MIT Forum: Documentary Film and New Technologies

Tuesday, March 20, 2012
5-7 PM
Bartos Theater, Media Lab

Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. How will handheld video cameras and ubiquitous open-source computing change the nature of documentaries? What are the implications for makers and viewers of documentaries of today’s unprecedented access to online editing and distribution tools, to an ocean of data never before available to the general public? These and related questions will be central to our discussion. Panelists will include a scholar of digital culture, a producer who has begun to exploit emerging technologies, and a representative of a newly-important specialty of the digital age – a curator of digital artifacts.

Speakers:
Gerry Flahive is a producer for the National Film Board of Canada. He has produced more than 50 films and new media projects including Project Grizzly, Waterlife and Highrise.

Shari Frilot is senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and curator of the New Frontier section of the event.

Ingrid Kopp is the new media consultant at the Tribeca Film Institute where she runs the TFI New Media Fund. Launched in 2011 with the support of the Ford Foundation, the fund seeks to develop interactive, non-fiction projects centered around issues of social justice.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Arts and Politics of the Everyday) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracy and coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories.

Moderator:
William Uricchio is professor and director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and professor of comparative media history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His books include Media Cultures, on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, New Collectivities  and Europe.

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