Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar Scott MacDonald 9780253053985

Flash Flaherty, the much-anticipated follow-up volume to The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, offers a people's history of the world-renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an annual event where participants confront and reimagine the creative process surrounding multiple document/documentary forms and modes of the moving image.

This collection, which includes a mosaic of personal recollections from attendees of the Flaherty Seminar over a span of more than 60 years, highlights many facets of the "Flaherty experience." The memories of the seminarians reveal how this independent film and media seminar has created a lively and sometimes cantankerous community within and beyond the institutionalized realm of American media culture. Editors Scott MacDonald and Patricia R. Zimmermann have curated a collective polyphonic account that moves freely between funny anecdotes, poetic impressions, critical considerations, poignant recollections, scholarly observations, and artistic insights.

Together, the contributors to Flash Flaherty exemplify how the Flaherty Seminar propels shared insights, challenging debates, and actual change in the world of independent media.

Scott MacDonald is Professor of Art History and Director of Cinema and Media Studies at Hamilton College. He is author (with Patricia R. Zimmermann) of The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema; The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama; Binghamton Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department, 1967-1977; and Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema. Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Media Arts, Sciences and Studies at Ithaca College and Director (with Thomas Shevory) of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is author (with Scott MacDonald) of The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema; Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics; (with Helen De Michiel) Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice; and Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of Independent Public Media.

As the essays move through time and space, we are left with the knowledge that The Flaherty was and remains a complex, meaningful and often confounding event that could only be experienced by being there.