CAMSZINE

CAMS Feature Film Lucidity to Screen This Weekend at the Weitz Center

Lucidity is finally coming to a theater near you — specifically, the Carleton Weitz Center cinema!

In the summer of 2012, a group of recent Carleton CAMS alumni ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a feature film. After spending August 2012 shooting in Northfield and the Twin Cities, and the interim on post-production, on May 18th, you can finally see what they 've made.

The film, which runs about 75 minutes, centers on Lee Ann, a struggling writer stuck in a dead-end cafe job; her boyfriend is always away on business, and she's unsatisfied with her fantasy novel. When she starts falling in love with a man who appears in her dreams every night, she starts to reconsider the life she's made for herself.

Carleton CAMS alumni filmmakers Sam Dunnewold '12, Kaitlin Randolph '12, and Anna Swanson '12 will be joined by their cinematographer, current senior Jack Davis '13, on Saturday, May 18 at 5:30pm for the world premiere of their new feature film, Lucidity, at the Carleton College Weitz Center for Creativity Cinema. Other members of the cast and crew will also be in attendance, with a talkback session to follow. This event is free and open to the public; the screening is sponsored by the Carleton Film Society.

You can follow the movie on Twitter @Lucid_Films or on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/lucidfilmsllc.

Carleton Grad Eric Trebar to Premier New Feature Film

Filmmaker Eric Tretbar will premiere his new feature film, Girl Meets Bike, on Saturday, May 11 at 7:00pm in the Weitz Cinema.  The screening, sponsored by CAMS, is free and open to the public. 

In the film, a young high school shop teacher buys her first motorcycle with her wedding dress money, leading her away from her controlling fiancée into a new circle of motorcycle friends who are attracted but threatened by her newfound freedom. As she learns to ride, she must interpret their offers of advice and mechanical assistance: are they subtle forms of control? Or crucial knowledge, without which she might get herself killed?

Girl Meets Bike is Eric's seventh feature film. His films have won the audience award at the Berlin Film Festival, received an Independent Spirit Award nomination (the indie Academy Awards), and aired on the Sundance Channel, German TV, and NBC.  They've also screened in competition at world festivals, including London, Athens, Sao Paulo, Warsaw, Seattle, Toronto, Rivertown, Orlando, Vienna, Hong Kong, Melbourne, the American Film Institute, and Los Angeles Independent. 

Eric is an avid motorcycle enthusiast and musician, scoring much of his film music, and drumming for Minneapolis and L.A. garage/R&B/punk outfits The Funseekers, The Spectors, The Red Hearts and Friends Like These.  In addition to producing and promoting his own films, Eric is currently teaching film production courses at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  

FILMOGRAPHY

GIRL MEETS BIKE (2013, 105:00/color/drama/USA)

AMERICANS (2011, 56:00/color/documentary/USA)

INQ409 (2008, 95:00/color/drama/USA)

THE HORRIBLE FLOWERS (2006, 83:00/color/drama/USA)

GIGI 12x5 (2005, 92:00/color/drama/USA)

ZENITH (2003, 56:00/color/documentary/USA - co-producer)

SNOW (1998, 82:00/b+w/drama/USA)

THE USUAL (1992, 80:00/b+w/drama/USA)

Professors Williams and Donelan Lead Discussion of Django Unchained

Professor Harry Williams from the History department and Associate Professor Carol Donelan from the Cinema & Media Studies department co-lead a lunch discussion of Django Unchained on Thursday, May 2, with students, staff and faculty from across campus in attendance.  The event was hosted by the Student Department Advisors from the History department.  Discussion centered on the film's genre conventions and race politics.  A genre mash-up, the film mixes the semantics and syntax of the Western (spaghetti as well as Hollywood) with the semantics of the Southern plantation, blaxploitation, and other film cycles.  Participants reflected on the character of Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), the slave who is complicit with Southern whites in oppressing other blacks, Django's "performance" as black slave trader, the theme of "flesh for sale," the role of film genres in working through persistent cultural anxieties about race, how genre films as "functional structures" mediate history, and how films are received disparately by viewers, here and abroad.

