Media Mecca - University Film and Video Association conference

Afterimage, Sept, 2001 by Anne Ciecko, Gina Marchetti

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.)