Media Mecca - University Film and Video Association conference

This years University Film and Video Association (UFVA) Conference, co-hosted by Rochester institute of Technology (RIT) and Kodak, kicked off with an entertaining talk by George Spiro Dibie, President of the International Cinematographer's Guild, Local 600. Dibie's remarks were a mixture of fatherly advice and outrageous anecdotes coupled with his nostalgic exhortations that technology will never replace art. He also asserted that every film student should make his/her first class project on film (rather than video), providing some interesting fodder for debate throughout the course of the five-day conference that brought together an eclectic group of media educators, independent makers and industry professionals.

This sense of fusion (and at times, confusion) was also represented by the 2001 plenary session titled "Meeting the Challenges of Teaching Production in a University Environment," moderated by UFVA President Bob Bassett, which featured three-time Academy Award winner Mark Harris, professor and former head of production at the University of Southern California; independent filmmaker Michelle Citron, professor and associate dean of the graduate school at Northwestern University; Bob Collins, Emmy award winning filmmaker-in-residence at North Carolina School of the Arts; and Bill McDonald, associate professor at UCLA and professional cinematographer. Citron described the current moment as one of transition, noting that very few of her students are "really watching films" and described innovations in Northwestern's curriculum to emphasize hybrid forms, the connections between text and context, critical thinking, content and a sense of ethics and social responsibility. McDonald also talked about transition and br idging the gap--in his case, the idea of transitioning a student between film school and the professional world. He outlined the goals of allowing students to leave school with a completed body of work (as in a completed feature-length screenplay), providing students with marketable skills and giving them awareness of how to navigate and work within the various media industries. Harris observed that technology inevitably has an impact on image, and, candidly, commiserated about an industry that favors commerce over art and is becoming more and more corporate, where a filmmaker's passion usually plays only a small part in the equation. Collins discussed the mutually illuminating experiences of working within a conservatory system and as an industry professional. Seemingly all film students come to school with the goal of becoming a director. While recognizing this, their instructors are idealistically hoping (in Harris's words) to teach them "to see the world more clearly," and to participate in productive col laborations.

Day sessions at UFVA are typically of five types: screenings of film/video work followed by short prepared responses, panels of scholarly papers, media writing (script readings) and responses, theme-based workshops and new media responses of installations and CD-ROMs on display. This year a special three-part hands-on new film technology production workshop using the Aaton A-Minima Super 16mm Camera was also available for a limited number of conference participants, courtesy of Eastman Kodak Company.

One of the most pervasive obsessions at this year's conference was the digital revolution and its impact, as evidenced by panel presentations on the topic and screenings of a growing number of works shot on digital video and edited with nonlinear systems such as Final Cut Pro and AVID Xpress DV. There was also a wide array of useful panels, workshops and individual papers and testimonies devoted to explorations of pedagogical practices and classroom observations. The UFVA conference is not especially known for being a forum for rigorous new scholarship, so the presentation of some carefully researched and engaging history/theory/criticism work this year was greatly appreciated, and will hopefully be encouraged at future conferences.

The majority of the screenings were documentary films or doc-hybrids (personal, experimental), 16mm or 16mm hybrid (16mm and video, beta, archival footage, super 8). However, the number of projects shot on digital ran a close second. Juried screening awards of merit went to John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson's documentary Riding the Tiger: The American War in Vietnam (1999);

in the experimental/interpretative category Tony Gault's Housesitting (1999), Heidi Mau's Back to Misery (2000) and Robert Todd's FABLE: I Want the World Clean (1999) took top honors. Roger Beebe's experimental short The Strip Mall Trilogy (2001) and Brady Lewis's narrative feature Daddy Cool (2001) received honorable mention.

This year's conference included a strong showing of work dealing with Latino, Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Asian/Asian American themes, including three feature-length narratives. Pierre Desir's allegorical ZoNa (2000) draws on Creole and Native American storytelling and musical traditions from Africa, Cuba, Haiti and the United States to paint an eerie picture of a parallel world in which creative expression has been banned, artists and musicians incarcerated in mental institutions, and a brave few emerge to go in search of "the Zone" in which free expression can still be found. Francisco Menendez's Medio Tiempo (Part-Time) (2000) is a short narrative about Salvadoran refugees in Las Vegas. C. A. (Crystal) Griffith's Del Otro Lado (The Other Side) (1999) explores gay/lesbian life in Mexico City, focusing on the story of a young actor with AIDS who suffers through the pain of trying to get to the "other side" of the border for treatment in the U.S. Using extreme close-ups of the written word for "barren " in several different languages, Wenhwa Ts'ao's experimental Against Filial Piety (2001) gets into the body of these restrictive texts and boldly explores the connections between Chinese patriarchal traditions and other similarly oppressive restrictions on women in other parts of the world.