CAMS Comps Films Screening at The Ledge Gallery in Minneapolis

The Ledge Gallery is a domestic exhibition space located in Stevens Square, Minneapolis, whose mission is to showcase new art and build a community dedicated to its appreciation by holding monthly exhibition openings and Q&A sessions with their featured artists.

Carleton CAMS is pleased to announce that this coming Saturday, April 27, from 7-9pm, The Ledge will host a screening of two CAMS comps films, A White Suit by Joey Fishman '13, Gabriel Loeb '11, and Matt Spevack '13; and When You Wish Upon a Star by Anna Swanson '12. The screening will be followed by discussion with the filmmakers.

A White Suit (2012) follows an unnamed house painter as he acquires and begins to experiment with an electric juicer. The filmmakers, collaborating under the name Mothers Favorite Pictures, state, “We made this film to better understand the man sitting on the couch, watching TV. This man is ubiquitous yet undiscovered.”

 

When You Wish Upon a Star (2012), by Anna Swanson, is a creative nonfiction experiment that compares the stardom of Lady Gaga and Marlene Dietrich. The film examines the role of feminism in the performances of celebrities from different eras. Swanson writes, “ Ultimately, [the film] becomes both a meditation on embodied identity in the female star, and how we, as scholars, filmmakers, and fans, struggle to find our own reflections in the auras that celebrities cast into our lives.”

The Ledge Gallery is located at 1916 3rd Ave. S #1, Minneapolis, MN. Please join your fellow CAMS students and alumni as they bring their work into conversation with the Twin Cities art community and wider public!

When: 7pm-9pm, Saturday, April 27
Where: The Ledge Gallery,  1916 3rd Ave. S #1, Minneapolis MN

For more information about the event, check it out on Facebook.

CAMS Major Henry Rownd Published in Film Matters

CAMS major Henry Rownd '13 recently had an essay published in Film Matters 3.2 (2013).  The essay is based on a paper Henry developed in CAMS 216: American Cinema of the 1970s, taught by Professor Jay Beck.  The essay,  "The Stewardesses: Soft-core Porn that Kills," investigates the paradoxical success of the 3D soft-core feature The Stewardesses (1969). In the paper, Henry argues that the film is built upon a series of contradictory impulses: of a group sex experience but also of a private space of sexual musings, of a celebratory easygoing comedy with a violent, dark, satiric ending, as both “realistic” and purposefully disorienting, as classy but also sleazy.  Henry is currently weighing his options and will be attending graduate school next Fall.

Carleton CAMS at the National Association of Broadcasters Trade Show

We are excited to announce that this week, CAMS Audio and Visual Technical Director Paul Bernhardt is joined by two CAMS majors, Jack Davis '13 and Ashley Shaw '14, in Las Vegas, where they are exploring the new frontier of media production at the Annual Trade Show for the National Association of Broadcasters!

If you want to follow the action, all three of our audiovisual adventurers will have an online presence this week:

You can follow Paul at his tumblr or get live updates on his Twitter feed: @papadiscobravo.

You can follow Jack at his tumblr or get live updates on his Twitter feed: @johnjackdavis.

You can follow Ashley at her tumblr or get live updates on her Twitter feed: @AshleyShawPaw.

Stay tuned for updates throughout their trip, and a CAMSzine full report on their return next week!

CAMS Major Felicity Flesher Presents Research at Visions Film Conference

Still from Intruders in the Dust (1949)

CAMS major Felicity Flesher '12 will present her  research on race films at the Visions Film Conference in Wilmington, North Carolina on Friday April 5, 2013.  Felicity's research is based on a paper she developed in CAMS 211: Film History II, taught by Professor Carol Donelan.

In 1949, four films were released in America which transcended the norms of so-called “race films” from years prior: Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Pinky, and Intruder in the Dust. Felicity discusses how post-WWII escapism allowed Hollywood to bridge the gap between separate cinemas and integrate African American actors and themes into mainstream films.

Felicity is a junior Cinema and Media Studies major. In addition to historical writing, she also pursues creative writing as a film, television, and short story writer and frequently visualizes her work as a video director and producer. Her first narrative short Expiration Date won a special jury citation at the 2012 Oxford Film Festival. She recently had the opportunity to work for the Jim Henson Company in Hollywood. One day she hopes to put her studies in the classroom and cinema to practical use as the writer of the next great film since the Indiana Jones trilogy.

