Closing and dismantling this site

because of time restraints. it will slowly move to Dialogic

The Colbert Show: Michael Moore on Capitalism: A Love Story

Mark Hosler: "Adventures in Illegal Art" on Sunday, October 11 at Natasha's Bistro

(Courtesy of Saraya. Extra credit opportunity for my students)



Hey all - this is going to be a really great presentation on corporate media, pop culture, intellectual property and the interplay between. Not sure if you are familiar with Negativland but they are pretty culturally significant - they have been pushing the buttons of corporate media pretty hard since the early 1980s, and the topics covered are still very relevant today. thought you might be able to pass it on to anyone you felt might be interested - students, faculty or friends. Thanks so much!
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Cultural icon Mark Hosler, founding member of Negativland will give his multi-media presentation "Adventures in Illegal Art" on Sunday, October 11 at Natasha's Bistro in conjunction with WRFL 88.1's 21st birthday extravaganza, BOOMSLANG.

"Pranks, media hoaxes, media literacy, the art of collage, creative activism in a media saturated multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, artistic and funny critiques of mass media and culture, so-called “culture jamming”.... even if you've never heard of Negativland, if you are interested in any of these issues we think you’ll find this presentation worth your time and attention.

"Is Negativland a “band”? Media hoaxers? Activists? Artists? Musicians? Filmmakers? Culture jammers? Comedians? An inspiration for the unwashed many? A nuisance for the corporate few? Decide for yourself in this presentation that uses films and stories to illustrate the many creative projects, hoaxes, pranks and "culture jamming" that Negativland has been doing since 1980.

Most famous for getting sued for their “U2” single, Negativland has had many years of experience being a tiny thorn in the side of the corporate media and entertainment biz. They’ve released a gazillion CDs, do occasional tours, published a few books, make little movies, put on art shows, and were the subject of San Francisco filmmaker Craig Baldwin’s 1995 feature film “SONIC OUTLAWS”."



Offthesky, a sound & video performance by former WRFL DJ Jason Corder, will open. Sunday, October 11, 4:30 p.m. Nastasha's Bistro is located at 112 Esplanade. Please be aware that Main and Short Streets will be closed for Second Sunday; you will need park a couple blocks away, or walk or ride a bike.

$3 general public, FREE with festival pass!

Other Boomslang acts throughout the weekend include Os Mutantes, Faust, Atlas Sound, Mission of Burma, The Black Angels and Papa M. The festival will also include workshops, sonic experiments, art & literary events, a film showing at KET, and a free, all ages carnival featuring fire twirlers, glass-walkers, spoon benders, a circus-themed fashion show, participatory workshops and installations and much more. For more information, including scheduling and ticket info, please visit Bommslang

Kentucky Theater Global Lens Film Series: October 2 - October 8

(Extra credit opportunity for my students--watch a film and write a response to it.}

What a great opportunity for Lexington cineastes, 10 films, from 10 countries, in 7 days:

See the List of Films

To See Dates/Times

The Nation: Naomi Klein's Conversation with Michael Moore About His New Film

Klein, Naomi and Michael Moore. "America's Teacher." The Nation (September 23, 2009)

Pray the Devil Back to Hell (USA: Gini Reticker, 2008): Fri. October 2, 7:00—9:00 pm

(Extra credit opportunity for my students)

Pray the Devil Back to Hell



Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a multi award-winning gripping account of a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia, a nation torn to shreds by civil war. The women’s historic, yet unsung achievement finds voice in a narrative
that intersperses contemporary interviews, archival images, and scenes of present-day Liberia together to recount the experiences and memories of the women who were instrumental in bringing lasting peace to their country. It offers moving testimony to the power of regular people to make real change in their worlds.

