Site Archive

Ten glimpses into the crystal ball: the future of documentary
Written by David Tames on June 18, 2011
Filed Under Business, Distribution, Documentary, Featured, Film Festivals, Filmmaking, Media Technology, New Media, Television, The Media, Web
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I’ve been contemplating the evolution of the documentary this summer and I was delighted to see that The MediaGuardian’s recent Sheffield Doc/Fest 2011 coverage includes ten articles providing a refreshing perspective on how documentary makers are finding new ways to reach their...  Continue Reading...

Cartographies of Time
Written by David Tames on December 4, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Featured, Narrative
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I love St. Mark’s Bookshop, every time I go to New York I make it a point to make the trek to Third Avenue between 8th and 9th Streets and spend time browsing there, especially through the new book section, where I came across Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg...  Continue Reading...

A framework for thinking about cyberspace
Written by David Tames on December 1, 2010
Filed Under Books, Critical Theory, Featured, New Media, The Media
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Daniel Downes suggests in Interactive Realism: The Poetics Of Cyberspace (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) that it is people who construct social reality through their interactions, critiquing the “transformative turn” in media studies. Distinguishing clearly between the Internet...  Continue Reading...

Spaces Speak, Are you listening?
Written by David Tames on November 29, 2010
Filed Under Books, Featured, Sound
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In their book, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture (MIT Press, 2007) Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter remind us that we experience spaces not only through visual perception but also through our auditory perception. They explore auditory spatial awareness (experiencing...  Continue Reading...

Cinema will eventually become a flexible means of writing
Written by David Tames on November 22, 2010
Filed Under Art, Camera, Critical Theory, Featured, Filmmaking, Music Video, New Media, Writing
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In 1948 Alexandre Astruc, a filmmaker and theorist, suggested the notion of caméra-stylo (camera pen) in his essay, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” which appears in the book, The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (Edited by Ginette Vincendeau and...  Continue Reading...

Did digital imaging throw documentary into an ontological crisis?
Written by David Tames on August 20, 2010
Filed Under Art, Camera, Critical Theory, Documentary, Featured, Photography
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Scholars have long discussed the ambiguity and subjectivity inherent in photographic representation with its seductive verisimilitude. Bill Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (The MIT Press, 1992), the first book-length critical analysis of the...  Continue Reading...

Expanded Cinema: Still fresh after forty years
Written by David Tames on August 17, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Featured, Filmmaking, New Media
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A few months ago I pulled Gene Youngblood’s classic Expanded Cinema (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1970, available online) off the shelf and read it again. The pages in my well worn softcover edition were falling out, the glue having dried over the two decades I’ve owned the book....  Continue Reading...

Memory and the end of reality
Written by David Tames on August 11, 2010
Filed Under Art, Critical Theory, Featured, New Media, Writing
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The transformation from media as a form of cultural production to media as entertainment has lead us into a crisis as we enter the fifth phase of history. Marshall McLuhan (1962, 2005) divided history in four phases: 1. culture of oral communication, 2. manuscript culture, 3. the Gutenberg...  Continue Reading...

Sixty-seven excellent documentaries available through Netflix
Written by David Tames on August 28, 2009
Filed Under Documentary, Featured, Films
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Students and friends often ask me for suggestions on what documentaries I recommend watching, and they are often frustrated that many of my suggestions are not easily obtainable. Many classic documentaries are hard to find: they are only available for purchase at high prices or through libraries,...  Continue Reading...