Scott MacDonald

This is the inspiring story of The Flaherty, one of the oldest continuously running nonprofit media arts institutions in the world, which has shaped the development of independent film, video, and emerging forms in the United States over the past 60 years. Combining the words of legendary independent filmmakers with a detailed history of The Flaherty, Patricia R. Zimmermann and Scott MacDonald showcase its history and legacy, amply demonstrating how the relationships created at the annual Flaherty seminar have been instrumental in transforming American media history. Moving through the decades, each chapter opens with a detailed history of the organization by Zimmermann, who traces the evolution of The Flaherty from a private gathering of filmmakers to a small annual convening, to today's ever-growing nexus of filmmakers, scholars, librarians, producers, funders, distributors, and others associated with international independent cinema. MacDonald expands each chapter by giving voice to the major figures in the evolution of independent media through transcriptions of key discussions galvanized by films shown at The Flaherty. The discussions feature Frances Flaherty, Robert Gardner, Fred Wiseman, Willard Van Dyke, Jim McBride, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Erik Barnouw, Barbara Kopple, Ed Pincus, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Bruce Conner, Peter Watkins, Su Friedrich, Marlon Riggs, William Greaves, Ken Jacobs, Kazuo Hara, Mani Kaul, Craig Baldwin, Bahman Ghobadi, Eyal Sivan, and many others.

Comprehending Cinema is a collection of in-depth interviews and panoramic essays that models a generalist approach to modern audiovisual media, prioritizing remarkable cinematic accomplishments that can get lost within our overwhelming modern mediascape. The 18 interviewees featured in this publication include Oscar-winning documentarians Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin; Dean Fleischer Camp, whose Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was an internet smash, then an Oscar nominee; canonical filmmakers Guy Maddin and Su Friedrich, still building on remarkable careers; renowned poet (and cineaste) John Ashbery; Irish independent Tadhg O'Sullivan who is entranced by the moon; indefatigable cine-historian, Paul Cronin; LA artist Jennifer West, who collaborated with 11,500 visitors on New York City's High Line to produce a new kind of City Symphony; Penny Lane, whose documentary films continually surprise; a collaborative filmmaking team who provide an immersive motion study of a crowd taking selfies with the Mona Lisa; cine-explorers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel; master of the cine-archive Bill Morrison; cine-scientist Erin Espelie; video-essayist Chloé Galibert-Laîné; and the Alloy Orchestra, who entertained silent-film audiences for three decades. Comprehending Cinema combines engaging conversations with accomplished filmmakers and essayistic explorations of recent contributions to modern media-making by filmmakers creating a tradition of "cine-nocturnes," and by filmmakers exploring archival representations of World War 1. The book offers a reading adventure dedicated to opening the door to exciting new kinds of film experience.

The goal of virtually all my writing has been to bring attention to cinematic (and, early on, literary) accomplishments that have not received the careful attention, or the audiences, they deserve. I'm hoping that this new collection might create awareness of cultural achievements that have remained underserved or are in danger of fading from cultural memory. Collecting essays for Publication as Autobiography, which is organized chronologically, has allowed me to consider how successive decades have transformed my writing and how recent developments are transforming the field of cinema and media studies.The subjects of the essays collected here include the betrayal of a canonical Hemingway short story, Erskine Caldwell's experiments with dialogue; and a range of films by Larry Gottheim, J.J. Murphy, Peter Watkins, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Robert Nelson, Taka Iimura, Shiho Kano, James Benning, Gustav Deutsch, Peter Hutton, and the team of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi-along with multi-media works by Patrick Clancy and Robert Huot. Also included: the catalogue essay for "Frames of Mind," a breakthrough 1986 Munson show of filmic and photographic works by Central New York artists (Hollis Frampton, Marion Faller, Bill Brand, Alan Berliner, John Knecht...); a survey of North American pilgrimage sites where generations of cine-devotees accessed independent cinema; explorations of books by Fluxus artist Emmett Williams and subversive-cinema curator/writer Amos Vogel, and of the remarkable one-season television series, My So-Called Life-plus an interview with media scholar, Max Tohline, focusing on the recent emergence of the video essay and the "supercut."Scott MacDonald

