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Media and Communication


Media and Communication



PRISM

By Eleonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam

Is the technology of photography and motion pictures inherently racist?

For PRISM, Belgian filmmaker An van. Dienderen invited Rosine Mbakam, from Cameroon, and Eleonore Yameogo from Burkina Faso, to work together on a film in which the differences in their skin color, and experiences as filmmakers, serve as points-of-departure to explore this provocative question.

Invented and standardized with white skin in mind, "the aesthetics and emulsions weren't created for us," the film director and actor Sylvestre Amoussou says in PRISM. And that underlying issue remains, even with digital technology: such white-centricity has meant that photographic media assume and privilege whiteness.

PRISM problematizes the objectivity of the camera and its inequality of power to tackle other inequalities based on skin color as well. And as the film deconstructs these issues, the filmmakers are also trying to reconstruct, by creating in a collaborative manner, and self-consciously attempting to overcome these biases. The film consists of three sections, one by each of the directors:

  • Rosine's scenes are the most personal. She wonders about how she and her family have been hurt by photography's inability to accurately portray their skin tones. She also meets with two former film professors of hers about their focus, and the biases of the film "canon," syllabi and curriculums.
  • In Eleonore's scenes, she interviews African actress Tella Kphomahou, discussing problems she encountered with the lighting of her skin while working in Europe. They also bring Sylvestre Amoussou into their conversation to discuss his philosophy towards making films that accurately portray Black skin.
  • An's scenes are more abstract. They are shot at the Belgian film school where she teaches, and in a studio where the setting evokes a "color-test" scene, with a white man and a woman of color.

  • But the film is more than just the sum of the different visions of the directors: recorded zoom conversations are woven into the film in which the directors discuss the issues, their viewpoints, and the very making of PRISM itself.

    To tackle the issue of racism in Western filmmaking, PRISM takes what some see as simple technical problems, and while creating powerful counter-images and methods of working, explores their insidious personal, cultural, and historical ramifications.


    DVD (French With English Subtitles, Color) / 2021 / 78 minutes

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    EMOJI STORY, THE

    Directed by Martha Shane, Ian Cheney

    Explores the complex, conflict-prone, and often hilarious world of the creators, lovers, and arbiters of emoji, our world's newest pictorial language.

    The rapid rise of emoji (Japanese for "picture character") is a global phenomenon without precedent. Their widespread use and ability to convey complex messages have not only cemented emoji's place as an emerging digital language, but prompted difficult questions about the creation of a language and digital communication's fraught ties to identity and inclusion.

    In THE EMOJI STORY, directors Martha Shane and Ian Cheney lead viewers on a deep dive into the ever evolving world of picture characters, from their humble beginnings in Japan to mobile keyboards the world over, and shed fresh light on the private consortium that approves new emoji offerings and the individuals fighting to make the language more representative of its billions of users.


    DVD / 2020 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adults) / 79 minutes

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    FILMFARSI

    By Ehsan Khoshbakht

    Sex, drugs, rock 'n roll - Iranian style! A personal journey through the history of Iranian popular cinema before the revolution and the world of "filmfarsi", a term referring to the rowdy and melodramatic genre films made from the early 1950s to 1979.

    Filmfarsi provides a fascinating archaeology of "the biggest secret in cinema history" (The Guardian) - a compelling window into a lost past. This documentary uncovers a cinema of titillation, action and big emotions, which presented a troubling mirror for the country, as Iran struggled to reconcile its religious traditions with the turbulence of modernity, and the influences of the West.

    Four years in the making, Filmfarsi features clips from more than 100 films, almost all banned in their country of production.


    DVD / 2020 / 83 minutes

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    FATTITUDE

    By Lindsey Averill, Viridiana Lieberman

    An eye-opening look at how popular media perpetuates fat hatred that results in cultural bias and discrimination.

    FATTITUDE is an eye-opening look at how popular media perpetuates fat hatred that results in a cultural bias and a civil rights issue for people living in fat bodies.

    Fat people are paid $1.25 less an hour than their thin counterparts and can still legally lose jobs just because they're fat. Additionally, 1 in 3 doctors associates fat bodies with hostility, dishonesty and poor hygiene. FATTITUDE looks at how this systemic cultural prejudice results in fat discrimination. Informed by a post-modern, post-colonial, feminist perspective, FATTITUDE also examines how fat-shaming crosses the lines of race, class, sexuality and gender. It features a diverse variety of voices such as academic scholars, activists, filmmakers, actors and psychologists, including Lindy West, Sonya Renee Taylor, Virgie Tovar, Ricki Lake, and more.