The story of the role played by the women of Liberia in helping forge a peaceful resolution of the nation’s civil war might have been lost without the documentation
provided by “Pray the Devil Back to Hell”. While conflict and disagreement among people of different faiths often dominate world headlines, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” details the success of an unlikely interfaith alliance between Muslim and
Christian women in resolving the Liberian conflict.
-— Discussion Guide quotes written by Ellen Livingston,
Teachers College, Columbia University

Discussion to follow; Reception in Art Gallery
Fri. October 2, 7:00—9:00 pm
Lexington Public Library Theatre,
140 East Main St., Lex. KY
Sponsored in partnership with: Lexington’s One World
Films; Central Kentucky Council for Peace & Justice

Belinda Smaill: Documentary investigations and the female porn star

Documentary investigations and the female porn star
by Belinda Smaill
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Since the mid-nineties, documentary filmmakers have become increasingly interested in exploring the world of pornography. This subject matter represents one of the most marketable trends in contemporary documentary, particularly in terms of DVD distribution. These documentaries frequently have an argumentative logic as they investigate pornography's culture and production, creating a “behind the scenes” exposé of the industry and the individuals who work in it. Perhaps more than any other media form, pornography is shaped by and attracts a great deal of strong feeling. A documentary about the pornography industry, or what I term here the pornography documentary, similarly draws upon a range of emotional responses, and I argue that a number of these emotions cohere around the figure of the female porn star. Here I look in particular at three such documentaries: Sex: The Annabelle Chong Story (2000), The Girl Next Door (2000) and Inside Deep Throat (2004).

In their discussion of pornography and ethnography, Christian Hansen, Catherine Needham and Bill Nichols argue,

“Both pornography and ethnography promise something they cannot deliver: the ultimate pleasure of knowing the Other. On this promise of cultural or sexual knowledge they depend, but they are also condemned to do nothing more than make it available for representation” (225).

In other words, as viewers we desire pleasure but will never be pleased entirely (in pornography we extract pleasure but this is never the pleasure that is represented). Similarly, we desire to know but cannot fully appropriate the knowledge that is represented (the knowledge of the cultural other in the case of ethnography). Hansen, Needham and Nichols’ formulation is instructive for a number of reasons. These documentaries contain a representation of women that appeals to the viewer’s desire for knowledge about the other. And this desire is based in pre-existing spectatorial expectations shaped by the aesthetic qualities of documentary and pornography. Yet the pornography documentary emerges at an historical moment when female subjectivity and desire is itself a site of particular fascination and struggle. If these films are organized around the pleasure of knowing the other, and thus engage a narrative desire that works at the intersection of pornography and documentary, how is (heterosexual) female desire, or the female as desiring subject, positioned in the films?

In considering the larger issue of women's fantasy and film, Claire Johnston writes early in second wave feminism,

“In order to counter objectification in the cinema, our collective fantasies must be released: women’s cinema must embody the working through of desire: such an objective demands the use of the entertainment film” (31).

The problem of desire and female subjectivity in film has occupied scholars for some time, yet the terms of this problem have shifted greatly from the 1970s when Johnston was writing. The quest to release collective female fantasies has become complicated by the proliferation of sexual discourses in the contemporary media sphere, and many of these discourses attempt to articulate or explicate female desire. The sphere of popular culture in which pornography documentaries circulate is one that has seen mainstream representations, often fictional, explore what “female sexual agency” might mean, most notably in the much discussed examples of Sex and the City or Bridget Jones’s Diary. This sphere has emphasized female desire and pleasure, yet not necessarily on the terms second wave feminism might intend. Beyond the mainstream other examples have contributed to this revision of sexual agency, including the fiction filmmaking of Jane Campion or Catherine Breillait and the figures of Susie Bright and “post-porn Goddess” Annie Sprinkle.

My question of how female desire is evidenced in different texts stems from my broader interest in locating documentary within an economy of the emotions. For some time documentary scholars have sought to account for the spectatorial experience of pleasure and desire offered by documentary and how this sets it apart from narrative fiction film.[1] I wish to add to these discussions and think through pleasure and desire not only as theoretical constructs but also as embodied emotions and social discourse. In this essay my focus is on the emotions, both agreeable and aversive, that frequently shape the meaning of female corporeality and sexuality. These emotions find a particular focus in the pornography documentary.

