Media Mecca - University Film and Video Association conference

Afterimage, Sept, 2001 by Anne Ciecko, Gina Marchetti

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.