CAMS Faculty Films Accepted to the MSP International Film Festival

CAMS faculty past and present are taking the Minneapolis-St Paul International Film Festival by storm, along with students.  Eric Tretbar's feature film GIRL MEETS BIKE will screen on Friday, April 26 at 6:30pm and Cecilia Cornejo's documentary THE SONG OF THE APPRENTICE on April 14 at 4:00pm.  Both showings are at St Anthony Main Theater in Minneapolis with the filmmakers present.  For more information and to purchase tickets in advance, visit the festival website.  Congratulations to all of our talented filmmakers!

GIRL MEETS BIKE (Eric Tretbar, 2013)

Feature Narrative. A young high school shop teacher buys her first motorcycle with her wedding dress money, leading her away from her controlling fiancée into a new circle of motorcycle friends who are attracted but threatened by her newfound sexual freedom. As she learns to ride, she must interpret their offers of advice and mechanical assistance: are they subtle forms of control? Or crucial knowledge, without which she might get herself killed?

Still from Girl Meets Bike (Eric Tretbar, 2013)

THE SONG OF THE APPRENTICE (Cecilia Cornejo, 2013)

Documentary Short. This beautiful essay film reflects on issues of productivity, creativity and the need for meaningful and dignified work

Still from The Song of the Apprentice (Cecilia Cornejo, 2013)

 

CAMS Majors Spevack, Fishman and Loeb to Screen Feature Film at MSP International Film Festival

Still from Men With Arms (Spevack, Fishman & Loeb, 2012)

CAMS majors Matt Spevack '13, Joey Fishman '13 and Gabe Loeb '12  just received word that their feature-length film MEN WITH ARMS has been accepted into the 2013 Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival.  The 86-minute film is in contention for the "Minnesota Made" film award and will be screened on Friday, April 12 at 6:45 at the St. Anthony Main Theater in Minneapolis.  Visit the festival website for more information and to purchase tickets in advance.

Feature Narrative: Sidney is a quiet and hard-working clock repairer and a loving yet distant single father constantly preoccupied with his work. His son, Lloyd, takes after his father’s qualities as well as his work. Helping his father all his life, Lloyd began working beside him full-time after high school. His sister, Martha, is a free-spirited high school graduate whose motherly role in the family is disrupted by a quick-moving serious relationship. After receiving a tape recorder from his sister Martha before she leaves, Lloyd discovers the sounds of New York City and his new-found obsession propels him from his father’s cloistered life and into the outside world.

Film teasers can be accessed here.

 

CAMS Major Sam Dunnewold '12 at Sedona International Film Festival

Recent CAMS graduate and current Gould Library employee Sam Dunnewold '12 spent the month of February in sunny Sedona, Arizona, as an intern with the Sedona International Film Festival. Although he had never heard of the festival before landing the internship, he was pleasantly surprised by how much attention his co-organizers paid to making the festival about the audience. Says Sam,"it turned out to be one of the best and biggest film festivals left in the states that still focuses heavily on the audience experience instead of filmmakers, awards, and production companies."

His month-long stay was characterized by, in his words, "picking up slack" for projectionists, filmmakers, bartenders, and even the festival director, but between 16 hour days and nightly parties, Sam still found to time to talk about some of his favorite CAMS topic areas — cinematography, narrative structure, and industry history — with the festival employees and attendees, with everyone from industry veterans to filmmakers younger than himself. To sum it up, Sam says, "I had a blast."

When he is not interning at festivals across the U.S., Sam is currently finishing up the post-production for Lucidity, a feature film shot last summer by a crew of recent Carleton graduates and current students including himself, Kaitlin Randolph '12, Anna Swanson '12, Jack Davis '13, and Hannah White '14. Inspired by his taste of the festival circuit, Sam is back to Northfield now, hard at work on his own film project, which is slated to be hitting the festival circuit next year. Stay tuned for details on a screening of the new film later this spring!

