The Editor's Reflections and Reports
Click for larger view | Figure 1 The Dolce Center |
Click for larger view | Figure 2 |
Film & History League Conference is Imminent. Be There for "The Documentary Tradition" (Nov. 8 – 12, 2006)
The next Film and History League conference is just around the corner, and we are anticipating great interest in "The Documentary Tradition," our announced theme for the meeting. Participants in our last meeting at the Dolce Conference Center near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport will remember the excellent meeting rooms, the very reasonable meal offerings at the food court, and the inexpensive sleeping rooms in this well-kempt facility. Newcomers are urged to go to the registration page of our web site and to click on the Center to view the facility and its accommodations. American Airlines trains its personnel at this location, and the standards are very high for cleanliness and cooperation. The facility is entirely WIFI, which means that laptops can connect to the Internet from the sleeping rooms, the desks in hallways, the meeting rooms—indeed, anywhere in the building.
Many of us in the Film & History tribe started out with projects dealing with documentary. In my own case, I remember attending a 1970 meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City and seeing a short documentary entitled Goodbye Billy: American Goes to War, 1917-1918, an effort which was described by Patrick Griffin and others as a "historian-made film." For me—and for countless others who began using the Cadre Films production in their teaching—the production posed questions about how motion pictures reflect, affect, and interpret historical events. This session had been sponsored by the Historians Film Committee of the AHA, and I put my name on the mailing list for this fledgling group founded by John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson. Not long after the meeting, I received my first copy of Film & History, a newsletter packed with ideas about how humanists could use film in the classroom for legitimate pedagogical ends. The next year, when Griffin could not attend the AHA meeting in New Orleans, I was asked to pinch hit as a commentator at a Film & History session focusing on documentary. At this point, I was hooked but found that I was not without mentors: O'Connor and Griffin sent me booklists, readings, film titles, and I raced off in directions suggested by these mentors. I have been following these paths ever since.
Contemporaneously, I attended a three-day conference on documentary at Brandeis University where the full spectrum of documentary was offered for viewing and discussion. Many of the leading filmmakers of the genre attended and introduced their work. I took notes feverishly and found myself fully immersed in an entirely new dimension of scholarship, the cultural study of film and television. It is our goal to provide such an immersion experience for junior and senior scholars at our Dallas/Fort Worth meeting.
The major focus of the conference will be on selected Areas of Study (see list on following pages). These Areas will have multiple academic panels running for ninety minutes—hopefully with enough time to present arguments and to entertain questions. (We always urge participants to attend the entire meeting so that they can follow up the formal sessions with useful informal discussion.) Major documentary issues, genre, and filmmakers will be the focus of sessions. As an educational complement to these sessions, we will conduct screenings so that participants can view classic works discussed by panels or related to plenary speakers and their presentations. When filmmakers are present and discussing their work, we will try to accommodate their desire to show their films. [End Page 1]
Click for larger view | Figure 3 The Mondells |
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Click for larger view | Figure 5 Raymond Fielding |