I seek to locate the pornography documentary within a terrain that encompasses genre concerns and histories of signification, as well as feminist approaches to representation and sexual politics. More specifically, my discussion focuses in on the figure of the female porn star and how she is produced at the intersection of popular feminism, narratives of female agency, and historically-shaped genre conventions that seek to organize desire. In this sense, my discussion is limited to the problem of how female agency and desire is produced in the pornography documentary text through genre conventions and popular discourse. Questions that pertain to the female viewer and her desiring relation to pornography and the female porn star are significant yet beyond this essay's scope.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Left Field Cinema: Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1978)

Misunderstood Modern Cinema: Heaven's Gate
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema



Heaven’s Gate is a western, however is appears unlike any other western you’re ever likely to see. Based on historical events from 1890 Wyoming, a powerful group of land owners known as the association are in the midst of conflict with European immigrants who are trying to forge a life on the American frontier. The judicial system favours the immigrants, and the land owners decide that they must bypass the law in order to rid themselves of these interlopers. Their extreme solution is to create a death list with one-hundred and twenty-five names on it, and then hire a small army of bounty hunters and mercenaries to hunt down every man and woman on the list and kill them. Sheriff James Averill played by Kris Kristofferson comes to town and finds violence on the streets and murder brewing amongst civil unrest, he visits with his prostitute girlfriend Ella Watson played by a very young Issabelle Huppert; his former university friend from Harvard - Billy played by the incredible John Hurt; and a bar owner and prospector John played by Jeff Bridges. Slowly Averill gets a picture of the violently volatile situation and wants to convince Ella to leave before the situation explodes, but Ella is content with her life, she runs a successful brothel, and has everything she could want where she is. Averill isn’t the only one who wants Ella to leave, hired gun Nathan played by Christopher Walken wants to marry Ella and start a life together away from her prostitute occupation. A love triangle is formed with both men wanting the same thing, but neither of them may achieve their goal in the end as it comes to light that Ella’s name is also on the death list and the illegal army begin their march towards the town to kill the majority of the inhabitants.

To Read the Rest of the Analysis

To Listen to the Analysis as a Podcast

Left Field Cinema: Terence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

Terence Malick's Days of Heaven
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema



“The Magic Hour” also known as “The Golden Hour” are the two hours of the day when the sun is setting and rising; painting the sky, ground, objects and people with a sort of golden yellow hue, pronouncing shadows as the light hits everything at an angle rather than the blanket of light we usually witness throughout an average day. Softening light and enhancing colours through mother natures own form of diffusion. “The Magic Hour” will improve even a mundane image through what are considered to be idyllic and beautiful lighting conditions. No filmmaker has ever captured the intoxicating beauty of “The Magic Hour” as exceptionally as director Terrance Malick did with cinematographer Nestor Almendros in the 1978 production of Days of Heaven. Malick’s second film before his twenty-year hiatus from film making, but even the stunning beauty of his third film The Thin Red Line can not match the majesty of this most gorgeous of American films. This ranks amongst the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful film ever made. It may be clichéd to describe the imagery as such, but it is no exaggeration to say that every single frame of picture in the film is a potential still you could hang on a wall. Magnificently painterly and extraordinary to look at, but its dream like sensibilities are not limited to imagery and its beauty as a film goes beyond cinematography – it extends to every facet of the film – music, editing, pacing, plotting, and emotions.

To Read the Rest of the Analysis

To Listen to the Podcast of the Analysis

Jon Lewis: Real Sex -- Aesthetics and Economics of Art-House Porn

Real sex: aesthetics and economics of art-house porn
by Jon Lewis
Jump Cut



...

So let’s ask the obvious question: which is the more obscene: Shortbus or Saw IV ? I think it is an easy question to answer, but one the film industry is disinclined to examine or discuss. Commenting on the writhing bodies in the climactic orgy scene in Shortbus, a character exclaims (speaking as much to the images on screen as to our present cultural predicament):

“It’s just like the 60s, only with less hope.”

It’s a curious pay-off line for such an upbeat film, but nonetheless telling.

To Read the Entire Essay