Extra Curricular
by Holly Willis
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Pedagogical City Hopping: the DocNomads Film School
“What if we create a curriculum for a school we’d like to attend ourselves?” That question was the foundation for a group of five educators who gathered in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2011 to brainstorm an entirely new two-year Masters-level film program dedicated to documentary production. The partners came from Lusófona University in Lisbon; the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, Hungary; and LUCA School of Arts/College Sint Lukas in Brussels, Belgium. Vítor Candeias, who represented Lusófona University in designing the program and is a course director as well as a documentary filmmaker, says that the original idea was… Read more
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Environmental Storytelling
In August 2021, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new report on the global state of the environment, highlighting the shrinkage of glaciers, warming of oceans, massive forest loss, extreme heat, devastating drought and more. While the report is crushing, it is also fuel for action. Indeed, the BBC’s climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, suggested that 2021 could be the year for finally making climate change a top priority, citing the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in early November as just one landmark event that could help consolidate action. For filmmakers teaching in universities, the… Read more
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Talking about Film
While filmmakers attend festivals to show their work, network and see old friends, film scholars have their own, similar venues; namely, academic conferences. Instead of submitting films, scholars submit proposals to present papers or host workshops; these are either accepted or rejected. Scholars whose proposals are selected not only have more impetus to attend the conference, they also will be able to add the presentation to their CV and activities list for the year. More significantly, though, these presentations often serve as early drafts of book chapters or essays to be published later. As a result, conferences play a vital… Read more
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Arizona Dreams of Justice
Imagine taking a film class in which, during week one, you learn activist filmmaking strategies from Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís of Skylight, a human rights media organization based in Brooklyn. In week two, you discuss participatory documentary and community collaboration with Concordia University professor and filmmaker Liz Miller. A little later in the course, you encounter Brenda Manuelito and Carmella Rodriguez, cofounders of nDigiDreams, a woman-owned and indigenous-focused consulting and training company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. These are session descriptions of a graduate course titled “Advancing Human Rights Through Documentary Media,” developed and taught by Beverly Seckinger, a… Read more
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The Diagetic Prototype
“I want an app like Tinder that we can use to end genocide,” said Luis Moreno Ocampo, former first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), in fall 2019. The Argentine lawyer was visiting the University of Southern California from Harvard, where he was a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He was in town to coteach a class with USC professor and documentary filmmaker Ted Braun, perhaps best known for his 2007 film Darfur Now, on the ways in which storytelling can affect our understanding of political issues. I first met Ocampo in 2008 when… Read more
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In My Room
The big question for film educators this summer is how to prepare for classes this fall. Some campuses will host all of their classes online; others, like mine, are figuring out a hybrid model, with some production classes held on the sound stages with careful social distancing, masks and lots of hand sanitizer. In the meantime, many of us have been figuring out ways to inspire our students to keep making film and videos, even within the confines of their bedrooms, apartments and family homes. Luckily, there’s an exciting history of projects that demonstrate the power of a small space.… Read more
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Messing With the Medium: On the Textured Pleasures of the Handmade Film
Last summer, filmmaker Jennifer West and I were invited to talk at Femmebit, an LA-based triennial celebration of media made by women. I had been thinking about materiality and mediamaking practices, and Jennifer is known for a stunning body of work centered on physically manipulating strips of film. We decided to call our event “Messing With the Medium: Radical Materiality in Feminist Media” and challenged each other on stage in a battle of clips, each of us presenting a visual example of some sort of feminist creative intervention, along with a two-minute argument for its contributions to an expanded history… Read more
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The Inner Reaches Out of Space
“I think one of the things I am most concerned about is how we interact with space in a bodily way,” says LA-based video and VR artist Kate Parsons, who will co-teach an undergraduate studio class, “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space,” next spring at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, with VR veteran Ben Vance. The pair was asked to teach in the Immersion Lab by professors Jenny Rodenhouse, a faculty member in the graduate Media Design Practice (MDP) program, and Maggie Hendrie, chair of Interaction Design. Parsons, who teaches a basic video production course for first-year graduate… Read more
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Creating Community Through Cinema: The Echo Park Film Center and MONO NO AWARE
I love the way Paolo Davanzo jazzes up his emails with exclamation points! He almost never uses just one; instead, he lines up two, three, sometimes four in a row, and if his ardor is not evident through prolific punctuation, he’ll apply all caps: “SO GLAD to reconnect!!!!” or “The kids created a BEAUTIFUL FILM!!!!” This cheery trait is pure Paolo, and it completely infuses the Echo Park Film Center, a small nonprofit space at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado in Los Angeles that he cofounded in 2001. EPFC packs a microcinema, filmmaking classroom and equipment rental house all… Read more
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The Most Valuable Lessons: Filmmakers Remember Their Iconic Instructors
Teaching is a complex act, but most of us standing in front of students in film classrooms have never been taught to teach. Instead, we recall the teachers who impressed us, then try to repeat some part of that practice and hope for the best, often never quite realizing the impact we are in turn having on our own students. Here, three current faculty members recall iconic instructors from their college experience, and the lasting effect of key ideas and behaviors. Cauleen Smith on Lynn Hershman Leeson and Trinh T. Minh-ha Interdisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith earned a BA in creative… Read more
