Documentary Studies: A State of the Field Symposium

Saturday, April 11

Temple University Center City (TUCC)

room 320 | directions

10:30 AM - 5:15 PM

This one-day symposium will gather area scholars and media makers in a conversation about documentary studies today. Documentary studies has often held a minority but important position within the larger field of film studies. During the 1980s and 1990s, post-semiotic interventions into the truth and meaning of documentaries dominated the research agenda. Lately, newer concerns – from a social theory of cinema to the phenomenology of spectatorship – have supplemented this agenda. How do we best characterize documentary studies today? How has the subfield responded to wider changes in the discipline and to changes in documentary itself? How has the relationship between documentary makers and documentary scholars changed?

To address these questions, the symposium will comprise panels and workshops, allowing for both substantive scholar or artist presentations and wider dialogue. Contexts and Institutions will ask in workshop format how have documentary institutions evolved, particularly in the contemporary mediascape. Documentary Studies: Traditions and New Directions will explore new methodologies and research agendas in the discipline and weigh them against an impressive body of scholarship already existing. Non-Griersonian Genres will theorize nonfiction filmmaking that departs from the Griersonian documentary model: experimental documentaries, essay films, etc.

 

10:30 – 12:00

Contexts/Institutions

Workshop-Discussion

D.B Jones (Drexel University), on film policy and the National Film Board of Canada

Patricia White (Swarthmore College), on distribution and Women Make Movies

María Teresa Rodriguez (University of the Arts) on public broadcasting and community video

Ellen Spiro (Mobilus Media), on activist documentary

Ben Kalina (Temple University) on environmental production practices

1:30 – 3:15

Documentary Studies: Traditions and New Directions

Panel

Jane Gaines (Columbia University), on documentary cinephilia

Jonathan Kahana (New York University), on reenactment

Warren Bass (Temple University), on fictionalization and Leacock

Chris Cagle (Temple University), on documentary reception studies and Grey Gardens

3:30 - 5:15

Non-Griersonian Genres

Panel

Nora Alter (University of Florida) , on the essay film

Elisabeth Subrin (Temple University), on conceptualism and experimental appropriations of documentary

Roderick Coover (Temple University), on the artifact and the found footage film

Jason Zuzga (University of Pennsylvania), on the nature documentary

 

 

 

Affiliated Screening

Ellen Spiro

will present the award-winning documentary

Body of War

April 10 at 7pm

Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema

Swarthmore College

 

Body of War is an intimate feature documentary about the true face of

war. Tomas Young, 25 years old, was paralyzed from a bullet to his spine

- wounded after serving in Iraq for less than a week. Body of War is

Tomas' coming home story as he comes to terms with his disability and

finds his own unique and passionate voice against the war. The film is

produced and directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, and features two

original songs by Pear Jam's Eddie Vedder.

Body of War was named Best Documentary by the National Board of Review, and John Anderston, writing in the Washington Post, calls it

"Architecturally sound, emotionally ravaging... a ferocious film."

 

Ellen Spiro is a long-time video activist whose works including DiAna's

Hair Ego (about DiAna, an AIDS-educator and hairdresser), Greetings From Out Here (lesbian and gay culture in the South, and Troop 1500, Troop 1500 (about a Girl Scout troop that unites daughters with mothers who are serving time for serious crimes, made with Karen Bernstein) and,

now, Body of War (with Phil Donahue). Spiro, Associate Professor at the

University of Texas in Austin, is the recipient of a Guggenheim and two

Rockefeller Fellowships and numerous other distinctions.

 

This event is presented by Swarthmore's Program in Film and Media

Studies and cosponsored by War News Radio, and made possible by the

Department of English Literature's Owen Moon Fund.