A favorite conference feature is the well-attended late night reading series (followed by responses and animated discussions) of feature-length scripts. This year's selection included Blur by Robert Arnett of Mississippi State University and Asta's Amazing Exhibition by Emily D. Edwards of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. A surprise guest, actor Gary Farmer, lent his charisma to the proceedings during the script reading of Blur.

This year's conference featured meetings of three caucuses, groups that provide support and professional development opportunities as well as expand the organization's profile: the Women's Caucus, and the more recently formed New Media Caucus and Theory/ Criticism Caucus. During this year's Women's Caucus meeting, Bonny Dore of the Women in Film Foundation presented clips of a video program called the "Signature Series: A Video Oral History of Extraordinary Women in Film of the Golden Age of Hollywood-1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s." The clips (from interviews taped in 1991) included engaging profiles of actresses Evelyn Keyes and Margaret O'Brien, and writers Meta Wilde and Fay Kanin. The tapes of interviews are currently housed in the UCLA archive, but according to Dore will soon be available on the Kodak Web site.

Exhibitions of new media work have become an increasingly visible and welcome presence at the UFVA conference. This year, the computer-based work included Peter Freund's "Anatomy of a Screen Shot" (2001) and two CD-ROM pieces by Michelle Citron, Cocktails and Appetizers (2001) and American as Apple Pie (1999).

This year's multimedia installations were Susanne Fairfax's "Untitled" (2001), "Wise Woman Wisdom Project" (1994-present) by Jennifer Machiorlatti and Deron Albright's "Vegas Suite" (2001). In the contemplative "Untitled" Fairfax explores family memories and her unsettled relationship with her father. The piece incorporates a tent construction with internal written texts and a projection of worker ants and landscape paintings (found objects from the Kodak facility). The collaborative, community-based "Wise Woman" project includes three videos of interviews with women and girls, drawings and still photographs, wood sculptures of female forms and the artist's photo albums, journals and personal papers. Albright's "Vegas Suite" created a charged and challenging multimedia environment, combining an operating slot machine, a "corrupted" statue of liberty (hawking the Sin City sex industry), and complex video pieces/projections. Simon Tarr's experimental Extremely Bright Lights and the Sound of Explosions (2000) i s also worthy of mention as the product of the meeting of Super 8, digital video and the filmmaker's innovative encounters with a motley assortment of computer technologies.

UFVA is a remarkably congenial gathering, and its close-knit members look forward to the annual picnic, banquet and golf tournament. This year there were memorials and program dedications for several recently departed friends and colleagues including Timothy Lyons, Richard MacCann, Kenneth Mason and Jonathan Mednick. (Eric Barnouw passed away too close to the conference deadline to be remembered properly this year.)

Rochester was a logical location for the conference, given the longtime relationship between the UFVA and Kodak, and the presence of RIT. A tour of the School of Film and Animation at RIT was also offered, and Professor Adrianne Carageorge presented a 45-minute screening of her undergraduate and graduate students' films.

The finalists and winners of NextFrame international student film and video festival have premiere screenings each year at the UFVA conference, and have become a conference highlight. UFVA has had an important partnership with the NextFrame festival program based in the Department of Film and Media at Temple University since the festival's founding in 1993. Currently co-directed by Temple graduate students Rebecca Carlson and Sarah Skiles, the festival received 301 submissions this year from 110 different schools. NextFrame has become one of the largest student film and video festivals in the world, and the festival has a touring program available for screening on university campuses, museums, media arts centers and other venues. Next year the UFVA conference migrates a few miles further east to Ithaca College. [1]

ANNE CIECKO is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

GINA MARCHETTI is Associate Professor of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College.

NOTES

(1.) For information on NextFrame visit their Web site at www.temple.edu/nextframe. The UFVA site can be found at www.ufva.org.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group