Site Archive
Researching Macro TrendsWritten by David Tames on October 15, 2011
Filed Under Business, Filmmaking, Media Technology, Sticky
While I was preparing my presentation, “Seven Macro Trends,” I reached out to people I thought might have some ideas and/or examples I should weave into my presentation. I’m indebted to their wonderful and generous... Continue Reading...
Seven Macro Trends (RioSeminars 2011 Presentation)Written by David Tames on October 15, 2011
Filed Under Business, Distribution, Filmmaking, Handout, Media Technology, Presentation, Sticky, The Media
I promised during my keynote presentation on Monday, October 10, 2011 at RioSeminars 2011 that I would post my slides and some notes before Sunday at midnight, so here it is: 7 Macro Trends, RioSeminars 2011 (5 MB, PDF), and below... Continue Reading...
Cinema will eventually become a flexible means of writingWritten by David Tames on November 22, 2010
Filed Under Art, Camera, Critical Theory, Filmmaking, Music Video, New Media, Sticky, Writing
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... Continue Reading...
Expanded Cinema: Still fresh after forty yearsWritten by David Tames on August 17, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Filmmaking, New Media, Sticky
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... Continue Reading...
Memory and the end of realityWritten by David Tames on August 11, 2010
Filed Under Art, Critical Theory, New Media, Sticky, Writing
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... Continue Reading...
A one-case lighting kit ready for travelWritten by David Tames on January 8, 2010
Filed Under Documentary, Filmmaking, Lighting, Sticky, Tools
I’m often asked by students, “what’s a good light kit for starting out” and I find it a very hard question to answer, because it really depends on what you want to do. There really is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all... Continue Reading...
Notables of the Noughties: 35 documentary films, 2000-2009Written by David Tames on January 4, 2010
Filed Under Documentary, Films, Sticky
It’s a special time that comes around every ten years in which we take a moment to reflect back on the past decade and make our “favorite” and “best-of” lists. It was a good decade for documentary films,... Continue Reading...
Flying takes documentary form to new heightsWritten by David Tames on August 27, 2009
Filed Under Documentary, Filmmakers, Filmmaking, Films, Sticky
Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is an amazing six-hour, six-part, documentary of epic proportions by Jennifer Fox in which we follow the filmmaker as she travels around the world asking her women friends how they construct and... Continue Reading...
A postmodern remake of a futurist classicWritten by David Tames on March 29, 2009
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Filmmaking, New Media, Sticky, Web
Video artist Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory project made with contributions from people around the world who upload video clips interpreting Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera... Continue Reading...
Bard’s work is the kind of machine-assisted participatory filmmaking that brings Vertov’s vision into the new millennium and enabled by computers and the net. I’m sure Vertov would have loved it. Man With A Movie Camera was Vertov’s mechanical vision of a new socialist society with Vertov as auteur, Mikhail Kaufman as the cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova as editor, and with Soviet society and the machinery of the industrial age as the protagonists. Bard’s project presents a global social reality in the new millennium. Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, or as I like to think of it, “People with Video Cameras” brings the machine and ordinary people into the process of movie production and delivery, providing a collective vision consistent with Vertov’s futurist masterpiece of the modern era but remade in a postmodern setting with the media and tools of our generation: participation, camcorders, the internet, and computation. The perspectives of multiple contributors is consistent with Vertov’s philosophy, Joseph Schaub wrote in his essay, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“, “Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.” OK, I’m stretching a little, but ideas are fun to play with, I see them as guides to possible worlds.
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake provides a crisp example of the first, second, and fourth characteristics that Janet Murray suggests in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, make new media a powerful vehicle for literary creation: 1. Procedural, 2. Participatory, 3. Spatial, and 4. Encyclopedic. The site does not make use of the spatial dimension (except for some aspects of the interface, which traditional cinema lacks completely), however, It’s pretty easy to see how the project could become more spatial in an interesting manner by adding geographical information related to the video when it is uploaded to the site, underscoring the truly global nature of the effort. Regardless of being light in the spatial dimension, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is one of the most interesting participatory video projects I’ve had the pleasure to experience and points the way to the future of cinema. While theater owners worry over sagging ticket sales and studio moguls fear the audience’s move to net, as creators and participants we can move beyond the industrial practices of the past and look forward to a re-invented, participatory, global, postmodern, Kino-Eye.
This post is based in part on a post written for my Design Seminar II class at MassArt in response to Scott Kirsner’s Media Tech Tonic presentation, “Inventing the Movies.”
--> Interview with David Redmon and Ashley Sabin about IntimidadWritten by David Tames on October 18, 2008
Filed Under Distribution, Documentary, Film Festivals, Filmmaking, Interviews, Sticky
Back on April 25, 2008 I had the opportunity to talk with filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin after the screening of their film Intimidad, at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Their new film presents a beautiful and intimate... Continue Reading...
