On Desktop Documentary (or, Kevin B. Lee Goes Meta!)

Kevin B. Lee talks about Desktop Documentary at the University of Sussex, March 17, 2015

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to present an entry dedicated to some of the latest work of one of its absolute heroes: filmmaker, critic, and pioneer (and expert proponent) of the online video essay format, Kevin B. Lee.

On March 17th, 2015, Lee gave a Masterclass on his work at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex, UK.

Recently, he and others at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have developed a form of filmmaking they call Desktop Documentary, which uses screen capture technology to treat the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas. Desktop documentary seeks both to depict and question the ways we explore the world through the computer screen.

The Masterclass straddled a screening of Transformers: The Premake (2014, embedded below), Lee’s innovative essay film in this idiom. The ‘Premake’ produced and studied viral fan footage of the making of Michael Bay’s 2014 blockbuster Transformers 4: The Age Of Extinction and examined the ways in which this operated as an unofficial crowdsourced publicity vehicle for the film.

Below, you can find a complete audio recording of the Masterclass, an 'iPhone guerrilla video recording' of Kevin's five minute long introduction of the 'Premake,' and also a high quality video recording of the brilliant, first half hour of the Masterclass in which he discussed in detail the audiovisual antecedents of the innovative form his film took. There are also some links to further related online resources.

In FSFF's very humble view, this form of audiovisual presentation, with its incredibly skilful and brilliantly thought through use of screen capture, has the potential to revolutionise aspects of media studies teaching and learning - even as it's going to be pretty difficult to achieve the expressive and argumentational heights that Lee manages in his 'Premake'. Thanks Kevin!

Kevin B. Lee introduces his desktop documentary TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE

Kevin B. Lee discusses the inspirations behind his desktop documentary
TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE

The complete audio recording of Kevin B. Lee's talk on Desktop Documentary at the University of Sussex, March 17, 2015 (1:10:42)

• Rhizome on Nick Briz Author of "Apple Computers" - a Desktop Documentary avant la lettre
• Camille Henrot: Extracts from the video Grosse Fatigué (2013, video, color, sound)
• Jill Godmilow, What Farocki Taught (1998)

TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (Kevin B. Lee, 2014)

What Makes a Video Essay Great? by Kevin B. Lee (2014)

Kevin B. Lee, Interface 2.0, Frames Cinema Journal 1.1, July 2012

Also see Kevin B. Lee, The Audiovisual Essay, September 2014

Kevin B. Lee, 'Learning Farocki: A Live Desktop Response', Delivered as Live Response to Panelists of "What Farocki Taught," Harun Farocki Panel at the 2015 Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Montreal.

Obstinate Battles for Documentary Memory: Patricio Guzmán Resources Online

Regular readers will know, hopefully, that Film Studies For Free issues forth only on the topics that take its fancy. It receives no commercial or other patronage, and it does not respond to 'prompts' for its hypertextual-utterances: nor does it want any! It loves and supports free online culture, and it prefers to make its own reading, viewing and blogging choices. Sometimes, though, it does get independently inspired by commercially-available film releases or new offline publications of a very worthwhile kind, as was the case today. And the result is a little bit of unsolicited free advertising...

FSFF was so HAPPY to hear that Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán's films The Battle of Chile (1975-1978), The Pinochet Case (2001) and a particular personal favourite, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997 - see the opening sequences above) have been released on a new DVD by a great and longstanding supporter of Latin American film culture -- Icarus Films -- that it decided to mark this very auspicious occasion with a related scholarly links-list in honour, and warm appreciation, of Guzmán's hugely important films.

• Articles on Guzmán's website:

• MOVIES THAT MARKED ME FOREVER
• When I was about eight or nine years old (I really don’t remember exactly)...
• THE DOCUMENTARY EXPLOSION
• THE LOST IMAGES
• PIECES OF LIFE
• STAINS ON THE NEGATIVE
• OBLIVION AS A CENTRAL THEME
• THE CHILEAN DOCUMENTARY, A PANORAMIC LOOK

• Pat Aufderheide, 'Interview with Patricio Guzmán', Center for Social Media, Oct. 25, 2002

• Pamela Biénzobas, 'Patricio Guzmán's Salvador Allende: The Personal Painting of a Universal Myth', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, January 2005

• Katherine Bliss, 'Review of Chile, Obstinate Memory/Battle of Chile', The Public Historian, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 1999

• Judy Branfman, 'Poking in the wound or reclaiming history? Documentary Films as Gendered Historical Memory in Post-Dictatorship Chile and Spain', CSW Update, October 2007
  

