Directions in Documentary Sound: A conversation with Stuart Cody, Ernst Karel, & Sarah Elder
When:
Monday, Sep 17, 2018 6:00p -
8:30p
Monday, Sep 17, 2018 6:00p -
8:30p
Where:
Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Art, Film, Lectures & Conferences
Along with the familiar historical developments in picture technology, there have been significant changes in the way documentary sound has been recorded, composed and conceptualized. Join us for a lively discussion with documentary sound artists—whose work collectively spans over a half-century—as they dissect landmark film clips to explore the relationship between the technical and practical innovations and emergent theoretical and aesthetic concerns of ethnographic filmmaking from the 1950s to today. Moderated by Ilisa Barbash.
Co-sponsored by Documentary Educational Resources, Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard and the Harvard Art Museums.
The lecture will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway. Doors will open at 5:30pm.
Free admission, but seating is limited. Tickets will be distributed beginning at 5:30pm at the Broadway entrance. One ticket per person.
Sneak Preview Screening
Monday, September 17 at 8pm
The Sound of the Bells (O som dos sinos)
Helping to preserve a sonorous language that is steadily disappearing, this film is part of a larger multimedia project exploring the tradition of church bell ringing throughout cities in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. In its tender, drifting exploration of the art and meaning of the bells, the film patiently reveals the quieter, inconspicuous details and tangential stories of those within resonant range. This percussive melody swells and reverberates outward, conversing with the environment and culture of a region shaped by the richness of both its religion and its mineral deposits. As the disaffected din of capitalism and mining takes a different kind of toll, the bell ringers’ descriptions of the significance of minute differentiations in the types of rings do sound like echoes from another time that have somehow survived—assiduous markers of danger, euphoria, reverence, and loss.
Directed by Marcia Mansur & Marina Thomé
Brazil 2017, DCP, color, 70 min. Portuguese with English subtitles
Preceded by
Buckdancer
A folklore film in the romanticized, half-staged style of Robert Flaherty, Buckdancer features Mississippi fife player Ed Young discussing and then playing his instrument. His music and dance are accompanied—thanks to Hawes and co-producer Edmund Carpenter—by the Georgia Sea Island Singers, who happened to be in Los Angeles, where the film was made.
Directed by Bess Lomax Hawes
US 1965, digital video, b/w, 6 min