Kudos: CAMS Major Janae D. Green '10

CAMS grad Janae Green has been freelancing and volunteering in the film/television industry for close to three years now.  She graduated from Carleton in 2010 and worked at the Associated Press as a Business Associate intern.  She then worked as an Assistant Media Planner for a global advertising agency.  In 2011, she quit advertising and starting taking unpaid internship and volunteering as a production assistant and editor for smaller production companies and community media organizations throughout MYC.  Then the paying work started to come through and she went to work for BET and CBS on two different pilots, Bunim-Murray on Project Runway Allstars, and Style Network for a reality show featuring Betsey Johnson.  One of her proudest moments was being able to work on set directly across form Woody Allen as he was filming a scene on a movie set in 1980s Brooklyn.  "I never stood that close to a legend before," Janae remarks.

Janae was recently promoted to an Integrations/Trade-Out Associate Producer for an HGTV/CBS show filming in Los Angeles but is now back in NYC for a 10-week stint.  Meanwhile, she has been accepted to a graduate program at Carnegie Mellon University and will be attending this summer, pursuing a Master's degree in Entertainment Industry Management.  The program is an immersive professional training program that spends one year in Pittsburgh and one year in LA for students who want to advance their knowledge and skill set in business management within the entertainment industry.  It is crafted as an apprenticeship program mixed with classroom teaching and trips to Sundance and SXSW.  Janae hopes to one day open a production studio (not "company," but "studio," she clarifies) in Chicago.  Congrats to Janae for her achievements thus far.

CAMS Professor Laska Jimsen to Screen Film at Ann Arbor Film Festival

CAMS is excited to announce that Assistant Professor Laska Jimsen has had her film Beaver Creek Yard (2013, 5.5 mins) accepted to the highly competitive 2013 Ann Arbor Film Festival.  The film will be screened on the opening night of the festival on March 19.

Laska describes the newly-completed work as being both about a place, a Christmas tree processing facility on Beaver Creek Road, and also about the human impulse to control, exploit, and profit from the natural world.

Still from Beaver Creek Yard (Laska Jimsen, 2013)

Laska will also be screening several of her films and videos this coming Saturday, March 9, at 4:30 pm in the Weitz Cinema. This special faculty film screening event is hosted by the Carleton College Film Society. Laska will be in attendance to speak about her work — an opportunity not to be missed!

Kudos: CAMS Major Linnea Bullion '13

When she traveled to Barcelona two years ago with the CAMS Off-Campus Studies Roadtrip, Linnea Bullion '13 says she expected to leave with thousands of pictures of old buildings. But instead, she came home with a hard drive full of shots of skateboarders, and the itch to return to Europe and deepen her photographic study of the skateboarding community.

This past summer, funded in part by the Carleton College Larson International Fellowship, Linnea was able to traveled back to Barcelona and Copenhagen to continue her photographic passion. With her work, she aims to dissuade the belief of skateboarding as a pastime of delinquents and instead shift the focus towards the passion, dedication and beauty that accompanies it. Drawing from her work over the summer, Linnea has just completed a photo book of the series for her senior comps project.

Her new book is titled ...And For a Moment, Time Stops, and a show featuring her work from this book will have its official opening at Familia Skateshop in Minneapolis on Saturday, March 2nd, from 7-10pm. The show will run through the end of March.

CAMS Majors Offer Media Internship Advice

Earlier in February, CAMS hosted an Orange Couch lunchtime discussion with current Carleton students who have had internships related to film and media production. Two of our students, Matt Spevack '13 and Felicity Flesher '14, offer some additional thoughts and advice about internships in the wide world of CAMS!

Matt spent last summer working as a (full-time paid!) Video Post Production and Digital Media Intern at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY. Matt had worked at a few smaller, independent studios previously, but he said that he "gained a lot of experience working at such a large art institution which was a very different experience from previous internships." The Museum of Moving Image offers pretty unique (and competitive) possibilities with paid internships in a lot of different and interest-specific areas of media, and Matt says his experience there was incredible, but "even if your internship isn't so glamorous/educational/lucrative, just put up with it, stick with it, add it to your resume, and apply for another one."

Felicity, who spent last summer at the Jim Henson Company in Hollywood, also stresses the importance of continuing to apply for internships — from Felicity:

"Apply to anything and everything you might be interested in. Even if it's not exactly in your field, it could turn out to be a great opportunity. If you don't get an internship with the perfect company the first time around, use that time to build up and tweak your resume and try again. Connections often get important people's attention, but strong resumes and good, interesting students definitely do. A great way to reach out to potential employers is just to look for people and companies that you respect and drop them an email or search for available opportunities."