The goal of virtually all my writing has been to bring attention to cinematic (and, early on, literary) accomplishments that have not received the careful attention, or the audiences, they deserve. I'm hoping that this new collection might create awareness of cultural achievements that have remained underserved or are in danger of fading from cultural memory. Collecting essays for Publication as Autobiography, which is organized chronologically, has allowed me to consider how successive decades have transformed my writing and how recent developments are transforming the field of cinema and media studies.The subjects of the essays collected here include the betrayal of a canonical Hemingway short story, Erskine Caldwell's experiments with dialog; and a range of films by Larry Gottheim, J.J. Murphy, Peter Watkins, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Robert Nelson, Taka Iimura, Shiho Kano, James Benning, Gustav Deutsch, Peter Hutton, and the team of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi-along with multi-media works by Patrick Clancy and Robert Huot. Also included: the catalogue essay for "Frames of Mind," a breakthrough 1986 Munson show of filmic and photographic works by Central New York artists (Hollis Frampton, Marion Faller, Bill Brand, Alan Berliner, John Knecht...); a survey of North American pilgrimage sites where generations of cine-devotees accessed independent cinema; explorations of books by Fluxus artist Emmett Williams and subversive-cinema curator/writer Amos Vogel, and of the remarkable one-season television series, My So-Called Life-plus an interview with media scholar, Max Tohline, focusing on the recent emergence of the video essay and the "supercut."Scott MacDonald

Comprehending Cinema is a collection of in-depth interviews and panoramic essays that models a generalist approach to modern audiovisual media, prioritizing remarkable cinematic accomplishments that can get lost within our overwhelming modern mediascape. The 18 interviewees featured in this publication include Oscar-winning documentarians Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin; Dean Fleischer Camp, whose Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was an internet smash, then an Oscar nominee; canonical filmmakers Guy Maddin and Su Friedrich, still building on remarkable careers; renowned poet (and cineaste) John Ashbery; Irish independent Tadhg O'Sullivan who is entranced by the moon; indefatigable cine-historian, Paul Cronin; LA artist Jennifer West, who collaborated with 11,500 visitors on New York City's High Line to produce a new kind of City Symphony; Penny Lane, whose documentary films continually surprise; a collaborative filmmaking team who provide an immersive motion study of a crowd taking selfies with the Mona Lisa; cine-explorers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel; master of the cine-archive Bill Morrison; cine-scientist Erin Espelie; video-essayist Chloé Galibert-Laîné; and the Alloy Orchestra, who entertained silent-film audiences for three decades. Comprehending Cinema combines engaging conversations with accomplished filmmakers and essayistic explorations of recent contributions to modern media-making by filmmakers creating a tradition of "cine-nocturnes," and by filmmakers exploring archival representations of World War 1. The book offers a reading adventure dedicated to opening the door to exciting new kinds of film experience.

D. Scott MacDonald's father, W. Blair MacDonald had a keen interest in the changing landscape of Charlottetown, and documented a number of these changes with his slide camera. Instilled with a keen sense of history at an early age, Scott and his family have always treasured the work that their father did to preserve Charlottetown's history. So, over 60 years later, Scott has now retraced his father's steps to record how the city has changed over that time. Standing in the exact spot where his father stood, Scott has captured how the streets and buildings of Charlotttown have changed and remained the same. Scott has also researched the history of the buildings he protrays, both back to his father's time and much earlier. The result is a fascinating glimpse into why and how even a small city can change so much. Ten years later, in this new edition, Scott has gathered new photos and insightful information about this beautiful city in Prince Edward Island.

This book is intended for students, policy makers, lawyers and experts in the field of substance use and crashes. I describe in simple terms epidemiological issues important for understanding whether conclusions from studies are justifiable and discover numerous myths and truths about cannabis and driving.

