exposures) and happy accidents
• You’re going to work with the film itself (hand processing, optical printing, etc.)
• You’re going to do something conceptually with the medium (for ex., shooting the length of a film roll, double exposures, etc.)

Flaherty Fellowship

I'm really excited to be attending this year's Robert Flaherty Film Seminar as a LEF New England fellow. I haven't been to the seminar in eight years and look forward to another vision-charging experience: seven days of pure documentary film absorbtion...

Artist Talk at MassArt Thursday

This Thursday, April 28 I'll be giving an artist talk at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in their Thursday Night Lecture Series. The lecture begins at 6:30pm at 621 Hungtington Ave., Boston, in the Trustees Room (11th floor).

Life in the Junkyard

I was just in New York and caught the first night of MoMA's week-long presentation of Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki's Foreign Parts. It's a wonderful piece about the inhabitants of Willet's Point, a junkyard-filled industrial zone slated for demolition under New York's eminent domain rules.

I appreciated both the supreme craft - meticulously framed, confidently held shots and complex, subtle editing - and the humanity of this film. The filmmakers clearly developed strong relationships with their subjects ("many Corona beers," was J.P.'s answer to one audience member's question about this), and refrained from either sentimentality or judgement. The result is a film which truly puts us there, in the wet, muddy shoes of these folks who scrabble a creative existence from a pile of auto parts.

Congratulations Véréna and J.P.!

Chicken and Egg Pictures grant

Chicken and Egg Pictures - a great "incubator" of social issue films by women filmmakers - just awarded Under Water's Mercy a grant from its WHICH CAME FIRST environmental film fund. We're very excited to be picking up speed as we bring the film to completion. Stay tuned for more information... including a final title!