    A body positive documentary intent on inspiring change, FATTITUDE offers alternative ideas that embrace body acceptance at all sizes, explores examples of fat positive representations being produced today by activists and the media, and focuses on real life solutions for moving forward and changing the national conversation about body image.


    DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 88 minutes

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    HORROR NOIRE: A HISTORY OF BLACK HORROR

    Directed by Xavier Burgin

    Delving into a century of genre films that by turns utilized, caricatured, exploited, sidelined, and finally embraced them, HORROR NOIRE traces a secret history of Black Americans in Hollywood through their connection to the horror genre. Adapting executive producer Robin Means Coleman's seminal book, HORROR NOIRE will present the living and the dead, using new and archival interviews from scholars and creators; the voices who survived the genre's past trends, to those shaping its future.

    Includes interviews with Ernest R. Dickerson, Meosha Bean, Ashlee Blackwell and Robin R. Means Coleman.


    DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 83 minutes

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    SEAT 20D

    Director: Jill Campbell

    Suse Lowenstein lost her son Alex in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In an effort to come to terms with her grief, Suse turned to her art. She began to sculpt herself naked, frozen in the position she fell into upon hearing the news of her son's death. Creating the sculpture brought her solace, and when Suse posted about her project in the Pan Am Victims' Family Newsletter, inviting others to participate, 75 women responded.

    Suse spent fifteen years completing the monumental sculpture she titled "Dark Elegy," a memorial to the victims of the brutal attack that altered American history. In her new documentary Seat 20D, director Jill Campbell explores how art cradled a mother's soul and touches all who view it.


    DVD / 2019 / 70 minutes

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    STEVENSON: LOST AND FOUND

    By Sally Williams

    As one of the New Yorker's most prolific cartoonists, James Stevenson's body of work spans five decades, countless drawings and innumerable laughs.

    This profile takes us inside the life, struggles, philosophy and humor of a man who credits his success to the deliciousness of peanut butter. Featuring delightful animated interludes and interviews from colleagues, editors and his nine children, this look at Stevenson's life - who is also a noted writer of children's books and a columnist for The New York Times - is a testament to observing the world from an original perspective.


    DVD / 2019 / 76 minutes

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    BELLINGCAT: TRUTH IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

    Director: Hans Pool

    Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World follows the rise of the collective known as Bellingcat, a group of online researchers - all private citizens - dedicated to exposing the truth behind controversial news stories from around the world. From the Malaysian jetliner shot down over Ukraine to the poisoning of a Russian spy in England, the Bellingcat team's quest for truth brings clarity and accountability to our era of fake news and alternative facts.

    Bellingcat uses cutting-edge digital techniques and crowdsourcing to create a faster, more innovative approach than traditional journalism. For the first time, the group gave exclusive access to filmmakers - allowing us to see the inner workings as they demonstrate the power of open source investigation and put networks, newspapers and governments to the test.


    DVD / 2018 / 88 minutes

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    PROPAGANDA: THE MANUFACTURE OF CONSENT

    By Jimmy Leipold

    "Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can… help to bring order out of chaos." - Edward Bernays

    In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran on a platform strongly opposing US entry into WWI. But just a few months after taking office, the United States declared war on Germany. Soon after, the American people, so firmly opposed to the war just a year earlier, were enthusiastic supporters.

    What happened?

    The short answer: propaganda.

    PROPAGANDA: THE MANUFACTURE OF CONSENT is a revealing documentary about how public relations grew out of wartime propaganda-and a portrait of one of the key architects of the field, Edward Bernays.

    The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays refined the techniques used so successfully during the war to sell products to consumers, and ultimately to sell capitalism itself to workers. Public relations was also critical in building support for the New Deal, and in the pushback against it from the National Association of Manufacturers, which created materials including films aimed at children on the glories of manufacturing.

    Bacon and eggs as part of a hearty breakfast? The work of Bernays on behalf of a bacon company. Cigarettes as a sign of women's liberation? Bernays, again. Casting the democratically elected government of Guatemala as a Communist threat to justify US invasion on behalf of the United Fruit Company? Once more, Bernays.