• Michael Chanan, 'The Changing Geography of Third Cinema, originally published in Screen Special Latin American Issue (edited by Catherine Grant and Jackie Stacey), Volume 38 number 4 Winter 1997

• Michael Chanan, 'The economic condition of cinema in Latin America ', Third World Affairs 1985, London: Third World Foundation, pp.379-389

• Michael Chanan, 'Latin American Cinema in the 90s. Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema', E.I.A.L. ESTUDIOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE, Vol. 9, No. 1, enero-junio 1998 (Cultura visual en América Latina, Editor invitado: John Mraz)

• Michael Chanan, New Cinemas in Latin America (1960-1995), from The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, OUP, 1996

• Hugo Chaparro Valderrama, 'Patricio Guzmán according to Jorge Ruffinelli', El ojo que piensa, 2002
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-1978), CHILE, OBSTINATE MEMORY (1997), THE PINOCHET CASE (2001), Films by Patricio Guzmán
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for SALVADOR ALLENDE (2004), Film by Patricio Guzmán

• Jim Hillier, 'The Battle of Chile/La batalla de Chile, Patricio Guzmán, 1975–9', 100 Documentary Films (London: BFI/Palgrave, BFI Film Guides, 2009 (scroll down to Ch. 14))
  

• Sarah Kessler, 'An Imperfect Cinema', The Brooklyn Rail, September 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, 'Third Cinema Today', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 6, 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, 'The Art of Hunger: re-defining Third Cinema', 16:9, November 2009 - 7. årgang - nummer 34

• Zuzana M. Pick, 'Chilean cinema: ten years of exile (1973-83)', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 66-70
  

• Margaret Power, 'Chile, Obstinate Memory', H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. September, 1998
  

• Margaret Power, 'The Battle of Chile', H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. August, 1998
  

• Juan Carlos Rodríguez, The Postdictatorial Documentaries of Patricio Guzmán: Chile, Obstinate Memory, The Pinochet Case, and Island of Robinson Crusoe, PhD Thesis, Duke University 2007
  

• Antonio Traverso, 'Unsettled Screens: The Cinema of Latin America', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 12, March 2005
  

• And a very special bonus for French or Spanish speakers: … à Valparaiso (1963 France/Chile 29 mins, directed by Joris Ivens, with a script by Chris Marker and assistance from Patricio Guzmán). See Adrian Danks' Senses of Cinema article on this film here.

Jarman Award 2009 winner is Lindsay Seers

Recording of part of Lindsay Seers' exhibition 'Swallowing Black Maria'
(more info here)

'Lindsay Seers tells seductively tall tales.'
Laura McLean-Ferris, guardian.co.uk, February 27, 2009

Lindsay Seers's Extramission 6 (Black Maria) [is] one of the real finds of [the Altermodern: Tate Triennal exhibition, 2009]. Seers shows a semi-autobiographical, quasi-documentary film about her life, screened in a mock-up shed whose design is a copy of Thomas Edison's Black Maria, his New Jersey film studio. The story is implausible, troubling, and beautifully told by different narrators.

As a child, Seers is so overwhelmed by visual stimulus that she cannot speak. As soon as she sees a photograph, she decides she wants to be a camera. She uses her mouth as the camera, and goes about with a black bag over her head. As she grows up, Seers stops being a camera, and wants instead to be a projector. She wears a model of Edison's studio on her head, projecting the movies in her mind. She struggles to illuminate the world.

The whole story is both dreamlike and moving. How much of it is true? There are interviews with Seers's mother and with a psychologist. Are they really who we think they are? As I staggered out, someone muttered "What is she on?" Adrian Searle, guardian.co.uk, February 3, 2009

Film Studies For Free is very happy to add its congratulations to the many being deservedly delivered today to Lindsay Seers following the award to her yesterday of this year's Jarman prize for artists working with the moving image. Seers, whose hypnotic work as an artist includes film practice-based research produced as a lecturer in arts practice at London's Goldsmiths College, receives a cash prize, but also a very valuable broadcast commission – to make four artworks for Channel 4’s acclaimed Three Minute Wonder slot (3MW). FSFF looks forward to watching those.

The Jarman Award was inspired by British avant-garde film-maker Derek Jarman, one of the most innovative, esteemed and visionary artists of the last century. Interviews and features on this year’s award shortlist and Jarman's legacy can be found at Engine, an online forum from Animate Projects.

Below are some further links to online and openly accessible resources, reviews and information about Lindsay Seers' work.

