Maxim Pozdorovkin on Our New President

Russian-American filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin has made a series of films documenting Russia in the age of Putin, including the well-known Pussy Riot (2013), about the radical feminist performance group. This interview focuses specifically on Our New President (2017), which traces the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump presidential race and the Trump election as depicted in Russian propaganda. Pozdorovkin’s film is a significant contribution to the recent history of recycled cinema. The political weaponizing of media to produce “fake news” is the focus of Our New President. Pozdorovkin demonstrates that in the 2010s propaganda is not so much misinformation carefully embedded in an otherwise informative context, but an attempt to overwhelm by creating total media confusion. He makes clear that in Russia the government controls all major news outlets and hacking into the online networks of other nations is considered patriotism.

Janet Biggs

This is the first substantive career interview with installation artist Janet Biggs. Biggs discusses her motivation for making installations, rather than theatrical films, and the different ways in which moviegoers and visitors to installations experience moving image art. Biggs describes her experiences traveling to the ends of the earth to record compelling imagery in the Arctic, at a sulfur-mining operation inside a volcano in Indonesia, and in the Afar triangle region of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, Her many wide-ranging conceptual videos explore various forms of physical labor and athletic endeavor from football to water ballet and synchronized swimming to NASCAR, as well as the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease and attempts to break the on-land speed record.

Erin Espelie

Artist/scientist Erin Espelie was trained at Cornell University as a biologist, but turned down opportunities to study biology at the graduate level at Harvard and MIT in order to explore the New York City theater scene, before finding her way into independent, “avant-garde” filmmaking, first exploring her interests in biology and the history of science in a series of short films, then producing the remarkable essay-film The Lanthanide Series (2014), which explores the importance of the “rare earths” (the elements with atomic numbers 57–71) for modern communication and informational technologies. The imagery for The Lanthanide Series was recorded, almost entirely, off the reflective surface of an iPad. In her work as a moving-image artist, Espelie combines poetry, science, environmental politics, and modern digital technologies within videos that defy traditional knowledge categories. She is currently editor in chief for Natural History magazine and a director of the NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter

This is the first career interview with Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, whose films, like those of Fred Wiseman, often focus on cultural institutions, though with a radically different sensibility. Geyrhalter’s most widely known film in the United States is Our Daily Bread (2005), his astonishing documentation of mass food production within the European community. Geyrhalter’s films are visually rigorous and formal—he was a photographer before he turned to filmmaking and is his own cinematographer. His films have explored cultural realities far and wide, from the aftermath of the Balkan wars of the 1990s to the plight of workers laid off from an Austrian factory during the years after the factory closed. His most elaborate film is Elsewhere (2000), a global survey of the edges of modern life and cultural transformation at the moment of the new millennium. The recent Homo Sapiens is a panorama of ruined places and landscapes across the planet at the dawn of the Anthropocene.

Gustav Deutsch

Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch has been a major contributor to what has come to be called “found-footage filmmaking” and/or “recycled cinema”—that is, he is best-known for making films from other films. This interview focuses on a range of his projects: his first found-footage project, an exploration of home movies made by Austrians visiting the Italian coast in the years after Super-8mm became a popular film gauge for documenting family events; a collaborative diptych of Place, made with an Algerian friend, comparing the Algerian oasis Figuig and Deutsch’s native Vienna; his revisiting of proto-cinematic technologies in the construction of a panoramic camera obscura on a Greek island; his remarkable feature film Shirley—Visions of Reality (2013) in which he (and his partner Hanna Schimek) dramatize a series of canonical Edward Hopper paintings; and the recent Notes and Sketches 1: 31 Pocket Films. 2005–2015, a panorama of everyday events, made with new camera technologies.

Documentary Educational Resources

Any important contribution to the history of cinema requires more than accomplished filmmakers. Indeed, filmmaking accomplishment itself is nearly always dependent on the availability of exhibition venues and distribution organizations. Documentary Educational Resources (DER) is a crucial distributor for a wide range of ethnographic films from across the world. Founded by John Marshall and Timothy Asch in 1971 in order to make their own films available, DER now makes available to colleges and universities, schools, and festivals, eight hundred films by hundreds of nonfiction filmmakers from across the globe who are committed to cinema as a form of cultural education and immersion. This interview with the three women who have served as DER’s executive directors over recent decades traces the evolution of a model independent distributor.

Craig Johnson

Craig Johnson was the “third man” in what has become one of the legendary ethnographic adventures and bodies of ethnographic cinema: the series of films about the indigenous Yanomamö living in the highland jungles of southern Venezuela, produced by anthropologists Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch. Johnson, who took sound for the canonical The Ax Fight (1974) and other Yanomamö films, and edited some of them, had never spoken publicly about his involvement in and thoughts about his early filmmaking adventure, until this interview. In the years following his disenchantment with the Yanomamö project, Johnson worked on various films and now, through his Interpret Green, develops and constructs interactive installations for museums.

Yance Ford on Strong Island

After Yance Ford’s brother William was murdered in 1992, when Yance Ford was a college student, she imagined making a film about his death. Finally, in 2017, having worked for many years with television’s POV, seeing independent documentaries into the public arena (and having transitioned to male), Ford completed Strong Island, a feature-length, personal documentary that investigates William’s death within a context of the former and subsequent lives of his parents and siblings. As a crime story, Strong Island is both suspenseful and beautiful to look at. And it is personally performative for Ford. The unusually intimate close-ups of his face, his dramatization of William’s falling to his death in front of the gas station where he was murdered, and his conversations with family and friends dramatize the way in which this family tragedy and cultural injustice continues to inform the lives of those who knew William.

Brett Story

This interview surveys the career of Canadian filmmaker Brett Story, from her early attempts to evoke dimensions of modern urban life to her feature The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), a panorama of the ways in which the American prison system is visible and audible outside prison walls and away from the remote prison locations across the country, where criminals are housed. Story finds evidence of the prison system hidden in plain sight in New York City’s Washington Square, at an airport built on the flat top of what was once a coal mine in Eastern Kentucky, at Quicken Loans headquarters in downtown Detroit, where a forest fire is being fought in Marin County, California, at a grocery storeroom in the Bronx, at a kids pocket park in LA, in a quiet town outside of St. Louis, in a radio station in Kentucky, and on buses traveling through the night toward rural New York State towns.

Bill Morrison

This is the first extensive interview with the “Orpheus of nitrate,” Bill Morrison, whose forte is finding interesting imagery, often imagery with obvious film decay, in celluloid film archives, then fashioning this material into works of his own. Morrison has explored American archives—most often, the paper print collection in the Library of Congress and the Moving Image Research Collections housed at the University of South Carolina, which archive the outtakes of the newsreels Fox Movietone produced for theatrical exhibition between 1928 and 1963; and recently, a collection of early silent films unearthed in the permafrost in Dawson City, Canada. Morrison is particularly drawn to moments when obvious film decay seems related to the content or implications of the imagery that remains uncorrupted. Morrison’s breakthrough feature, Decasia (2002), like nearly all his subsequent works, was produced in collaboration with accomplished composer/musicians from around the world. Morrison’s films are to be understood as image-music experiences.