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October
6 , Thursday, 7:30PM,
2005
Filmmakers from the West Coast:
Rebecca Baron
Balagan
welcomes Rebecca Baron (in
person), a Los Angeles-based
filmmaker. Her work has screened widely in international
film festivals and media venues including Rotterdam
Film Festival, New York Film Festival and the
Viennale and the Whitney Museum of American
Art. Her film okay bye-bye received awards at
the San Francisco, Montreal and Ann Arbor Film
Festivals and was included in the 2000 Whitney
Biennial. Her previous film The Idea of North
received awards at the Leipzig, Athens, San
Francisco, Ann Arbor, Onion City and Sinking
Creek Film Festivals. She is Associate Dean
of the California Institute of the Arts School
of Film/Video where she teaches documentary
and experimental film.
How
Little We Know of Our Neighbours 50
minutes, 2004
How
Little We Know of Our Neighbours
is an experimental documentary about Britain’s
Mass Observation Movement and its relationship
to contemporary issues regarding surveillance,
public self-disclosure, and privacy. At its
center is a look at the multiple roles cameras
have played in public space. Mass Observation
was an eccentric social science enterprise
founded in the late 1930’s in England.
The group used surreptitious photography to
record and scrutinize people’s behavior
in public places. The film traces the history
of the movement from its inception as progressive
if naive “anthropology of ourselves”
in the 1930’s through its reincarnation
as a civil spy unit during World War II and
its eventual emergence as a market research
firm in the 1950's. Mass Observation is regarded
also in relation to a range of present-day
phenomena from police surveillance to web
cams to reality television that points to
ways in which our notions of privacy and self-definition
have changed. The film looks back as well
to the 1880’s when the introduction
of the hand-held camera, brought photography
out of the studio and into the street, and
for the first time one could be photographed
casually in public without knowledge or consent.
The
idea of North 14 minutes, 16mm b/w,
1995
In
the guise of chronicling the final moments
of three polar explorers marooned on an ice
floe a century ago, Baron’s film investigates
the limitations of images and other forms
of record as means of knowing the past and
the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical
time, real time and the fixed moment of the
photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover
and allusive sound fragments, evidence and
illustration, in Baron’s words “meaning
is set adrift” --from the1997 New York
Film Festival “Views from the Avant-Garde”
program notes
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