• David Berridge, 'Lindsay Seers: It has to be this way, More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen, February 9, 2009
• Chris Fite-Wassilak, 'Lindsay Seers', Frieze Magazine, Issue 122, April 2009
• Rebecca Geldard, 'Lindsay Seers: It Has to Be This Way', ArtReview magazine, 21 April 21, 2009
• Tom Morton, 'Remember Me [monograph on Lindsay Seers]', Frieze Magazine, Issue 124, June-August 2009
• Jennifer Poole, 'Lindsay Seers: Eyes of Others...', Circa Arts Magazine, 2005
  
• Lindsay Seers at the Event Horizon exhibition (2008) webpage at the Royal Academy
• Lindsay Seers' webpages at Smart Project Space
• Lindsay Seers, 'Artist's Text', Arts Council England website, 2003
  

Austrian cinema for export #1: Ulrich Seidl

Image from Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007)

Unlike [Michael] Haneke or his protégée Jessica Hausner, [...] Seidl finds the disturbing not in extraordinary outbursts of violence or helplessness, but rather in the everyday strangeness all around us, a world he transmits formally in blurring and ultimately deconstructing the boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and feature. He ranks, alongside Egon Humer, as the most important Austrian documentary filmmaker of the 1990s and has only strengthened this position in the last few years.

Ulrich Seidl has repeatedly emphasised in interviews and public appearances that he never intended to be, and indeed does not see himself solely as, a documentary filmmaker. Like others working in Austria's subsidy-dependent film landscape, Seidl stumbled upon the documentary as a means to realise his cinematic aspirations without having to resort to making movie-of-the-week fare. And even before shooting Dog Days Seidl refused to call his films documentaries, maintaining that all his films have both “documentary and fictional levels”.

Seidl's stylised, laconic regard of quotidian quirks moved his work beyond the social reportage and discourses of “authenticity” and “reality” that inform other domestic documentaries. The world he records lacks any pre-packaged shine. Seidl is uninterested in “life's few happy moments”, which he justifies by asserting the contrast between his cinematic project and a wedding photographer's job.

Mattias Frey (hyperlinks added by FSFF)

Film Studies For Free brings you the first of a number of Austrian cinema-themed links-lists: this one is to anglophone, scholarly, or otherwise very useful, and openly accessible online resources related to the film work of Ulrich Seidl. Below the links list are some excerpts from his early films (trailers for some of the later ones can be seen at the official websites in the links-list).

• Martin Brady and Helen Hughes, 'Import and Export: Ulrich Seidl’s Indiscreet Anthropology of Migration', gfl-journal, No.1/2008
• Robert von Dassanowsky, 'Austria Hungry: The Return of a Film Nation', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 51, February 2006
• Mattias Frey, 'Border Zones: The Films of Ulrich Seidl', Senses of Cinema, May 2004
• Gerd Gemünden, 'Review of Austrian Cinema: A History. By Robert von Dassanowsky. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005', Monatshefte 99.1 (2007) 131-133
• John Gorick, 'To a dog you're the world, to your girlfriend you're never sure', Vertigo Magazine, No.15, February, 2008
• Charlotte Hansen, 'The Unbearable Insistence of Authenticity', Cambridge Film Festival Daily Magazine, Issue 2008
• Aaron Hillis, 'Interview: Ulrich Seidl', GreenCine Daily, July 30, 2009
• Christoph Huber, 'Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, Austria)', Cinema Scope, Issue 31, 2007
• Import Export press folder 1
• Import Export press folder 2
• Import Export Official Website 1
• Import Export Official Website 2
• Daniel Kasman, 'Review: Import/Export', d+kaz on moving images and motion pictures, February 19, 20o8
• Glenn Kenny, 'Notes of a Seidl sceptic', Some Came Running, July 31, 2009
• Herbert Krill, 'AUSTRIA: A high between two lows? The 2002 Diagonale festival', Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 10, May 2002
• Joseph Jon Lanthier, 'Import/Export', SlantMagazine, July 28, 2009
• Joanne Leal and Klaus-Dieter Rossade, 'Introduction: Cinema and Migration since Unification', gfl-journal, No. 1/2008
• Vadim Rizov, 'The Films of Ulrich Seidl', The House Next Door Online, July 24, 2009
• Ulrich Seidl in conversation with Mark Cosgrove, 'Between Heaven and Hell: the Films of Ulrich Seidl - Director Q&A', Watershed's Head of Programme, Sept 25, 2008, Watershed, Bristol - Quicktime video 55 mins

Loss Is to Be Expected (Ulrich Seidl, 1992)

Good News (Ulrich Seidl, 1990)