if the “olive” doesn’t link to the article, just use the address below…

http://looking-for-mabel.webs.com/peaceday1916.htm

Hi everyone, when last we left our ongoing adventures in technology and education, my Multicultural America‘s final class project, a multimedia “archive” for our community partner, Kids Matter, Inc. had just emerged from Google limbo.     I wanted to update folks on how things were going.   

The Center for Social Media at American University is having its 5th annual Making Your Media Matter Conference, Feb 12-13, 2009. It has a great focus on the connections between ethics, aesthetics, and funding for media makers — an important issue for all of us working in media during these tough economic times. The conference features keynotes by the noted documentary film makers, George Stoney and Gordon Quinn. Sessions planned include: a special focus on the often perilous balance between money and mission in social issue media (speakers include, Danny Alpert, Executive Producer of See3 and Kindling Group, Julie Goldman, founder of Cactus Three Films, Diana Barrett of the Fledgling Fund and Alyce Myatt, Executive Director of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media); a panel on outreach (panelists include, Andrew Mer of Snagfilms, Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, film makers of Made in LA; Scott Kirsner, author of CinemaTech; Wendy Levy, Director of Creative Programming of the Bay Area Video Coalition), and a session on art, ethics, and mission (with Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, film makers of War Dance, Cara Mertes, Director of the Sundance Documentary Film Program, Thomas Allen Harris, Director of Chimpanzee Productions, Sky Sitney, Programming Director of SILVERDOCS).

Here’s a link for more information on this important event.

By the way, the website for the Center for Social Media is a great resource for those of us interested in Media Literacy education, with all kinds of information on fair use and public policy issues related to media.

Hey everyone:
As promised, my interview with Sharon Sekhon discussing her work with The Studio for Southern California History can be found on the podcast part of the feminism 3.0 site:

Tucked between an electronics store and an employment agency in LA’s Chinatown is the wonderful, Studio for Southern California History, a community based cultural history museum, which focuses on overlooked histories/stories of the region. I first had the good fortune to visit the museum as part of the Imagining America conference in October 2008, when, as part of the event, the Studio‘s Director, Sharon Sekhon, took us on a walking tour of the neighborhood.

But I truly knew this was my kind of archive when I saw the website connected to the space borrowed a quotation from Marcel Proust:

Here’s a cool new site to check out, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Art and Creative Intelligence that is very much in spirit with our feminism 3.0 mission of connecting the creative and critical, or as noted on the site a commitment to engage “the intuitive and the intellectual in simultaneity.”   The Institute’s Director is the artist/scholar, Jeananne Dill, who will be offering seminars on creativity through the site.   Also of interest on the site is a link to a forthcoming project/site on the artist and filmmaker, Jules Engle.   

Coming down the homestretch for the semester here at UWM and my Multicultural Amercia class was given the ultimate challenge as they were working on their final projects — an online archive devoted to the child’s advocacy group, Kids Matter Inc. . Using the fairly new and usually nifty app, Google Site, somehow the class was trapped in a spam filter that shut down the entire site ONE DAY BEFORE the classroom presentations of their work. We all had a collective gasp and kept working and looks like the site is now emerging from the Google limbo intact. We are still working away on our collective project given the mini setback, but I wanted to give a shout out to my UWM students’ resilience and good humor throughout the experience.

I ask a lot from my students in the class, building basic to mid range multimedia making skils, media analysis, critical skills on multicultural issues, AND a service learning experience. I am excited to see their final projects and the archive completed. Their earlier assignment, a photo essay and interview, demonstrated enormous self-reflection as well as concern and respect for their subjects. I have learned so much from my students this semester and just wanted to send them a big thank you in this blog post. I will put a link up here when the archive is available, but in the meantime here’s to our adventures in praxis.

A big thanks is especially directed to our course tech assistant, Dale Kaminski, who labored all afternoon creating a parallel website for the class and then received a note from Google informing us of our release from exile.

Hey all — From our friends at University of Arizona we have news of Foto-Synthesis, a student run film showcase dedicated to issues of social justice. The festival is open to undergrad, grad, community college students. The deadline is February 16, 2009.

Here are some details:

REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSIONS:
• Topic must focus around an issue of
social justice, for instance how things
like race, ethnicity, gender identity,
ability, class, religion, sexual
orientation, nationality, etc. relate to
health, law, policy, economics, art, and
other social institutions and themes
• Submission open to undergraduate
and graduate students at four year
universities or 2 year community
colleges, from all departments and
areas of study
• Film must be submitted in DVD format:
DVD clearly marked with title, name of
filmmaker, running time, which will be
kept in a permanent file
• Documentary, experimental, narrative,
animation, live action features and
shorts accepted
• Please include the informational sheet,
filled out in full, with your submission:
Download the sheet at our website,
www.u.arizona.edu/~ksad
• Submissions must be postmarked by
February 16, 2009.