Felicity worked in the creative affairs department mostly reading scripts, writing coverage, talking to executives about said scripts, and performing general office duties including answering the phone, making copies, and preparing for guests to the office. She got the internship by contacting the company through their website and went through the normal interview process and had to do a sample coverage over one weekend. Her advice for your time at the company:

"At the internship, just work your hardest. You might feel competitive with your other interns and you will definitely worry about screwing up (and you will), but be mindful that your bosses are aware of your work ethic no matter what, so do your best. And if you do your best, they might let you out once in a while to participate in the fun stuff they have going on and give you more of a chance to prove yourself. Also be aware of the environment and get the feel for how much weight you can carry in the office. You might either be free labor scum or a future CEO-in-training, but it all depends on the atmosphere so don't overstep your bounds if it doesn't seem appropriate. At the same time, don't be afraid to ask questions - inquisitive interns are the best."

What she loved about it was that it gave her insight into how the industry actually seems to work, and the opportunity to make friends and connections and get a sense of direction with her career. Her main disappointment was wishing that her bosses had been less closed off and more open to a mentoring relationship.

For more insight into the world of a media production intern, check out this video that Felicity produced about her summer with the Jim Henson Company!

 

CAMS Professor Laska Jimsen Leads Ethics Workshop

As part of last September's Visualing the Liberal Arts Conference, CAMS Professor Laska Jimsen gave a talk titled Ethics of Visual Representation in Liberal Arts Classrooms: A Media Arts Perspective, drawing on her teaching experiences in a diverse range of institutions, including Carleton's Cinema and Media Studies Department. Visitors to the conference from St. Lawrence University subsequently invited Jimsen to both give her talk again and lead an associated 3-hour workshop at their Winter Institute in January, under the title Visual Ethnography: Teaching and Modeling Ethical Behavior.

In Jimsen's own words, "Sending students out of the classroom to collect visual representations brings up complicated ethical questions, whether we ask them to, for example, conduct video interviews on campus or do street photography abroad." As part of her visit to St. Lawrence in January, Jimsen's workshop served to help over 30 faculty at the upstate New York institution grapple with questions of how to prepare students to think and create ethically, to tread the line between ethical responsibility to students' subjects and audiences, and personal artistic or ideological responsibility to themselves.

Jimsen is activating an important and on-going discussion both within the CAMS world and beyond, and St. Lawrence University's invitation is both a testament to the importance of this kind of discourse, and to Jimsen's compelling presentation of it. Even more, her willingness to draw on personal experience as an artist and educator demonstrates the importance of constantly reflecting on our own experiences and practices, both academic and artistic, and embodies concretely the ethical necessity of self-reflection in our studies and our creations.

CAMS Short Film, The Dutchman's Waltz, Wraps Shooting

Over the course of nine days between January 4th and January 22nd, four CAMS majors devoted their time to shooting the upcoming short film, The Dutchman's Waltz, which is a co-independent study between Connor Einarsen '15, director, and Diana Fraser '14, producer. They collaborated with Jack Davis '13 and Hannah White '14 to produce twenty minutes of what Fraser describes as "almost-noir, dance, and closure."

The film stars Gabe Terrell '14 and Karen McCleary '14 as main characters Jack and Jess. Shooting locations included local locations on-campus, the Archer House in Northfield, and playgrounds on -2 degree days. The whole team had a fantastic time preparing and shooting and are looking forward to sharing the final product at the end of winter term. Check out some photo highlights from the film set below and stayed tuned for update about campus premiere screening.

Connor Einarsen '15 directs his actors on-set at the Archer House in downtown Northfield.

Cinematographer extraordinaire Jack Davis '13 uses our CobraCrane Jib Arm to maneuver the camera for a shot.

Crew members Hannah White '14, Sam Dunnewold '12, and Jack Davis '13 experience the privations of filmmaking necessary to make great art as the actors, Gabe Terrell '14 and Karen McCleary '14, prepare for their scene.

