This all-day conference is part of “MoMentum: Mobilization & East Asian Documentary in Trans-Pacific Context.” See the rest of the events in the series.
Focus is on social change in historical moments that resonate in the present from a comparative international perspective. Events set up dialogue across cultures around political questions: how documentary making was historically aligned with movements for independence, agitation for change, citizen revolt, labor reform, and immigrant struggle. Conference participants rethink the discourse around documentary non-fiction in widest circulation starting from the premise that documentary moving image-making developed worldwide in “times of crisis”: 1920s Soviet agit-prop in revolutionary Russia, 1930s US Depression-era documentary, pre and post-World War II Japan, and post-Bandung Afro-Asian cinematic networks. But what about the new social justice crises we face and how are makers strategizing as a consequence? Finally, why the “recourse” to documentary in mobilizing communities—then, via the new technology of motion picture film—now, via iphone video uploads?
Co-sponsors:
Film and Media Studies, School of the Arts
Center for Comparative Media
C.V. Starr East Asian Library/Dragon Summit Culture Endowment Fund
Dean of Humanities
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Donald Keene Center for Japanese Culture
The Harriman Institute: Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies
Incite Institute/Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
“Sites of Cinema” University Seminars
The Society of Fellows & Heyman Center for the Humanities
Weatherhead East Asian Institute
