Tag: film

The Lost Weekend

Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, Missouri, one of the city’s locations for the annual True/False documentary film festival. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I spent last weekend watching documentaries. This may not sound at first hearing like the most exciting weekend a person could have, but every year at this time I spend all of my money and time to go see more documentary films than a person should see in four days at True/False, a documentary film festival in its tenth year that is a highlight of the year for me and my little town. Directors and producers and writers and fans descend on the city and turn it into temporary mecca for (mostly) nonfiction narrative cinema (and for hoodies, which for some reason go with documentaries like Botox goes with Hollywood), and normal residents like me get to forget our day jobs and immerse ourselves in a vibrant and inventive art form.

Emerging bleary-eyed and wrung out (maybe that explains the hoodies) on the other end of my sixteen-film weekend, I’ve been thinking about documentaries, especially in light of what I do, which is study and teach fiction. This isn’t so paradoxical—nonfictional and fictional narrative share more than most people think, and have a lot to teach us about each other. Continue reading “The Lost Weekend”

Film in the Classroom

Many of us use film clips in the classroom when we teach plays, especially when we teach Shakespeare.  This makes a great deal of sense, as we’re teaching something that’s meant to be seen.  But how do we actually use these clips?  Or even full films?  And why are we doing this, from a pedagogical standpoint?

I’ve used portions of films so that students understand what’s happening in the play.  For example, watching the ending of A Doll’s House has more emotional impact on students than only reading it, which increases their appreciation for the play.  So, there’s utility there.  But sometimes this method feels almost like a cop-out to me.  I worry that I’m showing students a lengthy (30 minute) clip just to avoid having to actually lead discussion.

So I’ve been working on using film in other ways – beyond simply making sure that students understand the plot.

Plays are, of course, highly collaborative in nature.  That collaboration continues well after the playwright is dead, since the plays continue to be performed and re-imagined by various and varied directors.  This is especially true in Shakespearean plays; each director imagines a different version of Shakespeare, each actor brings something different to the role, and the filming can draw our attention to different aspects of a scene or soliloquy.  I’ve found it useful to compare these collaborations, and thus far I’ve attempted this sort of comparative work with Hamlet (in intro to lit) and King Lear (in my senior-level Shakespeare course). Continue reading “Film in the Classroom”

Interview with Rattapallax Editor and Filmmaker, Ram Devineni

Ram Devineni is the founder and editor of Rattapallax magazine, a literary journal dedicated to publishing poetry from around the world. Devineni, also a filmmaker, co-founded the film school Academia Internacional de Cinema in São Paulo and recently co-produced Amir Naderi’s Vegas: Based on a True Story, which premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival and showed in competition in the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. For the 2009 PEN World Voices Literary Festival, Devineni curated a panel on literary short films and documentaries.

The Teaching Poetry blog asked Ram a few questions about his work with poetry and film.

Teaching Poetry: Tell us about your documentary on Ginsberg.

Ram Devineni: Ginsberg’s Karma is a thirty-minute documentary about the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It follows his mythical journey to India in the early 1960s that transformed his perspective on life and his work. Poet Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, traces the two years Ginsberg spent in India by visiting the places where he stayed and talking with the people he met and influenced, as well as intimate interviews with Beat poets and friends. Bob and I make appearances in it, too. Continue reading “Interview with Rattapallax Editor and Filmmaker, Ram Devineni”