Submissions must be mailed to:
Katelyn Sadler, Room 232
1000 N. Park Ave.
Tucson, AZ 85719

To learn more, email [email protected]
or visit the website at
www.u.arizona.edu/~ksad

Hi everyone — Vicki Callahan signing on this Saturday morning. I have been a bit MIA here as I have been working on other parts of the fem 3.0 website: the live blog, a podcast with the artist Cecelia Condit (check it out, a really wonderful insight into her artistic process). I will be posting in next couple of weeks about conferences I will be attending: IMAGINING AMERICA (in LA, Oct 2-4); FLOW (Austin, Oct 9-11) and THE CONVERSATION: THE FUTURE OF CINEMA, GAMES, AND ONLINE VIDEO. I have some links on the page so check these events out. I am excited to have the opportunity to hear all the ideas out there on new media tools and the transformation it is producing.

I had a productive summer with lots of travel and of particular interest was a trip to the BADLANDS and Lakota country. Off the beaten path housed in small trailer was the Lakota Visitor’s Center to the Badlands National Park. I had the good fortune to enter into the park from this direction due to a hotel worker’s information that this was the best way into the park rather than the “main entrance.” The area was minus the tourist cabins and gift shop we see at the “official” site and not far from Wounded Knee. To get to the Lakota center you travel down “Bombing Run Road,” which is land the US government took from the community for practice bombing runs in WWII. There are still warnings to leave any potential unexploded projectiles alone.

On a much more inspiring note, within the Lakota Visitor Center was a wonderful media archive of the history of the region. Photographs and text told of the community’s resilient efforts to maintain their culture and their language over the years despite external interference. The Lakota Center is great tribute to the community’s spirit and a wonderful example of an explicit counter history of the region (the “official” center focuses on geology and other scientific/technological domains, with little on the people in the area).

One last image from this stunning landscape.

A belated and partial report from the always inspiring Women and Silent Screen conference. This biennial event, which began in Utrecht in 1999, is for me one of best academic conferences around on topic of cinema history. Not only is the conference small enough that it has almost a family get together sort of feeling, but the quality of the research is uniformly excellent and typically addresses uncharted territory in film history. In addition, the screenings at each of the conferences (I have been fortunate to attend four of the five held) are filled with rarely or unseen gems of the cinema (and usually with jaw dropping gorgeous prints). This year was no exception, and I want to start out by sending out a big thank you to Astrid Soderbergh Widding and Sofia Bull and their crew in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University for their all hard work, hospitality, and indefatigable good cheer. Other acknowledgements for conference organization efforts should be sent out to Jane Gaines, Annette Kuhn, and Tytti Soila. In addition, the collective efforts of Annette Forster, Elif Rongen-Kaynakci from the Netherlands Film Museum and Kajsa Hedstrom and John Wengstrom from the Swedish Film Institute on the conference screenings were simply amazing to say the least — beautiful, fascinating, rare, and pristine 35mm prints were shown each day of the event.

Astrid Soderbergh Widding and Laura Horak’s presentations separately examined the phenomena of cross-dressing in the silent era. Soderbergh Widding looked at the 1926 Swedish comedy by Karin Swanstrom, FLICKAN I FRACK/THE GIRL IN TAILS (a restored version was premiered at the conference), which uses the device as a narrative strategy to question gender roles, while Horak’s talk explored the “Biograph Boy,” Edna/Billy Foster, whose roles were not so much cross-dressing but rather working from the theatrical tradition of male impersonation. Again, we were fortunate enough to see an example of the “Biograph Boy” in a screening of the D.W. Griffith film, BILLY’S STRATAGEM (1912) although the radicality of the gender role twist is countered with Griffith’s usual dualistic vision of race/ethnicity, and indeed gender, since Billy’s role is in fact to save “his” sister from marauding Indians, a plot structure we know all too well from the director’s career.

Cross-dressing could be much more stylized or performative as Victoria Duckett’s paper on Sarah Bernhardt underlined the largely overlooked or unappreciated “theatrical film” in early cinema. Often seen as an anachronism, Duckett made a compelling case for thinking of Bernhardt’s films as falling outside of the silent film classifications of “attractions” or “classical narrative.”  Anne Morey examined similarly a cross-over from the theatrical tradition in her presentation on Geraldine Ferrar, a Metropolitan Opera star who strangely enough made only one film, CARMEN (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915) which was an adaptation from the opera stage.   As Morey notes, Ferrar’s casting was an effort by Hollywood to bring in mass audiences to the cinema with an appeal to “high class” performances, but here the sheer presence of Ferrar rather than the art form itself was the designator of the “class” act.