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Category Archives: Video & Multimedia

May 29, 2018
Video & Multimedia

The Premiere of Four Women Artists

By William Ferris

Pecolia Warner, 1975.

Something shapes people. It’s the world in which they act that makes their experience, that furnishes the economic background that he grows up in and the folkways and the stories that come down to him and his family. It’s the fountainhead of his knowledge and experience. One of the reasons Southerners have this to talk about is that they don’t have much else to talk about—it’s their source of entertainment, besides their source of knowledge. You’ve got the family tales to wile away a long winter evening, and that’s what they have to drawn on, especially in the little hamlets where people sit on the store porch and talk in the evenings. All they have to talk about is each other and what they’ve seen during the day and what happened to so-and-so and also encourages our sense of exaggeration and the comic, I think. Because tales get taller as they go along. It is a pleasure but it’s also something of deep significance to people.

Eudora Welty’s introductory dialogue in the 1977 documentary film Four Women Artists, by William Ferris, is also a metacommentary on the filmmaker himself. Ferris was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1942, grew up on a farm outside town, and began documenting his friends and community at an early age. Between the fifties and the late seventies, he captured—in photographs and on tape and film—the stories, the songs and music, and the spirit of Southern culture during Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights: among his subjects are musicians James “Son Ford” Thomas, Sonny Boy Watson, Lovey Williams, and Fannie Bell Chapman, and the writers Barry Hannah, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Robert Penn Warren. Best known as a folklorist, Ferris founded, with the filmmaker Judy Peiser, the Center for Southern Folklore, in Memphis, in 1972; in 1979, he became the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he taught for nearly two decades. In 1989, he coedited the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and, in 1997, was named chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities. Read More
December 7, 2017
Video & Multimedia

A Very Particular Bird

By Jem Cohen

When asked to make a short film to accompany the release of Sam Stephenson’s Gene Smith’s Sink, I was more than pleased. It meant an increasingly rare excuse to wander, in Midtown and through my own footage archive. I’d need to sit with Stephenson’s soft-spoken reading of excerpts from the book and search for images that could at least loosely relate to Smith’s infamous Sixth Avenue “jazz loft.” I had neither the intention nor the means to re-create New York City in the period of 1957 to 1965, and in any case I didn’t want to compete with the text by being literal. It soon became evident that the film had to be a celebration of the subtractive, something Stephenson had done so beautifully in the book itself. I use that term to mean that which is added by leaving things out. For Stephenson, who worked on his Gene Smith project for more than twenty years, this meant relinquishing the more predictable biographical tome he could have written in favor of something looser and riskier. He would evoke the photographer via the lives of people Smith intersected with and through other fruitful, if unorthodox, digressions—one being the very particular sound of a very particular bird. Read More
November 17, 2016
My First Time

Karl Ove Knausgaard on Out of the World

By Dan Piepenbring

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria.

Today, Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses his 1998 debut novel, Ute av verden (Out of the World): “I got up at six in the evening, I woke up, and then I sat and wrote all night, till eight or nine in the morning … I was so egocentric, it was really the only thing I cared about for sixteen months. When you write a book you don’t know why you’re doing it.” Knausgaard wrote the book for his father, who died just before it was published. “I realized the book was meaningless,” he says. “I wanted to say to him, Look, this is me, you don’t know me, you never knew me.” Read More
September 19, 2016
Video & Multimedia

A New Machine

By Dan Piepenbring

Don Buchla with one of his instruments.

Don Buchla invented some of the first electronic instruments—not synthesizers, he insisted, but electronic instruments. To him, the word synthesizer implied some attempt at emulation, as if these new machines could do nothing more than imitate preexisting sounds. Buchla believed that his inventions offered an aural palette every bit as distinct as a trumpet’s or a clarinet’s. It was only marketing that made listeners hear something derivative in them.

“An instrument has to exist long before performance techniques can be developed and a repertoire arises,” he told Keyboard Magazine in the eighties, explaining why there are so few new sounds in the world:

Because of this, the market for the instrument doesn’t exist for many years after the R&D that goes into developing a truly new instrument. With short-term profits a primary motive, the big corporations are simply not interested … When you open up those other possibilities, you’ll alienate the people who are coming from a rock-band orientation and want instant gratification. They don’t want to have to figure out some other relationship between their actions and the instrument’s response. Read More
August 15, 2016
My First Time

Akhil Sharma on An Obedient Father

By Caitlin Love

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria.

Today, Akhil Sharma discusses his first novel, An Obedient Father, which he started when he was a student at Stanford: “I got [to school] about a month before classes started, and I didn’t know how to write or how to begin writing a book. And I thought, I’ll begin writing five pages a day and in two months I’ll be done with a novel. I didn’t know how to come up with plot, I didn’t know how to do anything … Still I don’t know how you get through all those years of being lost.” Read More
July 19, 2016
My First Time

Vivian Gornick on In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt

By Caitlin Love

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria.

This week, Vivian Gornick discusses her first book, In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt, about middle-class Egyptian family life. After reporting overseas, she came home and confronted her material: “When I got home, I had this whole cast of characters, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know how to write a book, it was the first book! … The book taught me who I was. It began to teach me what I was capable of doing and what I would ultimately do, which was to use myself to see the world.” Read More