{"title":"Fred Wiseman at the Brattle Theater with Hospital, July 19, 2010","authors":"S. Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This interview is an edited version of a public discussion with filmmaker Fred Wiseman at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about his film, Hospital (1970). Wiseman discusses his filmmaking approach and his belief that shooting film footage is research, while the actual filmmaking is done in the editing. During the shooting of each of his features, Wiseman takes sound and directs his cinematographers. In his editing, he is more interested in presenting an experience of the places he films than in developing particular socio-political arguments. Wiseman has been remarkably prolific, making at least one feature film a year since Titicut Follies (1967). He is understood as the epitome of “fly-on-the-wall” observational cinema-verite documentary and has used his approach to explore a considerable panorama of American institutions—“institutions” in the broadest sense. Hospital remains among the most engaging of his films.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124037793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ben Russell on Good Luck","authors":"S. Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Ben Russell’s Good Luck (2018), a feature about miners working in two very different mining operations—an underground copper mine Serbia, an open-pit gold mine in Suriname—immerses the viewer within two forms of difficult labor and the visual/auditory spaces within which this labor takes place. Good Luck is made up of imagery of the miners at work and of intimate silent, hand-processed portraits of individual workers. Though the two forms of mining occur in very distant locations and very different climates, Russell’s diptych creates a series of echoes between the two groups of miners. And Russell has described himself as working between ethnography and psychedelia, a diptych of concerns that combines an exploration of how the miners and mining activities look and how surreal they can seem.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130083272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Yance Ford on Strong Island","authors":"S. Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"After Yance Ford’s brother William was murdered in 1992, when Yance Ford was a college student, she imagined making a film about his death. Finally, in 2017, having worked for many years with television’s POV, seeing independent documentaries into the public arena (and having transitioned to male), Ford completed Strong Island, a feature-length, personal documentary that investigates William’s death within a context of the former and subsequent lives of his parents and siblings. As a crime story, Strong Island is both suspenseful and beautiful to look at. And it is personally performative for Ford. The unusually intimate close-ups of his face, his dramatization of William’s falling to his death in front of the gas station where he was murdered, and his conversations with family and friends dramatize the way in which this family tragedy and cultural injustice continues to inform the lives of those who knew William.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133075895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Maxim Pozdorovkin on Our New President","authors":"S. Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Russian-American filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin has made a series of films documenting Russia in the age of Putin, including the well-known Pussy Riot (2013), about the radical feminist performance group. This interview focuses specifically on Our New President (2017), which traces the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump presidential race and the Trump election as depicted in Russian propaganda. Pozdorovkin’s film is a significant contribution to the recent history of recycled cinema.\u0000The political weaponizing of media to produce “fake news” is the focus of Our New President. Pozdorovkin demonstrates that in the 2010s propaganda is not so much misinformation carefully embedded in an otherwise informative context, but an attempt to overwhelm by creating total media confusion. He makes clear that in Russia the government controls all major news outlets and hacking into the online networks of other nations is considered patriotism.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133332466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sensory Ethnography, Part 2","authors":"S. Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0022","url":null,"abstract":"This follow-up to “Sensory Ethnography, Part 1” (published by Oxford in Avant-Doc, 2015) is a set of interviews with veterans of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. J. P. Sniadecki, Stephanie Spray, and Véréna Paravel discuss their experiences with the SEL and director Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Sniadecki and Spray discuss their early films, made in China and Nepal respectively; and Sniadecki discusses his more recent work. “Sensory Ethnography, Part 2” concludes with discussions with Sniadecki and Paravel on their Foreign Parts (2010), about an automobile junkyard in Queens, New York; with Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn on People’s Park (2012), a single-shot excursion through a popular public park in Chengdu, China; and with Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta on El Mar La Mar (2017), a visual evocation of the border territory between Sonora and Arizona.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"9 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120898523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"James Benning Goes Digital","authors":"Scott Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0019","url":null,"abstract":"James Benning’s turn from 16mm filmmaking to digital filmmaking after his RR (2007) released the already prolific Benning from his struggles with 16mm film projection and print damage and unleashed a new wave of digital productivity. This interview explores Benning’s many digital films, including the several films that are part of his Two Cabins project (focusing on the cabins, lives, and writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski), his Warhol-inspired portrait films—After Warhol (2011), Twenty Cigarettes (2011)—his three-hour-plus “single-shot” film, BNSF (2012), his cine-exploration of Vienna’s Naturhistorischesmuseum, and his personal epic, 52 Films (2015), an adventure into modifying a broad range of online postings from the internet—originally designed to be presented on fifty-two computers, but so far, shown mostly as interactive screenings with Benning present.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128590464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Abbas Kiarostami at Bard College with Five, March 4, 2007","authors":"Scott Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190052126.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"In the months following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, filmmaking itself looked to be an endangered art form. Some Iranian filmmakers left the country; Abbas Kiarostami stayed—though for a time he was not making films. He turned to photography and produced a distinguished body of landscape representation. Then he returned to filmmaking, working far from Tehran in the Iranian countryside and in a low-key, but powerful and passionate way distinct from his more urban pre-revolutionary work.\u0000This public interview (at Bard College) with Kiarostami focuses on his experimental film Five (2003), a film originally made for an event in honor of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. Five is made up of five very minimal scenes, filmed at the edge of the Caspian Sea: scenes of a quiet surf, of several dogs hanging out on the beach, of a gaggle of geese and ducks, of men walking on a boardwalk, and, in the longest scene, a full moon reflected in the water. Five now seems a premonition of the final film Kiarostami finished before his death in 2016, 24 Frames (2018).","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115189869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Brett Story","authors":"Scott Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This interview surveys the career of Canadian filmmaker Brett Story, from her early attempts to evoke dimensions of modern urban life to her feature The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), a panorama of the ways in which the American prison system is visible and audible outside prison walls and away from the remote prison locations across the country, where criminals are housed. Story finds evidence of the prison system hidden in plain sight in New York City’s Washington Square, at an airport built on the flat top of what was once a coal mine in Eastern Kentucky, at Quicken Loans headquarters in downtown Detroit, where a forest fire is being fought in Marin County, California, at a grocery storeroom in the Bronx, at a kids pocket park in LA, in a quiet town outside of St. Louis, in a radio station in Kentucky, and on buses traveling through the night toward rural New York State towns.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115151145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Janet Biggs","authors":"Scott Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"This is the first substantive career interview with installation artist Janet Biggs. Biggs discusses her motivation for making installations, rather than theatrical films, and the different ways in which moviegoers and visitors to installations experience moving image art. Biggs describes her experiences traveling to the ends of the earth to record compelling imagery in the Arctic, at a sulfur-mining operation inside a volcano in Indonesia, and in the Afar triangle region of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, Her many wide-ranging conceptual videos explore various forms of physical labor and athletic endeavor from football to water ballet and synchronized swimming to NASCAR, as well as the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease and attempts to break the on-land speed record.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133094483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gustav Deutsch","authors":"Scott Macdonald","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch has been a major contributor to what has come to be called “found-footage filmmaking” and/or “recycled cinema”—that is, he is best-known for making films from other films. This interview focuses on a range of his projects: his first found-footage project, an exploration of home movies made by Austrians visiting the Italian coast in the years after Super-8mm became a popular film gauge for documenting family events; a collaborative diptych of Place, made with an Algerian friend, comparing the Algerian oasis Figuig and Deutsch’s native Vienna; his revisiting of proto-cinematic technologies in the construction of a panoramic camera obscura on a Greek island; his remarkable feature film Shirley—Visions of Reality (2013) in which he (and his partner Hanna Schimek) dramatize a series of canonical Edward Hopper paintings; and the recent Notes and Sketches 1: 31 Pocket Films. 2005–2015, a panorama of everyday events, made with new camera technologies.","PeriodicalId":340006,"journal":{"name":"The Sublimity of Document","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129828015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}