    There was nothing shadowy about Bernays. He wrote a book detailing his techniques and discusses them in an archival interview with Bill Moyers from 1983. Still, it is jarring to see his pride in hijacking the women's suffrage movement in order to sell more cigarettes-one of many illuminating moments in this film.

    Featuring Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Public Relations Museum co-founder Shelley Spector, historian Stuart Ewen, sociologist David Miller, and Bernays' daughter Anne, PROPAGANDA offers an insightful look into the development of public relations techniques, and how they continue to affect us today.


    DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2018 / 53 minutes

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    TVTV: VIDEO REVOLUTIONARIES

    Director: Paul Goldsmith

    Featuring Bill Murray, Hunter Thompson, Steven Spielberg, Lynn Swan, Goldie Hawn, Abbie Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and more, "TVTV: Video Revolutionaries" is a documentary about Top Value Television (TVTV), a band of merry video makers who, from 1972 to 1977, took the then brand-new portable video camera and went out to document the world. In those days, there were only three TV networks, using giant studio cameras, and no one had ever seen a portable camera stuck in their face, let alone one held by what Newsweek called "braless, blue-jeaned video freaks." Because the technology was so new, there were no rules about how to use it or what to make. So the "freaks" used it to make format-bending satirical shows about whatever interested them - from the 1972 Republican Convention to an award-winning expose of a 15-year-old jet-set guru named Guru Maharaj Ji, called "Lord of the Universe" to capturing the Steelers and Cowboys partying hard the night before Super Bowl X.

    Directed by TVTV alum Paul Goldsmith, the film is like opening a treasure chest into the 1970s, filled with cultural and political events hosted by now-famous characters who were then just beginning their climb to iconic.


    DVD / 2018 / 82 minutes

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    ACORN AND THE FIRESTORM

    Director: Reuben Atlas, Sam Pollard

    If you were impoverished and politically voiceless, ACORN hoped to change your mind. For 40 years, the community-organizing group sought to empower marginalized communities. Its critics, though, believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with liberal ideals.

    Fueled by a YouTube video made by two young conservatives who posed as pimp and prostitute in a sting, ACORN's very existence would be challenged. ACORN and the Firestorm goes beyond the 24-hour news cycle and cuts to the heart of the great political divide.


    DVD / 2017 / 84 minutes

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    CELLING YOUR SOUL

    Directed by Joni Siani

    An examination of our love/hate relationships with our digital devices from the first digitally socialized generation, and what we can do about it.

    In one short decade, we have totally changed the way we interact with one another. The millennial generation, the first to be socialized in a digital world, is now feeling the unintended consequences.

    CELLING YOUR SOUL is a powerful and informative examination of how our young people actually feel about connecting in the digital world and their love/hate relationship with technology. It provides empowering strategies for more fulfilling, balanced, and authentic human interaction within the digital landscape.

    The film reveals the effects of "digital socialization" by taking viewers on a personal journey with a group of high school and college students who through a digital cleanse discover the power of authentic human connectivity, and that there is "No App" or piece of technology that can ever replace the benefits of human connection.


    DVD / 2017 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adult) / 48 minutes

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    ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE: TRUTH, DECEPTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF I.F. STONE

    Director: Fred Peabody

    Independent journalists like Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Matt Taibbi are changing the face of journalism, providing investigative, adversarial alternatives to mainstream, corporate news outlets. Our cameras follow as they expose government and corporate deception - just as the ground-breaking independent journalist I.F. Stone did decades ago.


    DVD / 2016 / 91 minutes

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    CATCHING SIGHT OF THELMA & LOUISE

    Directed by Jennifer Townsend

    Explores the same women's and men's reactions to the groundbreaking film, "Thelma & Louise", 25 years ago and today.

    Powerful, authentic, and timely, CATCHING SIGHT OF THELMA & LOUISE dives off the edge into the truth of women's experience in the world. It revisits the journey of Thelma & Louise through the lens of viewers who saw that iconic film in 1991 and shared intimate, personal, stories at that time. The same women and men were tracked down 25 years later. Are their responses different now? Has anything changed in the way women are treated?

