Join R!C!A! for a screening of Enemies of the People, 2009 (TRT: 94 minutes)
When: Thursday, January 23, 7:00pm Location: FHI Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse Free and open to the public.
Cambodian investigative reporter Thet Sambath exposes the reasons for the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge genocide in which almost two million people were executed. Thet conducted interviews throughout the countryside with men who actually carried out the killings. Courageously, they tell the truth and show where the bodies are buried. But many still do not understand why they were ordered to kill. A crucial piece in Cambodia’s national process of reconciliation, these testimonies trace the transformation of abstract political principles into mass murder. In English and Cambodian, with English subtitles.
Directors: Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath
Awards: Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Award 2010 and Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Filmmaker Award 2010
Please join us on November 7 at 5:30pm for an artist’s talk and reception for the book and exhibit Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene photographs by Gerard Gaskin. The event will take place at the Center for Documentary Studies and is co-sponsored by the Archive of Documentary Arts.
Gerard H. Gaskin is the winner of the 2012 Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. Renowned curator and photographer Deborah Willis chose Gaskin’s longtime project for the prestigious biennial prize: color and black-and-white photographs that document the world of house balls, underground pageants where gay and transgender men and women, mostly African American and Latino, celebrate their most vibrant, spectacular selves as they “walk,” competing for trophies based on costume, attitude, dance moves, and “realness.”
The exhibition, in the Juanita Kreps Gallery at the Center for Documentary Studies, is on view from November 4, 2013, through Februrary 22, 2014. The photographs will then be placed in the Archive of Documentary Arts in Duke University’s Rubenstein Library.
Gaskin’s book, Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene, published in Fall 2013 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies, will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
For more information about the prize and to see images from Legendary: firstbookprizephoto.com
Marcos Hernandez lives and works in Chicago. He came to the United States from Mexico, after a life-threatening border crossing through the Sonora Desert in southern Arizona. Each month, he sends money to his mother in Mexico City to buy medicine for his brother, Gustavo, who needs a kidney transplant. The Undocumented, by acclaimed filmmaker Marco Williams, is Marcos’s story—as well as the story of countless other migrants.
Chronicling Arizona’s deadliest summer months, award-winning documentary and fiction film director Marco Williams (Banished, Two Towns of Jasper, In Search of Our Fathers) weaves Marcos’s search with the efforts of humanitarians and Border Patrol agents who are fighting to prevent migrant deaths, the medical investigators and Mexican Consulate workers who are trying to identify dead border crossers, and Mexican families who are struggling to accept the loss of a loved one.
In true cinéma vérité style, The Undocumented (91:00 TRT; 2013 Full Frame Honorable Mention for Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights) reveals the ongoing impact of immigration laws and economic policies on the very people who continue to be affected by them. By going beyond politics, the film also tells a story that is deeply personal.
The screening, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a panel discussion featuring director Marco Williams and Duke University professor Charlie Thompson.
Winner of the Full Frame Inspiration Award, We Still Live Here/ Âs Nutayuneân (TRT 56:00) tells the story of the revival of the language of the Wampanoag people of New England. All speakers of the language had died out when in 1994 Jessie Little Doe, a Wampanoag social worker, began to wonder if it could be recovered.
With M.I.T. linguist Ken Hale, with whom she earned a Master’s degree, she and other linguists pieced the language together from old documents and related Native American languages. Through community-wide efforts among the Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanoag, the language is being spoken again, and Jessie’s young daughter is the first native speaker of Wampanoag in more than a hundred years.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Dr. Liliana Paredes and Dr. Benjamin Frey.
Dr. Liliana Paredes is Associate Professor of the Practice of Spanish and Director of the Duke Spanish Language Program. She holds expertise in the areas of sociolinguistics, minority languages, and Amerindian languages.
Dr. Benjamin Frey is a Fellow in the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity at UNC. He completed his Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in August 2013. His research examines language shift among minority communities in the United States from their traditional languages to English, with specific focus on German in Wisconsin and Cherokee in North Carolina. Frey is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
In June and July we’ll celebrate the beginning of a new fiscal year by highlighting new acquisitions from the past year. All of these amazing resources will be available for today’s scholars, and for future generations of researchers in the Rubenstein Library! Check out additional posts in the series here.
Some of the most celebrated, recognizable, and graphic images of the American Civil War come from Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War and George N. Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign, both published in 1866. Among the most important pictorial records of the conflict, together they shed a stark light on the destruction witnessed during the war and its aftermath. As legendary examples of early American photography these albums also help us to understand the history of documentary photography and the emergence of the widespread documentation of war. Look for a feature on these important new additions to the Library’s Archive of Documentary Arts in the next issue of RL Magazine!
Alexander Gardner, “President Lincoln on Battle-Field of Antietam,” 1862, from Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War.George Barnard, “City of Atlanta no. 2,” from Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign.
The Rubenstein Library is grateful to the B. H. Breslauer Foundation for their generous support of the acquisition of Gardner’s Sketch Book.
Post contributed by Kirston Johnson, Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts.
Please join us for a conversation with internationally renowned photographer Lynn Saville on Thursday, May 23rd from 1:00 until 2:00pm in Perkins Library Room 217. Lynn will discuss her latest project, “Vacancy: The Disquieting Beauty of Emptiness,” which focuses on New York City and the strikingly beautiful visual effects of economic turmoil.
