Scott MacDonald, currently on leave teaching with the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard, was a keynote speaker at "Avant-Doc," a conference organized by the graduate students in cinema at the University of Iowa on March 6.
MacDonald's talk, "When Worlds Collide," reviewed the history of the intersections between documentary filmmaking and avant-garde filmmaking, beginning with the emergence of cinema from the motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey and the Lumiere Brothers (the photographic "avant-garde" of the 1880s and 1890s that was fascinated with documenting motion itself); and continuing through the first cinematic Avant-Garde, which flourished in Europe during the 1920s; the arrival of the film society movement in the United States in the 1940s; the establishment and evolution of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar during the 1950s through the 1990s; and the recent convergences of crucial developments in both filmmaking and cinema scholarship in what are normally conceived as two distinct film histories.
MacDonald's talk, "When Worlds Collide," reviewed the history of the intersections between documentary filmmaking and avant-garde filmmaking, beginning with the emergence of cinema from the motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey and the Lumiere Brothers (the photographic "avant-garde" of the 1880s and 1890s that was fascinated with documenting motion itself); and continuing through the first cinematic Avant-Garde, which flourished in Europe during the 1920s; the arrival of the film society movement in the United States in the 1940s; the establishment and evolution of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar during the 1950s through the 1990s; and the recent convergences of crucial developments in both filmmaking and cinema scholarship in what are normally conceived as two distinct film histories.
