Roundtable Discussion
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Vivienne Dick, Femke Wolting, Nick Ryan, Keith Potter, Dara Waldron, Ben Russell, Chris Killen of 'Wizard's Way,' plus new voices from Irish documentary, will field critical questions posed by the evolving forms of documentary. Storytelling, methodologies, codes of practice and responses to hybrid documentary filmmaking will be discussed as well as the creative opportunities and ethical conundrums it poses.
On Saturday 26 April Darklight will be the hot-bed of discussion and analysis on the multiple truths presented by interactive documentary, dramatisation, reenactment and animation in the genre.
Critical questions posed by this evolving form will be explored as we examine documentary story telling: methodologies and codes of practice and responses to hybrid documentary filmmaking and the ethical conundrums it poses. What digital autonomy means for this form and what the future may hold.
Facilitators' Biographies:
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Forsyth and Pollard met and began working collaboratively at Goldsmiths. They initially became known for their recreations of highly-charged cultural moments which pioneered the use of re-enactment within contemporary visual art over a series of major live art commissions at London’s ICA in the late nineties. This body of work culminated in their critically acclaimed 'A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide' (1998), a painstakingly faithful live re-creation of David Bowie’s final performance as Ziggy Stardust, 25 years after the original event. They have since continued to employ the mechanics of liveness and repetition while shifting focus to work predominantly with video and sound installation. In 2003 they produced File under Sacred Music a remake of an infamous bootleg of The Cramps playing at Napa State Mental Institute, California in 1978. The artists meticulously re-staged this performance with an audience from local mental health arts organisations, in order to re-shoot each pan, tilt, zoom and jitter of the original document. Performance and music culture plays a significant role in their work, and this has led to some notable collaborations. Their first feature film, '20,000 Days on Earth,' premiered at Sundance in January 2014, winning the Directing and Editing Awards. The film, backed by Film4, BFI, Corniche Pictures and Pulse Films, features Nick Cave alongside Kylie Minogue and Ray Winstone.
Vivienne Dick
Dick has been making films and installations for thirty five years, though is best known for a burst of work in NYC in the late 70’s and early 80’s when she was part of what has become known as the No Wave scene. Together with an unruly cast of artists and musicians (notably Pat Place and Lydia Lunch) Dick helped create a vortex of nihilistic glamour that sustains the East Village to this day. Dick’s films, which often display a fractured narrative, stops and starts, off camera voices and rough cut production qualities, are suffused with personality, intimacy and political strength.These early works including Guérillère Talks (1978), She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) and Liberty’s Booty (1980) are regularly shown in international museums as exemplars of an era when a tough aesthetic was probably the only option available. Having returned to Ireland in the '80s, she continued to create films that somehow refused--and indeed continue to refuse--to comply with the rules, despite displaying a serenity that only superficially offers thematic resolution.
Femke Wolting
Wolting is a Dutch independent new media producer. From 1995-2000, Wolting worked at the Dutch national public broadcasting network, VPRO. She is the initiator of Exploding Cinema, International Rotterdam Film Festival's annual look at the future of media, organizing exhibitions, conferences and master classes for media makers.[1] In 2000, she co-founded with Bruno Felix Submarine, an independent production company for documentaries, games, and animation. In 2001, they also created SubmarineChannel, a distribution and a production platform for filmmakers and interactive artists.
Nick Ryan
Keith Potter
Dara Waldron
Waldron is Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Limerick School of Art and Design. He is the author of the recently published 'Cinema and Evil: Moral Complexities and the "Dangerous" Film' (2013) and has also published extensively on the relationship between filmmaking and social events characterised as 'evil.' Dara's main interest resides in the fiction and nonfiction divide and he is currently researching the practice of 'near documentary' or hybrid documentary within contemporary British and Irish film.
Ben Russell
Russell is an itinerant media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. Formal investigations of the historical and conceptual relationships between early cinema, visual anthropology, and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences concerned at once with ritual, communal spectatorship and the pursuit of a “psychedelic ethnography.” A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Viennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. He began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space BEN RUSSELL in Chicago, IL, has toured worldwide with film/ video/ performance programs and was named by Cinemascope in 2012 as one of the “50 Best Filmmakers Under 50.”
Chris Killen