Course Announcement | Reality and Documentary Television, Summer 2012

Reality and Documentary Television, a non-GSAS summer course is open to Draperites for enrollment. Interested students should contact Robert at robert.dimit@nyu.edu regarding registration.

SUMMER COURSE (Graduate level)

Reality and Documentary Television

MCC-GE 2147-001; CINE-GT 1603-001

Instructor: Susan Murray

Meets: M/T/W/TH 10-12:45; May 21-June 8, 2012

Since 2000, we have witnessed the proliferation of "reality" genres across all areas of cable and network programming schedules. While there are specific explanations for the rise of the current wave of reality, reality programming is not new to television and has developed out of and in relationship to other non-fiction television forms--specifically game shows, participation programs, magazine news programs and, of course, documentary. This course will survey the history and development of documentary and reality television and its implications for the aesthetics, form, business and culture of television. Students will develop analytical skills needed to understand the aesthetics and culture referenced and created by the documentary tradition and reality-based programming as well as the business and marketing strategies that have been instituted in relationship to it.

Susan Murray is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. She is the co-editor, with Laurie Ouellette, of two editions (2004, 2008) of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture and the author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (2005).

Tonight (11/18): Film Screening @ NYU -- Community Activism and Environmental Justice in Post-Katrina New Orleans

A/P/A Institute at NYU presents
A story of community activism and environmental justice in post-Katrina New Orleans...
“A Village Called Versailles”
Film Screening and Talk with filmmaker Leo Chiang and Scholar Julie Sze, UC Davis

Friday, Nov 18th
Cantor Film Center
36 East 8th Street
Theater 101
6:30PM-9:30PM

RSVP: online at www.apa.nyu.edu , tel: 212.992.9653

Talk and demonstration is FREE and open to the public.

Winner of the Audience Award at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and New Orleans Film Festival, “A Village Called Versailles” is filmmaker Leo Chiang’s feature documentary about Versailles, an isolated community in eastern New Orleans that has been settled by Vietnamese refugees since the late 1970s. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Versailles residents impressively rise to the challenges by returning and rebuilding before any other flooded neighborhood in New Orleans, only to have their homes threatened by a new government-imposed toxic landfill just two miles away. The film recounts the empowering story of how this group of people, who have already suffered so much in their lifetime, turns a devastating disaster into a catalyst for change and a chance for a better future.

Following the film, Julie Sze, Associate Professor of American Studies at University of California at Davis and author of Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice will be in conversation with Chiang about the broader issues of race and environmental justice covered in the film affecting Asian American communities.

Cultures Of Resistance: Artists On Arts & Activism

“Cultures Of Resistance” — Artists On Arts & Activism
Suheir Hammad, Sidd Joag, Iara Lee, Paul D. Miller

Workshop | Film Screening | Panel Discussion

Wednesday, November 2, 2011
RSVP to WORKSHOP and FILM/PANEL:
www. apa.nyu.edu | apa.rsvp@nyu.edu | 212.992.9653
FREE and open to the public.

A/P/A Institute asks four artists — Suheir Hammad, Sidd Joag, Iara Lee and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) — to explore the idea of being “the change they want to see” as set forth by filmmaker Iara Lee in her film “Cultures of Resistance.” The workshop, screening and discussion will provide launching points for artists, scholars and community to come together in discussion on artistsʼ roles in global change and resistance.

WORKSHOP with Artist Sidd Joag, freeDimensional
NYU Institute for Public Knowledge
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
3:00PM-5:00PM

Artist Sidd Joag of freeDimensional will facilitate a workshop on its new region-specific model for providing distress services to artists and culture workers in areas of conflict. Participants will engage with the concept, purpose, structure and outcomes of Regional Triage Teams - network activators designed to advocate for and access resources on behalf of artists facing political repression as a result of their activist work.

FILM "Cultures of Resistance" dir. Iara Lee
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
24 West 12th Street, Auditorium
6:00PM-7:30PM

Does each gesture really make a difference? Can music and dance be weapons of peace? In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, director Iara Lee embarked on a journey to better understand a world increasingly embroiled in conflict and, as she saw it, heading for self-destruction. After several years, travelling over five continents, Lee encountered growing numbers of people who committed their lives to promoting change. This is their story. From Iran, where graffiti and rap became tools in fighting government repression, to Burma, where monks acting in the tradition of Gandhi take on a dictatorship, moving on to Brazil, where musicians reach out to slum kids and transform guns into guitars, and ending in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where photography, music, and film have given a voice to those rarely heard, “Cultures of Resistance” explores how art and creativity can be ammunition in the battle for peace and justice.

