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As we all know, the growth and vitality of the local filmmaking community is essential to the long-term goal of being a sustainable production center rather than just a distant location. The Massachusetts Film Office is dedicated to finding new ways to support “our own” and welcomes ideas for expanding the already robust industry.
Irish Film & TV Research Online is a website designed to bring together the wide diversity of research material relating to Irish-made cinema and television as well as to Irish-themed audio-visual representations produced outside of Ireland. It incorporates three searchable databases: Irish Film & Television Index; Irish Film & Television Biographies; and Irish Film & Television Bibliography; and the Irish Postgraduate Film Research Seminar, an annual conference of film studies’ postgraduate students based in Ireland or engaged in researching Irish material elsewhere. The project is based in the School of Drama, Film and Music, Trinity College Dublin.
The impetus for the Irish Film & Television Index was Kevin Rockett’s The Irish Filmography: Fiction Films 1896 – 1996 (1996), which documented all fiction films made in Ireland and about Ireland and the Irish produced worldwide since the beginnings of cinema. Under the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Major Grant Scheme, 2003-05, funding was awarded to update the original filmography and to document, with the same worldwide remit, all major non-fiction films, including newsreels, and animation, made for cinema and television. In addition to the IRCHSS, the other sponsors of the project are Trinity College Dublin; the Higher Education Authority’s North South Programme for Collaborative Research, 2003-06; and Bord Scannán na héireann/Irish Film Board, 2006.
Since 2003, filmographer and archivist Eugene Finn has been expanding the database which, incorporating the original Irish Filmography, has drawn on the archival and paper records of many of the world’s leading film archives and specialist libraries, including ones in Ireland, Britain, the USA, and Australia. We are especially grateful for the on-going support we receive from the Irish Film Institute’s archive and library. At present the Irish Film & Television Index has almost 40,000 titles, while new entries will be added in an on-going way.
The two complementary databases covering biographies and bibliography which are still in the early stages of development will be expanded over time. In addition, the ambition is to use the website as a publishing outlet for new research, as well as for out-of-print publications and archival documents, including, it is hoped, the extensive records of Ireland’s film censors.
While the website will need on-going editorial maintenance and development, its value for researchers, whether academic, from within the film industry, or the general public, is in its easy packaging of information concerning Irish-made or Irish-themed audio-visual material. In many cases, such information may have been gathered from numerous sources both within Ireland and elsewhere. Using the searchable fields, a researcher can almost instantly find a particular film, its cast list or production personnel, read a synopsis of its content, establish where a copy of it might be held, what has been written about it, identify a list of complementary titles through a keyword search, or, using the biographical database, access further information on cast and crew.
As a living archive, we would encourage feedback and invite online visitors to contribute to the development of the project by sending us information, additions and amendments.
More…Irish Film & TV Research Online – Trinity College Dublin.
John Taylor Gatto is an American retired school teacher of 29 years 8 months and author of several books on education.
He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions.
Excerpt from an interview by the Swedish teacher Lennart Mogren ( http://www.slutaskolan.nu ).
Watch the whole interview here:
After spending a year as a student teacher in a New York City elementary school, documentary filmmaker Lerone Wilson explores the effects of George W. Bush’s momentous No Child Left Behind Act on schools across the country.
Director: Fritz Lang
Guión: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou
Fotografía: Bruno Mondi, Erich Nitzschmann, Herrmann Saalfrank, Bruno Timm, Fritz Arno Wagner
By Damon Smith in Director Interviews
on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
One of the great European literary figures of the past half century was the German writer W.G. “Max” Sebald (1944-2001), a late bloomer who fused essay, history, memoir, and meditative fiction into an unclassifiable weld of eloquently bewitching prose in four major works (Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz), all written over the last decade of his too-abbreviated life. Sebald’s solitary narrators, given lightly autobiographical shadings, wander landscapes as far-flung as the Suffolk coast or the Slovakian countryside like melancholic revenants dwelling on the fate of individuals lost to war or time, the operation of memory, and other seemingly arbitrary recollections triggered by the encounter with a physical environment. Although the surfeit of stories and micro histories in his work often return us in unanticipated ways to his principal preoccupations — the Holocaust and the Allied bombing raids that decimated Germany during World War II — Sebald’s wider concerns are the decay of civilization and the array of momentous events to be found in scrutinizing neglected or uninhabited buildings, corroded tools, artifacts, and totems, and the old black-and-white photographs that punctuate his allusive texts, revealing curious details and correspondences but refusing to yield their secrets entirely.
It would require a filmmaker with, yes, patience, to shoulder the task of conveying Sebald’s strangely alluring prose into a cinematic field of reference. A veteran of music docs and rock videos for the likes of Radiohead and Blur, British filmmaker Grant Gee (Joy Division) tackled the challenge of unveiling the Sebaldian universe in a nonliterary medium by focusing on a single book, The Rings of Saturn. He began by retracing the narrator’s walking tour of East Anglia. After the journey, which he made on foot and documented on a Bolex camera, Gee spoke with a number of authors and artists (Rick Moody, Lise Patt, Andrew Motion, Ian Sinclair) who have been influenced by Sebald’s unorthodox style, the blend of fact and fiction that makes such “real” distinctions hazy and perhaps, at least in his dreamy subjective evocations of history, even irrelevant. In his new essay-film Patience (After Sebald), the result of those documentary efforts, Gee blends images of the locations he visited with archive material, stately readings by Jonathan Pryce (Brazil), and ghostly appearances by his aforementioned interview subjects and even Sebald himself, fittingly present only in an audio clip from KCRW’s long-running “Bookworm” program, hosted by Michael Silverblatt, which aired days before the author’s death.
Filmmaker spoke with Gee about literary obsession, walking art, and why documentary can pull off a difficult subject. Patience (After Sebald) opens today at Film Forum in New York.
Full Interview: GRANT GEE, “PATIENCE AFTER SEBALD” | Filmmaker Magazine.
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