Filmmaker showcase: Film as an information medium: Connecting cultures and communities

Abstract

ABSTRACT The panel will be structured as a modified film festival format, including the presentation of four short films produced by presenting scholars. Each panelist will be given a total of 15 minutes to showcase a film (or portion of a film) designed or produced in collaboration with relevant communities and stakeholder groups. These films and panelists were selected to represent diverse approaches to both filmmaking as an information medium and to the conference theme of community and culture. Following the screening of each of the films, the rest of the session will be devoted to an interactive discussion with the audience on: a) film as an information medium, b) the role of visual research methods in LIS, and c) how film fits in with professional and academic outcomes. Oliver Wendell Holmes Keywords Film, Visual Information, Documentary INTRODUCTION In June of 1859, physician, essayist, and photographer Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that photography provided humans a mirror with a memory. We could have direct, indexical representations of the world about us that would remain fixed across space and time. We have 5,000 years of practice thinking with words but scarcely a century and a half of practice thinking with pictures, both still & moving. Now that the means of production and viewing are simple and controllable, we find ourselves able to practice new ways of thinking in, with, and about video. Plato argued that words were useful because they were stripped of specificity; Holmes argued (as do we) that images are useful precisely because of their specificity. Videos return us to the specificity of lived life. For most of the 20