    Interview commentary mixes with clips from "Thelma & Louise" to reveal why this cinema classic continues to resonate with millions of viewers, the world over. Christopher McDonald, who played Thelma's husband, and Marco St. John, who played the truck driver, offer an insider's viewpoint.


    DVD / 2016 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 86 minutes

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    WHAT HAPPENED TO HER

    By Kristy Guevara-Flanagan

    WHAT HAPPENED TO HER is a forensic exploration of our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on screen. Interspersing found footage from films and police procedural television shows and one actor's experience of playing the part of a corpse, the film offers a meditative critique on the trope of the dead female body.

    The visual narrative of the genre, one reinforced through its intense and pervasive repetition, is revealed as a highly structured pageant. The experience of physical invasion and exploitation voiced by the actor pierce the fabric of the screened fantasy. The result is recurring and magnetic film cliche laid bare. Essential viewing for Pop Culture, Women's and Cinema Studies classes.


    DVD (Color) / 2016 / 15 minutes

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    DREAMS REWIRED

    Narrated by Tilda Swinton
    By Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart & Thomas Tode

    Tilda Swinton's hypnotic voiceover and a treasure trove of rare archival footage culled from hundreds of films from the 1880s through the 1930s-much of it previously unseen-combine to trace the anxieties of today's hyper-connected world back a hundred years. Then, too, electric media sparked idealism in the public imagination-hailed as the beginning of an era of total communication, annihilation of distance and the end of war. But then, too, fears over the erosion of privacy, security, morality proved to be well-founded.

    DREAMS REWIRED traces contemporary appetites and anxieties back to the birth of the telephone, television and cinema. At the time, early electric media were as revolutionary as social media are now. The technologies were expected to serve everyone, not just the elite classes. Human relationships would become stronger, efficiency would increase and the society would be revolutionized... But these initial promises were very different from what new media eventually brought to daily life.

    Using excerpts from early dramatic films, slapstick comedies, political newsreels, advertisements and recordings of scientific experiments culled during years of research in film archives around the world, co-directors Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode unearth material that is by turns hilarious, revelatory, beautiful and prescient. The archival footage, combined with poetic narration and a virtuosic score by Siegfried Friedrich forges a cross-generational connection between contemporary viewers and their idealistic forbearers of a century ago.


    DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 85 minutes

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    HOT TYPE: 150 YEARS OF THE NATION

    Director: Barbara Kopple

    Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation is a vivid, inside look at America's oldest continuously published weekly magazine. Shot over three years in intimate, cinema verite style, the film captures the day-to-day pressures and challenges of publishing the progressive magazine as it follows reporters out into the field, the editors who shape their work, and the editor-in chief who tries to keep all of the plates spinning.

    Writers are the heart and soul of the magazine, and the film follows them extensively. Sasha Abramsky travels to West Texas to report on the years-long drought that has gripped the region and the devastating economic impact on farmers and residents. John Nichols unpacks what's going on behind the effort to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Amy Wilentz visits the "temporary" tent camps of Haiti, three years after the earthquake, to shed light on the dire conditions and lackluster international response. And Dani McClain reports on the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, and its dynamic leader Rev. William Barber, as they push back against an extreme right-wing takeover of the state legislature.

    In all of the current-day reported stories, The Nation's incredible trove of archival articles - and roster of writers - acts as an historical touchstone and illuminates how the past continuously ripples through and shapes current events.

    At a fascinating moment in American history - politically, socially and culturally - the media landscape is changing at breathtaking speed. The film charts the journey of The Nation - and the nation - evolving into the future, as it is guided by its remarkable past.


    DVD / 2015 / 92 minutes

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    LOVE BETWEEN THE COVERS

    By Laurie Kahn

    Romance novels comprise over a billion dollars a year in book sales, outselling science fiction, fantasy, and mystery combined. So why is the genre so often dismissed as frivolous "scribble" rather than elevated as a radical literary form that pushes the envelope on gender, race, and diversity? The heroic characters, prolific writers, and voracious readers that dominate romantic fiction are primarily women. Witty and intelligent, these lovers of the written word form a collaborative, supportive, and dynamic community where readers and writers inspire one another. Emmy Award Winning director Laurie Kahn (Tupperware!) takes a comprehensive look at what goes into publishing a romantic novel, from the author's inspiration and writing process to the photo shoots for those distinctive cover designs. Speaking with literary scholars, romance fanatics, aspiring writers, and award-winning authors, including Nora Roberts, Eloisa James, Beverly Jenkins, and Radclyffe, this documentary offers fascinating insights into this female-centric literary world.