PANEL DISCUSSION
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò,
24 West 12th Street, Auditorium
7:30PM-9PM

The film is the launching point for the post-screening panel featuring filmmaker Iara Lee (“Cultures of Resistence”), Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky on the Vanuatu Pacifica Project and Tanna Center for the Arts), poet Suheir Hammad, and artist Sidd Joag. The panel will explore the role of the artist in a global society, including that of the diasporic artist. The panel will be moderated by NYU Tisch School of the Artsʼ Art & Public Policy Program chair Randy Martin.

Co-sponsored by: The Institute for Public Knowledge; Tisch School of the Arts’ Art & Public Policy Program; NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions; NYU Students for Justice in Palestine; and the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History

Congratulations to Peter Lucas, Winner of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship

Photos by Orizon Carneiro Muniz, Courtesy of Peter Lucas

Draper congratulates Professor Peter Lucas on being one of eight professors at NYU to be awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for 2011. "Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise," Peter and the other recipients were selected from a batch of over 3,000 applications.

Peter teaches "International Studies in Human Rights" for Draper each fall, but is also affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) program in GSAS and the Open Arts program in Tisch. When not teaching at NYU, Peter--an accomplished photographer and filmmaker--often works on projects highlighting memory, trauma, and personal narrative in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

It is for one of his photography projects--The Last Hour of Summer--that Peter was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. As he explains on his website, the project started with the discovery of 200 black and white photos that he found and bought at a flea market in Rio:

"Most of the pictures were women on the beach at Ipanema. Although we did not know who the photographer was at first, he took two self-portraits of himself in the mirror. He also dated his pictures on the verso. The time frame of 1962/1963 correlates with that golden period just before the 1964 military coup in Brazil and represents the “Last Hour” before the change.

With some clever research in Ipanema we eventually found people who were able to identify the late Orizon Carneiro Muniz as the photographer. Muniz was not a professional photographer, but a local weekend photographer with a deep love for women and the beach. In an attempt to find the people in the pictures, we mounted an exhibition in 2007 at Casa Laura Alvim on the beach in Ipanema. With substantial press coverage of the show, we finally met many friends that Muniz photographed. Over 45 years later, most of the people in the photographs are still living in Rio.

...

Among the people we met at the exhibition was a friend who had the remaining photos from Orizon Carneiro Muniz. There were 5000 more photographs. I purchased the photos and negatives in 2009. Using the entire archive as a visual base, we are planning a feature-length documentary film with production beginning in 2011. There are several stories in the pictures but the essence of the film will be documentation and remembrance of those incredible years just before the coup when Ipanema emerged as a global cultural sensation."

Using Muniz' photographs, Peter developed a series of exhibitions and also a book (co-authored with Mauricio Lissovsky) called The Last Hour of Summer: The Lost Photos of Ipanema, which is forthcoming from Brazil's Casa de Palavra press. With the support of the Guggenheim fellowship, he will be able to finish the documentary film that these photographs also inspired.

As Peter explained in a recent article for CLACS, the film will combine several narratives, using Muniz's found photos as a point of departure to examine the cultural and historical moment of Ipanema on the threshold of the military coup in 1964.

"Using the entire archive for the film, we will then interview other people who will speak on the political nature of these images. The photos were largely taken in the years just before the military coup in Brazil in 1964. Brazilians sometimes refer to this time as the “last hour.” As documents of this last moment before the dictatorship, the photographs evoke innocence, beauty, hope, naiveté, wonder, and youth. The photos also represent the last hour of the classic black and white snapshot before the widespread introduction of Kodacolor film in 1964. Photographic historians and photographers will then be interviewed to speak about the images from the perspective of personal photography.

Spiraling further out, the fourth story involves the cultural history of Ipanema in the early 1960s. While these photos were being taken, Tom Jobim was writing his most famous songs a few blocks away and in 1964, Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto would win the Grammy and introduce Bossa Nova to the world. As Americans discovered Ipanema, the first surfers from California arrived in Brazil in 1964 and they began to surf the waves at Arpoador, the first beach at Ipanema. And the final story is how these photos also documented this threshold moment when Brazilian women begin to change in so many ways. Their style, their beauty, and the way they walked the beach would forever captivate the world."

