Ryerson Lecture Series: September 27, 2007 – Mary Ellen Mark

Part of Kodak Lecture Series.

Auditorium evacuated for reasons of fire safety.

Ryerson Lecture Series: October 4, 2007 – Robert Semeniuk

Beginning, middle, end.
Blue Earth Alliance.

Ryerson Lecture Series: October 4, 2007 – Jennifer Baichwal

“Manufactured Landscapes”
“Let It Come Down”
“The Holier It Gets”
Documentary filmmaking is kind of an existentialist state.
Responding to the situation.
Subordinate relationship between text and images.
She does not like “B-roll”.
Structure should unite with content.
Hard to make a film in a foreign country without giving it a “National Geographic” feel (exotic).
Confessional work?
How do you not betray the subject?
By interacting with siblings she wasn’t in the film (family film).
By making film, no interaction with siblings (transporting father’s ashes to India).
To “sell” the film, one easily betrays the subject.
The more particular you get, the more real your story can get.
120 drafts of narration (confessional work’).
When you are invisible (behind the camera) there is no vulnerability exchange.
Any film about photographers is a film about representation.
The artist’s work as a departure point.
Represent representation without making it a central issue in the film.
www.docdrama.com

Ryerson Lecture Series: October 9, 2007 – Thomas Waugh

New voices in documentary.
Queer autobiographical documentaries.
Self-preferential, first person.
Formula docs of the 70s (interview, archival, interview, home movie, etc.)
Influenced by experimental, underground filmmaking.
Less access to equipment, due to their sexuality.
“Tom Johnson” (1977)
“Black Star” (on VHS)
“Silverlake Life”
Performance as documentary (Bill Nichols).
Curt McDowell (1980) “Loads”
Editing mimics the ejaculatory pattern of the men.
“Autobiography” part of the documentary.
A record of the “performance” of each man.
“Multiple Orgasm” Barbara Hammer (1976)
Multiple images while masturbating.
Performance reaches “real’” orgasms.
“Arms of Lovers” (USA, 1976)
Fassbinder influence.
Didactic sketch.
Marginal, outlaws, freaks, record of spaces, artists etc.
1970s realism.
“It is not the homosexual that is perverse, but the situation that he lives.”

Ryerson Lecture Series: October 11, 2007 – Mark Ruwedel

Nuclear photos.
Someone that goes out and makes careful observations of the world and reports back.
Photographing something that you can’t see.
Banality powerful when coupled with historical fact.
Relationship of caption to photo.
Captions give legal definitions.
What can be more invisible than nuclear radiation?
Garden at Three Mile Island.
Handford site.
Pictures of underground missles.
Documentary photographers have specific things to say.
Not subject alone that makes the pic.
“The most powerful statements about nuclear annihilation are, in fiction film, not documentary and that’s why I’m not a Documentary photographer.”
Center framing to not make pics look inventive.

Ryerson Lecture Series: October 18, 2007 – Geoffrey James

“Memory and the Camps”
Without a receiver, no message.
Thesis of show: no one has ever looked at the full range of Holocaust photos, i.e. who took photo, for what purpose, for whose benefit?
Photography was forbidden by 1941, the Nazis had completely succeeded in controlling the image of the camps.
Franz Braun took photos at Dachau.
Mary Vogel took photos.
“Identity photos”: L-R profile, Frontal, ¾ R-L, (photos of inmates)
Full frontal (faces of SS guards Bergen-Belsen)
Front flat light, no fill in eyes.
Eisenhower ordered photos of camp inmates.
George Rogers (photographer)
Lee Miller (photographer) was criticized for “composing”.
Margaret Bourke-White
Eric Schwab
Michael Kenner – art photos
Derk Reinhartz took photos at Auschwitz.
Rheinhard Matz.
Eric Hartmann, a photographer who lost his entire family in the camps.
Architectural records of camp were kept.
Edel Weitzman – Israeli architect.

Ryerson Lecture Series: October 23, 2007 – Katrina Cizek

Filmmaker in residence at the NFB.
“Seeing is Believing”.
“Witness” , with Peter Gabriel
*George Stoney
“The Bicycle” 2005, 12 minutes.
“The Interventionists”
“I Was Here”. – Photo Blog

Ryerson Lecture Series: October 30, 2007 – Marit Corneil

Spatiality of sound.
The presence of human voice sets up a structure of presence.
Make use of the voice in situations where we don’t see the speaker.
Bill Nichols, “a sense of social view”.
Gender and number of voices does not necessarily indicate authority.
Docs are intrusions upon the reality of the subject being filmed.

Ryerson Lecture Series: November 6, 2007 – Jozef Robakowski/Ryszard Wasko

The workshop of the film form.
Cinema as enlightenment.
Birthplace of independent Cinematography.
“Personal Cinema” created in 1980s.
Many “name” filmmakers came from this school.
Able to use “western” video equipment.

Ryerson Lecture Series: November 8, 2007 – Bruce Elder

“Reason is the advisory of thought”.
Man With A Movie Camera is a theory of film presented on film.
MWAMC is a lesson in seeing a chronological character of film’s time.
“Integration of art and life”.
“Art should make use of industrial materials and techniques.”
The artist is a worker, just like other workers.
Paradoxes.
Film as an absolute visual language.
Transportation moves things, cinema moves communication.
Cinema gives new geographic relationships, better world (juxtaposition of babies).
Traffic signals equals communication signals.
Pigeons shown flying backwards. Does camera capture life unawares or does it transform the event?