Fine-art and documentary photographer Lynn Saville was educated at Duke University and Pratt Institute. Saville specializes in photographing both cities and rural settings at twilight and dawn, or as she describes it, “the boundary times between night and day.”
Lynn Savile, Dyckman Street, C-Print, 2012
Lynn Saville has received numerous awards and grants and her photographs are published in two monographs: Acquainted With the Night (Rizzoli, 1997) and Night/Shift (Random House/Moncelli, 2009). Her work is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York and her prints are included in numerous permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the International Museum of Photography, the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University, and many others. She lives in New York City with her husband, the poet Philip Fried.
Edward Ranney is an internationally recognized photographer who has photographed the natural and man-altered landscape for over forty years. His work of the 1970s in the southern Andes of Peru resulted in the book Monuments of the Incas (1982), which was reprinted in an expanded edition in 2010.
Since 1985, Ranney has dedicated himself to a comprehensive photographic survey of pre-Columbian sites along the Andean Desert Coast. His recent work with Lucy R. Lippard in the Galisteo Basin, near Sante Fe, was published in Down Country in 2010.
Edward Ranney has received numerous awards, including two Fulbright fellowships for his work in Peru, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship. His work has been presented in individual exhibitions at the Princeton University Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and the Centro Cultural of Miraflores in Lima, Peru. His other books include Stonework of the Maya, Prairie Passage, and Pablo Neruda’s Heights of Macchu Picchu.
Date: Friday, November 30th, 2012 Time: 3:00 PM Location: Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library, Duke University Contact Information: Kirston Johnson, kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu
Please join us this Friday at 3:00pm for a screening of The Extravagant Shadows,David Gatten’s new work of digital cinema. Gatten is an award-winning filmmaker and Guggenheim fellow, and is currently a Lecturing Fellow and Artist in Residence with Duke University’s Program in Arts of the Moving Image. Earlier this year he was named one of the fifty best filmmakers under fifty by Cinema Scope magazine.
Still from The Extravagant Shadows
Fourteen years in the making, The Extravagant Shadows is a film concerned with libraries, reading, letters, and lovers. It premiered at the 50th annual New York Film Festival and has received widespread acclaim.
Still from The Extravagant Shadows
“David Gatten’s first digital work, The Extravagant Shadows, undertakes the head-scratching question of what it would mean for a film to be of its textual sources. A historical narrative of love separated across space and time is embedded in various codes and correspondences, all of it pocked by ellipsis and obscurity, never unfolding so much as digressing, disclosing, doubling back.” – Max Goldberg, Fandor
“Gatten […] lays long excerpts, condensations, and re-writings of text upon the image itself, so that looking at the image is as much about seeing as it is reading—if these two activities can even be separated. The text tells a looping, broken and elliptical tale of love across distances, love missed and time passed, of communicating via letter, manuscript, telegraph, […] notes, novelization, monologues and memories across and within these spaces. Of the lost meanings, allusive facts and fixtures, of the supreme ambiguity of purposes, of a sense of time, of narrative to be found between, around and inside text and its transmissions to the reader.” – Daniel Kasman, “Love in the Painted Image,” MUBI
Date: Thursday, November 15, 2012 Time: 6:00 PM, reception to follow Location: Biddle Rare Book Room Contact Information: Kirston Johnson, kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu
Please join the staff of the Archive of Documentary Arts next Thursday, November 15 for a talk with documentary photographer Gary Monroe.
In the late 1950s in rural Florida, a group of young, self-taught African-American artists began to paint optimistic and colorful Florida landscapes. They periodically left their backyard studios and took to the highway to sell their works to white customers, earning the name The Highwaymen. Their glowing images represented the American dream. Photographer Gary Monroe got to know these artists and will speak about their work and their legacy.
About Gary Monroe: Gary Monroe is a professor of art at the Southeast Center for Photographic Studies in Daytona Beach and author of The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Landscape Painters.
Post contributed by Kirston Johnson, Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts.
Join us for an evening with documentary filmmaker and MacArthur “Genius Award” recipient Laura Poitras at Duke’s Nasher Museum. Known for her incisive and nuanced portraits of individuals that emerge in and from wartime in the Middle East and New York City, Poitras is an Emmy and Academy award nominated filmmaker. Her films, My Country, My Country and The Oath won numerous awards including the Inspiration Award and the Special Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival respectively.
Arts advocate, historic preservationist, author and accomplished television interviewer Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel will facilitate the discussion.
Duke University has established the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker Series to feature artists whose work addresses significant contemporary topics of social, political, economic, and cultural urgency. Filmmakers chosen to participate have a recognized body of work and show promise of future contributions to documentary filmmaking. Visiting filmmakers are invited to Duke for a two-day residency.
The Diamonstein-Spielvogel series is unique in its exclusive attention to documentary filmmakers with a global perspective. By giving Duke faculty and their students an opportunity to explore the films of socially engaged filmmakers and discuss the work with them, this new series hopes to inspire and encourage the next generation of young documentarians.
Cambodian investigative reporter Thet Sambath exposes the reasons for the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge genocide in which almost two million people were executed. Thet conducted interviews throughout the countryside with men who actually carried out the killings. Courageously, they tell the truth and show where the bodies are buried. But many still do not understand why they were ordered to kill. A crucial piece in Cambodia’s national process of reconciliation, these testimonies trace the transformation of abstract political principles into mass murder. In English and Cambodian, with English subtitles.