To see images from The Last Hour of Summer and Peter's other photographic essays, check out his website: http://peterlucas.net/

Photography and Film Panel at Barnard, 3/28

The Barnard Center for Research on Women invites you to attend:

The New Woman International:

Representations in Photography and Film

a panel with Kristine Harris, Elizabeth Otto, Vanessa Rocco, and Clare Rogan
moderated by Linda Nochlin
Monday, 3/28, 6:30 pm
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
Barnard College
3009 Broadway (at 117th Street)
New York, NY

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a range of iconic female forms emerged to dominate the global pictorial landscape. Female athletes and adventurers, chorine stars, flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, suffragettes, and trampky were all facets of the dazzling and urbane New Woman who came to epitomize modern femininity in photographs and on film. This construct existed as a set of abstract ideals, even as it varied when translated across national contexts and through a range of key historical moments including First Wave feminism, colonialism, the First and Second World Wars, political revolutions, and the rise of modernism.

This panel, moderated by art historian Linda Nochlin, will examine the nuances of visual representations of this transgressive and border-crossing figure from her inception in the later nineteenth century to her full development in the interwar period and beyond.

Kristine Harris is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz and recently was a Visiting Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Linda Nochlin, moderator, is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Elizabeth Otto, assistant professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, is an art historian who focuses on issues of gender, visuality, and media culture in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in Germany and France.

Vanessa Rocco is an adjunct assistant professor in the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.

Clare I. Rogan is Curator of the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, where she also teaches courses on history of photography, the history of prints, and museum studies.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Barnard Center for Research on Women at (212) 854-2067 or visit our website, www.barnard.edu/bcrw.

Memory: Silence, Screen and Spectacle Conference at New School, 3/24 - 3/26

The Center for Public Scholarship at The New School recommends...

the Fourth Annual New School Interdisciplinary Memory Conference:

Memory: Silence, Screen and Spectacle

March 24-26, 2011

The New School for Social Research, New York City

Speakers Include:

Marianne Hirsch, Susannah Radstone, Diana Taylor,

Yael Hersonski, Dirk Moses, William Hirst, Tom Allen,

Cynthia Milton, Daniel Levy, Louis Bickford, Jonathan Bach,

Rick Crownshaw, Susan Pearce, and many others

For information on the 2011 conference visit

www.newschool.edu/nssr/subpage.aspx?id=57135

or email nssrmemoryconference@gmail.com

An Introduction to Mexican Cinema: Times of Decadence (Talks & Screenings Hosted by Draper Graduate)

Recent Draper graduate Salvador Olguín (Jan. 2011) will be hosting a series of talks about the history of Mexican cinema at the Brooklyn arts space Observatory in early March. The three talks will each include a surprise film screening. For more information on the talks, please see the Observatory website at http://observatoryroom.org/2011/02/14/mexican-cinema/

An Introduction to Mexican Cinema: Times of Decadence
Lectures and Screenings with Salvador Olguín
March 1st, 8th, and 15th
8:00 PM
Observatory
543 Union Street, Brooklyn

Spawning world-renowned directors like Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy), and with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful currently nominated for two Academy Awards, Mexico’s film industry has established a name of its own. But few people know the history of Mexican cinema, or have access to some of its early films. During this series of talks, we will provide a brief introduction to this history, show a few clips, and present screenings of films from a pivotal moment in the development of Mexican cinema: the times of decadence around the decade of 1970.

Wojnarowicz Screening & Panel, Co-Organized by Draper Student: Feb. 1

(David Wojnarowicz Photographed by Peter Hujar)

Draper student Emily Colucci has co-organized an upcoming event with Performance Studies, which will include a screening of David Wojnarowicz's film "A Fire in My Belly" and a panel discussion. Draper students are invited to attend the event and the following reception. More details are below.

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Performance Studies Lecture Series in conjunction with the Draper Program Presents

A Fire in Our Belly: Film Screening and Panel Discussion

Tuesday February 1st, 7-9pm

721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 612 With Marvin Taylor, Thomas Crow, Karen Finley and Leon Hilton

Artist David Wojnarowicz’s archives are housed at Fales Library and Special Collections on the third floor of Bobst Library at NYU, and the film ‘A Fire in My Belly,’ an edited version of which the National Portrait Gallery removed from its exhibition ‘Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,’ was on loan from Fales.

This event brings together members of the NYU community to address the myriad and ongoing issues raised by the censoring of this important work.

Reception to follow

Please visit our Facebook event listing to RSVP:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=183963461625645

A Draper alumna and a film about the Nuremburg trials

Draper alumna Kym Harris is currently involved in the educational component and outreach for a film about the Nuremberg trials that will be premiere in New York next week. It sounds like something that would interest a lot of Draper students, and we definitely love hearing from our alumn! All the info is below.

www.nurembergfilm.org

“Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today” is a documentary that was produced in 1948 for the War Department & U.S. Military Government by the filmmakers who had collected the Nazi footage that was used by the prosecution in the trials. It was shown widely in Germany in 1948/49 as part of the U.S. de-Nazification campaign, but because of Marshall Plan politics was never shown in the U.S.A. or in any other country.