    DVD (Color) / 2015 / 84 minutes

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    PROJECT Z

    Directed by Phillip Gara

    An investigation into how war games, worst-case scenarios, complex systems, and networked media produce the very crises they seek to model, predict and report.

    As the Cold War ends, a professor goes in search of an America without an enemy. Armed with a Hi8 video camera and inspired by the detective work of Walter Benjamin, he heads deep into the inner circles of the defense, entertainment and media industries, where he discovers a worst-case future being built from war games, video games, and language games.

    Some thirty years later, a group of student filmmakers find the videotapes in a filing cabinet, along with a stack of old newspaper clippings, audio interviews and photographs. With the help of friends from the Global Media Project, the filmmaker produces an experimental documentary that goes back to the future, where they find the original maps for a new world order. An unexpected warning is found on the outermost edges of the maps: "Beware of Zombies!"

    The result is PROJECT Z, a film that updates another warning, issued by President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, about the emergence of a "military-industrial complex" and the consequences should "public policy be captured by a scientific and technological elite".

    Combining rare footage from inside the war machine with corrosive commentary by leading critics of global violence, injustice, and inequality, the film challenges the living to write their own future before the walking dead conjure the final global event.


    DVD / 2015 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 74 minutes

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    SEX, LIES AND TABLOIDS!

    By Jean-Baptiste Peretie

    They're lurid, obnoxious, disdainful and explicit. And we love them - and love to hate them.

    SEX, LIES AND TABLOIDS! charts the rise and fall of tabloid papers in the UK and US, including the New York Post, The Sun, and notorious supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer and The Star.

    In the beginning, they were upstarts. Papers that shamelessly pandered with stories about sex scandals, and celebrities - often skirting ethical lines, and sometimes outright making things up ("Run it through the typewriter again," was one editor's mantra.) But by the 1980s and '90s they had become the media heavyweights. Left behind by the tabloids' coverage of Bill Clinton's sex life, Princess Diana and the OJ Simpson trial, the mainstream media started to adopt their techniques.

    SEX, LIES AND TABLOIDS! Features extensive interviews with key tabloid players such as notorious editor Kelvin MacKenzie ("If you have no news… you get a picture of Diana and make it as big as possible"), journalist Paul McMullan ("People need to understand that privacy is an evil, bad concept"), and the late Vincent Musetto (famed for the headline "Headless body in topless bar"). The film provides an insider's account of the no-holds-barred mentality driving tabloid journalism while also using fun and campy footage mimicking the style of the tabloids themselves.

    Eventually, the tabs would go too far. Briefly chastened by the death of Diana and shunned after the British phone hacking scandal, the papers would go into a downward spiral, with The News of the World even shutting down. But culture they spawned is stronger than ever. Sites like TMZ and The Smoking Gun and an omni-present gotcha culture have brought the spirit of the tabloids to the Internet. At the same time, the ubiquity of sharing means photos that would once have been prized by paparazzi (hello Kim Kardashian in a bikini) are posted by celebrities and would-be-celebs themselves. The tabloids may be gone, but the tabloid spirit is everywhere.


    DVD (Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 52 minutes

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    FROM THE GROUND UP

    Directed by Beth Gage & George Gage

    Five 9/11 widows of New York firefighters pay tribute to their husbands by accomplishing extraordinary feats in their communities, turning evil into good.

    FROM THE GROUND UP follows the widows of five New York firefighters ten years after 9/11. It's their journey, two steps forward and one step back, through tears, depression, and laughter to triumph over tragedy. It's five women finding strength to forge through madness and comfort their children while the world watches.

    FROM THE GROUND UP is a personal and emotional account of how 9/11 permeates the lives of these women. We see how this tragedy has strengthened them, forcing them to dig deeper to give new meaning to their lives, empower their families and make a difference in their communities. Turning evil into good, they lift our spirits and honor their heroic husbands in the most fitting ways they can imagine from building a library, starting several foundations and instituting the hugely succesful Tunnel to Towers run.


    DVD / 2011 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 30 minutes

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