Flaherty Seminar 2016
The 62nd Robert Flaherty Film Seminar… an institution, have only heard good about it, and not only from my former EDN colleague Anita Reher, who is head of the Flaherty, has something in common with the Danish folk high school tradition, films are watched and discussed from morning till night. You all stay the same place, eat and drink together. If you sign up, you do so without knowing which films are to be screened, but looking at the cv of the programmer, I don’t think you take a risk. His name is David Pendleton and
“he curates many of (and oversees all of) the screenings that make up the Harvard Archive’s ongoing cinematheque programming for the public. He has organized wide-ranging retrospectives of such varied filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, John Akomfrah and Warren Sonbert and has taught courses on 20th century film history and on the representation of masculinity in contemporary cinema…” His inviting well written promotion text for the seminar, love it, here it is:
A cinema at play is a cinema that breathes — a cinema open to the shifting rhythms of the world. Play implies looseness, experimentation, chance, a suspension of judgment in favor of a child’s open-ended curiosity. Play allows cinema to be a vital, living thing, one that faces the world with innocence, hoping to experience rather than persuade.
If spectacle demands a taut cinema, with no time for digression, the 2016 Flaherty Seminar is dedicated to a cinema of wandering, of curiosity and wonder. The filmmakers featured use the camera to encounter the world in all of its unpredictable glory and horror. The forms taken by these encounters are equally unexpected in their poetic depth and political range: visual sonnets, alternative histories, and diary films. As these films show, cinema at play is not aimless or fanciful but open-the kind of open — endedness that exists in any system with room for variation, like an image whose meaning is not fixed, a country caught between colonial past and capitalist present, or simply an individual who feels the tug of history.”
All details can be found on:
