“Any girl can be glamorous,” Hedy Lamarr once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” Well, Hedy Lamarr did much more than that: along with being one of the most glamourous actresses of her era, once she had become bored with her life being typecast as an exotic seductress in movies she became a successful inventor; her early work brought forth versions of wireless technology that led eventually to what we know as wi-fi and bluetooth. The exceptional Google Doodle that is being unveiled today is a superb little movie in its own right and a fine homage to this inspiring and very interesting woman.
Archive for 2015
Women Pioneers of the Cinema (and more): Hedy Lamarr
Posted in Chapter 8, Media Literacy, Women Mediamakers, tagged bluetooth, Google Doodle, Hedy Lamarr, wi-fi on November 9, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Women Pioneers of the Cinema: Agnès Varda
Posted in Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Women Mediamakers, tagged Agnès Varda, Alice Guy Blaché, Black Panthers, Jasmine Thiré, Les 3 Boutons, Moving Images, Pamela Gray, Uncle Yanco on October 31, 2015| Leave a Comment »
In earlier posts, a variety of exemplary female filmmakers have been discussed, from early pioneer Alice Guy Blaché to cinematographer Ellen Kuras to screenwriter Pamela Gray to casting director Marion Dougherty and many more. This year has seen more inspiring landmarks and creations in the exceptional life and career of Agnès Varda, one of the featured directors of Chapters 5 and 6 of Moving Images (and who showed notable generosity towards our project). From the Moving Images text, “director Agnès Varda has maintained a long career in which she has led her own production company and has made films that have established her highly personal integration of community life and a spontaneous method and style in her movies. Varda has created some of the most innovative and free-spirited short and feature films of her time shooting with an impressively wide range of approaches: feature productions in 35mm; documentaries in 16mm or other platforms; commercials and public service announcements; journal type projects in videotape and digital video, among others.”
At the Cannes Festival this past May, Varda received a lifetime achievement award — only the fourth given in the history of the festival — and more recently, she premiered a lively short film starring teenager Jasmine Thiré — Les 3 Boutons — that provides a neat introduction to her original approaches to moviemaking and storytelling. From casting to locations to editing to narrative digressions, it is pure Varda and a treat. She is a master of cinematic language through both image and sound. The Criterion Collection has also released a new box set of some of her less known work, and it includes such important and innovative shorts as Uncle Yanco and Black Panthers.
The Stevens on the State of the Game
Posted in Chapter 5, Directors, tagged Bridge of Spies, Cara Buckley, Matt Zoller Seitz, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, The Knick on October 17, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Soderbergh shooting handheld from a dolly
In an earlier post — Soderbergh Raids the Ark — I shared Steven Soderbergh’s very revealing experiment in which he turned Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark into a black & white silent movie. Right now I would like to highlight two recently published articles about these two very different and undoubtedly masterful directors. In Steven Spielberg on the Cold War and Other Hollywood Front Lines, Spielberg discusses his new historically based movie, Bridge of Spies, and many other topics with Cara Buckley of the New York Times. In The Binge Director (in New York magazine), Matt Zoller Seitz visits with Soderbergh on the set of his show The Knick. There are many interesting points for young filmmakers and media literacy educators in both of these superb articles.
Project-based Learning in Edutopia
Posted in Media Literacy, tagged Assessment, Collaborative Learning, Edutopia, Media Literacy Education, Project-Based Learning on October 12, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Summary of points from the recent article The Role of Collaboration and Feedback in Advancing Student Learning in Media Literacy and Video Production in the JMLE has appeared in Edutopia, the online magazine from the George Lucas Educational Foundation.
Of Cinesongs and Maverick Moviemakers
Posted in Chapter 5, tagged Derek Jarman, Jerome Hiler, Michel Gondry, Microbe and Gasoline, Nathaniel Dorsky, New Order, NYFF53, NYSU, Restless on September 28, 2015| Leave a Comment »
In an earlier post, I asked the question “What exactly is that movie?” in order to address forms of visual communication through a series of commercials. For those who may wish to explore the wilds of avant garde filmmaking, right now at the New York Film Festival, there is a retrospective titled Luminous Intimacy: The Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. From the NYFF53 site, “For the last six decades, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, partners in life and in cinema, have taken their cameras out into the world and filmed gestures, moods, atmospheres, states of being, light and darkness, movement and stillness. Hiler’s register is ecstatic and polyphonic, Dorsky’s devotional and poetic. And, simply put, they are two of the greatest filmmakers alive.” You can also check out a recent article by film critic Manohla Dargis about their work in The New York Times. Despite the access today’s students — and, in fact, all of us with Internet — have to the swirling miasma of videos streaming about the netverse (YouTube or otherwise), the mediascapes of avant grade or poetic or experimental cinema seem as distant as ever to the average media viewer, it would appear to me.*
Talking about maverick moviemakers, director Michel Gondry will be appearing at the festival next week for a free talk concerning his new film Microbe and Gasoline, a coming-of-age movie about two French teenage boys.
*That said, I did have to chuckle a bit at what seemed to me to be a very inventive homage to the avant-garde work of Derek Jarman in the recently released video of New Order’s song Restless, directed by the filmmaking collective NYSU.
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