Over the years, the original picture negative and sound elements were lost or destroyed.

Now, more than 60 years later, the newly restored film can be seen around the world for the first time.

It is truly a message in a bottle – a film of great historic value that also has a striking contemporary resonance. The film ends with Justice Jackson’s stirring words: “Let Nuremberg stand as a warning to all who plan and wage aggressive war.”

It has been shown in The Hague, Berlin, Toronto, and Uganda, and will be shown in Iran, Guatemala, Washington D.C., California, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Warsaw, and elsewhere in 2010/11. It will be playing in New York City for one week only. It is premiering at the New York Film Festival on September 28 (Sold Out) and will run:

Sept 29 - Oct 5, at Film Forum Cinema, 209 West Houston Street, New York, NY 10014 Tel: (212) 727-8110 Showtimes Daily: 1:00 2:45 4:30 6:15 8:00 10:00

Online ticket purchase: www.filmforum.org

Non-profit/educational/synagogue group rate available: $6 per ticket for groups of 12 or more. To book group sales: joffre@filmforum.org or call (212) 727-8110

For more information, including the fascinating story behind the film, go to:

www.nurembergfilm.org

Free Summer Film Series: Weimar on Screen

Draper graduate Leah Ammon now works at the Neue Galerie Museum, which is curating a free film series this summer called "Weimar on Screen." Leah thought the series might be of interest to Draper students. Some information on the series is below, but film descriptions and further information is available on the Neue Galerie website, here: http://www.neuegalerie.org/programs/film-series

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NEUE GALERIE NEW YORK ANNOUNCES
FREE SUMMER FILM SERIES
"WEIMAR ON SCREEN"

This summer, the Neue Galerie presents the film series "Weimar on Screen." The tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) were a time of far-reaching social, political, and cultural upheaval. In spite of this turmoil, they brought about a flowering of art and culture in Germany, particularly in cinema. The films in this series are brilliant examples of Weimar-era filmmaking, and they illuminate aspects of the culture of the period.

Films are presented to the public free of charge on Mondays at 4 p.m. in Café Fledermaus. For more information about Neue Galerie programming, please visit our website at http://www.neuegalerie.org/programs.

The personal is political - a guest post by Amber Musser, Gender Politics

In thinking about what to share on the Draper Community blog, I decided to take a slightly personal route.

First, I’m going to tell you a bit about my mother, Camille. She is a Boston-based painter from the Caribbean.

She is also featured in the recent documentary film, “Who Does She Think She Is?”

“Who Does She Think She is?” is a film that documents the lives of five female artists and “their struggles to lead creative lives while balancing family and motherhood.” It is directed by Pamela Tanner Boll, the Academy-Award winning co-executive producer of Born into Brothels. Boll describes the women as “a testament to both the heartbreak and the beauty of a 21st century life lived in art.”

This is where things start to get political. By foregrounding the personal, the film highlights the art of balancing families and careers as well as emphasizing the difficulty that women face in the art world. The under-representation of female artists in museums and galleries is not unknown. The discrepancy between male and female artists in terms of exposure and compensation is large.

So, what does this mean? As someone invested in critical gender studies, I have a number of reactions to the film. I am proud of my mother; proud that she has decided to make art a central part of her life even as it has meant sacrifice and little financial gain. This pride, however, is tempered with sadness and anger at the structural barriers to female participation in the art world and the social negotiation of the role of motherhood. In addition to the issues I've already raised, the film makes visible the tensions in familial negotiations of maternal time. Without financial gain, these women are continually asked to justify time away from their families. Clearly there are numerous gender issues at play including, but not limited to: what does it mean to be a female artist? Is asking these questions reifying already-problematic categories? What types of people fall under these categories and what kinds of art do these people produce? These questions are places where the personal intersects with the political. Art can be a useful tool to help us understand these tensions and open us to up to think differently.

I invite you take up these questions when you explore art in the New York Area. Here’s a list of interesting exhibits/events to get you started:

“The Dinner Party,” the iconic 1970s feminist installation Judy Chicago at the The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

“Gender Patterns: Clothing Makes the…” an installation that explores the concept of gay or lesbian clothing at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation

“Georgia O’Keffe: Abstraction” challenges the viewer to look at O’Keffe’s work from a different (non-floral) perspective at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Also, be sure to check out the Performa festival which features artists like Kalup Linzy and Tracey Emin among others.

Lastly, here is more information on the film featuring my mother, Who Does She Think She Is?
 There is a screening of “Who Does She Think She Is?” on Sunday, November 8 at 2:45 pm at Symphony Space at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, 2537 Broadway at 95th Street.