CAMS Students Develop Original Research in Postwar Hollywood Film History

Students enrolled in CAMS 211: Film History II last term (fall 2012) researched developments in the postwar Hollywood film industry.  The results of this work have been collected in a self-published volume, Postwar Film History, 1945-1954, Original Research by Carleton Film History Students.

Robert Yeagle and Giancarlo Danno set the stage by detailing the experience of moviegoing and struggles within the industry during the war years. From there, Katharine Walton, Ben Walsh, Dan McAlister, Felicity Flesher and Adrian Carpenter map a variety of understudied postwar developments, including an anti-trust suit against an independent theater chain, Hollywood’s ongoing humanitarian efforts, the machinations of the Theater Owners of America, the negotiation of race ideologies in the social problem film, and the advent of the first widescreen technology, Cinerama. In an era infused with Cold War anxieties about communist infiltration, Simon Lansberg, Alexandra Guy and Jack Davis trace a story arc from the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee to the film industry’s own Waldorf Statement, which instituted the Hollywood blacklist. Patrick Nalepka, Tanwaporn Ohl, Hannah White, Linnea Bullion, and Max Felderman investigate the deals that went down between Hollywood and other global industries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Britain, while Kyle Markwalter, Britney Fryer, Isaac Burns and Emily Boghossian survey the checkered history of film censorship in the mid-1950s. In a concluding section, Jacob McNaughton, Rebecca Brown, Chrissie Deutsch, Chris Baur, Woody Kaine and Braeden Ducharme scrutinized the dynamics of competition and cooperation between the Hollywood film industry and the emerging television industry.  

Carleton's Laurence McKinley Gould Library provides a suite of resources for research in film history typically only found in libraries at major research universities with graduate programs in cinema studies: collections of primary documents and film industry trade publications in microfilm and online archives, specialized film journal and magazine databases, and a large collection of DVDs rich in silent, classic Hollywood, experiemental and foreign cinema.

Kudos: CAMS Major Meryl Schumacker '10

Meryl Schumacker '10 currently works at PBS KIDS Digital. During her time at Carleton, Meryl completed internships in production and development at Pixar Animation Studios, DreamWorks Animation and Sesame Street. She earned distinction on her comps project, titled, "The Square: A Prosocial Children's Television Program for 6- to 9-year old Audiences."

CAMS Animation and Avant-Garde Students Collaborate on Short Film

A few weeks ago, Professor John Schott's Avant-Garde Film and Video students met in the Weitz Center White Space Gallery, each instructed to bring an object or two with which to create some Surrealist sculpture. The resulting event was then edited and given in 4-second chunks to members of Professor Laska Jimsen's Animation class — each animation student was tasked with rotoscoping their portion. Rotoscoping is a technique where original live-action footage is re-traced, frame by frame, to create an uncannily "real" or life-like animation, but the means of tracing can vary widely — in can be drawn by hand, traced on the computer, or even carved into wood. Animation students interpreted their 4-second clips according to their own artistic inclinations and then brought them back together to create this unified and delightfully strange little collaboration. Here is the collaboration in its entirety!

  

16mm Makes a Comeback, Liberal Arts-Style

In the production office, we've been busy preparing for the visit of two acclaimed Berlin-based filmmakers, Robert Beavers and Ute Aurand, who CAMS is honored to be hosting as Artists-in-Residence at the end of October. As part of their time here, each filmmaker will be screening a selection of his or her own works.

Since both Beavers and Aurand work exclusively in 16mm, we've been retro-fitting the projection booth of the Wetiz Cinema with a 550watt Xenon Projector. The romantic, nostalgic, and just plain cool factors of getting our hands dirty with photochemical film are great in-and-of themselves. But in the process of getting the projector churning at the right height, we've created something of an interdisciplinary sculpture: at the base are two apple boxes, courtesy of the CAMS department; on top of which is a plinth, courtesy of the Art Gallery; on top of which is a two-by-four, courtesy of the Theatre Department's scene shop; on top of which sits the 16mm projector, which was previously housed in Olin, the building dedicated to the Psychology and Physics Departments. The whole set-up is beautiful little illustration of how film relies upon and flourishes because of its connection with the other arts and academic disciplines.

Our serendipitous paean to the liberal arts: