Between You and We: Collectivity and the Documentary Interview

April 9, 6pm - 8pm

 

Since the 1960s, media interviews have played an important role in bringing the first person singular to the foreground of social and cultural discourse. Looking at feminist documentary films from the 1970s, Paige Sarlin's lecture, Between You and We: Collectivity and the Documentary Interview, explores how the documentary interview also operates as a structure for collective identification. Focusing on San Francisco Newsreel’s The Woman’s Film and Mariposa Group’s Word is Out, Sarlin highlights the importance of direct address and the shifting usage of pronouns to the construction and circulation of plural forms of political subjectivity and analysis.  For Sarlin, the documentary interview operates as a cinematic analogue to the consciousness-raising involved in the American women’s movement.  From this perspective, these films invite us to reconsider the axiom “the personal is political” in light of the assertion that “there are no individual solutions” and to challenge the reduction of feminist critique to a form of identity politics. 

 

 

Collective Interview-Work: Tactics for Inscription in the Midst of Struggle 

April 10, 6pm - 9pm

 

This workshop will explore the challenges and possibilities of the group interview as a vehicle for the production, representation, and circulation of aesthetic and political forms of militancy. The first half of the workshop will focus on different ways of talking about collaboration and movement-building that challenge conventional modes of interviewing.  The second half of the workshop will culminate in the collective-production of a video interview of a group of artist/activists involved in the current student strike.  Groups and individuals interested or engaged in collaborations or collectives, movement-building, and the documentation and mediation of struggle are encouraged to attend.

 

Paige Sarlin is a filmmaker, scholar, and political activist. Her writings on art, film, and politics have been published in October, Re-Thinking Marxism, Reviews in Cultural Theory, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and Framework: A Journal of Film and Culture.  She is currently at work on a book-length manuscript entitled Interview-Work: The Genealogy of a Cultural Form.  She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Paige Sarlin's events are presented as part of  Talk Show  and within SBC's spring workshop and speaker series, supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.