The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama is a collection of in-depth, substantive interviews with moving-image artists working "avant-doc, that is, making films that explore the territory between documentary and experimental cinema. The book uses the early history of the museum habitat diorama of animal life, specifically the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, as a way of rethinking both early and modern cinema document-and especially those recent filmmakers and films that are devoted to providing viewers with panoramic documentations of places and events that otherwise they might never have opportunities to experience in person. This international collection of 27 interviews follows on MacDonald's earlier Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford, 2015). The interviews, organized panoramically within the collection, are dense with information and insight, and readable by specialists and non-specialists alike. In most instances, these are the most in-depth and expansive-sometimes the first-interviews with these filmmakers. Together, these interviews offer an engaging panorama of the recent history and geography of cinema devoted to documenting the world around us, as well as an in-depth look at the challenges and accomplishments of filmmakers willing to go anywhere on the planet (or on the internet!) to document what they believe we need to see. MacDonald's general introduction provides an overall context for the collection, which includes interviews with Ron Fricke, Gustav Deutsch, Laura Poitras, Fred Wiseman, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Bill Morrison, Brett Story, Abbas Kiarostami, Lois Patiño, Dominic Gagnon, Erin Espelie, Yance Ford, Janet Biggs, Carlos Adriano, Craig Johnson, Ben Russell, Betzy Bromberg, James Benning, Maxim Pozdorovkin, along with several veterans of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (and with the executive directors of the distributor, Documentary Educational Resources, which has served the field of independent documentary for nearly fifty years)-each interview is introduced with MacDonald's overview of the interviewee's life and work. The book includes filmographies and selected bibliographies for all the filmmakers

The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama is a collection of in-depth, substantive interviews with moving-image artists working "avant-doc, that is, making films that explore the territory between documentary and experimental cinema. The book uses the early history of the museum habitat diorama of animal life, specifically the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, as a way of rethinking both early and modern cinema document-and especially those recent filmmakers and films that are devoted to providing viewers with panoramic documentations of places and events that otherwise they might never have opportunities to experience in person. This international collection of 27 interviews follows on MacDonald's earlier Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford, 2015). The interviews, organized panoramically within the collection, are dense with information and insight, and readable by specialists and non-specialists alike. In most instances, these are the most in-depth and expansive-sometimes the first-interviews with these filmmakers. Together, these interviews offer an engaging panorama of the recent history and geography of cinema devoted to documenting the world around us, as well as an in-depth look at the challenges and accomplishments of filmmakers willing to go anywhere on the planet (or on the internet!) to document what they believe we need to see. MacDonald's general introduction provides an overall context for the collection, which includes interviews with Ron Fricke, Gustav Deutsch, Laura Poitras, Fred Wiseman, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Bill Morrison, Brett Story, Abbas Kiarostami, Lois Patiño, Dominic Gagnon, Erin Espelie, Yance Ford, Janet Biggs, Carlos Adriano, Craig Johnson, Ben Russell, Betzy Bromberg, James Benning, Maxim Pozdorovkin, along with several veterans of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (and with the executive directors of the distributor, Documentary Educational Resources, which has served the field of independent documentary for nearly fifty years)-each interview is introduced with MacDonald's overview of the interviewee's life and work. The book includes filmographies and selected bibliographies for all the filmmakers

This workbook is designed to provide a good grounding of the most commonly used analytic approaches in the health sciences, using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Topics covered include creation of a database, aggregation of data, data transformations, scale development, t-tests, cross tabulations, ANOVA, logistic regression, correlation and regression. Notes and slides are included in each Chapter that describe the essentials of each analytic approach. As well, data from the Canadian Community Health Survey are analyzed to illustrate the application of each approach. SPSS output is included, with the most important elements for a research paper highlighted and interpreted.

Megan Brandt was a shy, lonely teenager secretly in love with a boy in school who didn't even know she existed. It's a common scenario that many young girls face and the resolution is typically something simple, like a makeover. Megan's solution, however, was a little less prosaic than that. She chose to enter into a contract to have her wish fulfilled magically by a bitter and alcoholic 132yr. old Gypsy fortuneteller with a lot of unresolved anger issues. A makeover would've been so much easier. Years later, long after the wish had been made, the time had finally come for the people involved to seek out each other and understand the truth of what really happened on that one miraculous night.

Over the past fifty years, a unique hybrid genre of nonfiction cinema called the "avant-doc" has emerged in the world of independent film. Combining the unconventional techniques of avant-garde auteurs like Stan Brakhage with the verisimilitude of traditional documentaries, the avant-doc expands the way cinema captures and chronicles events. Drawing on firsthand interviews with nineteen of the form's chief practitioners and participants, Avant-Doc constructs an oral history that provides the first insider's perspective on the phenomenon.

Over the past fifty years, a unique hybrid genre of nonfiction cinema called the "avant-doc" has emerged in the world of independent film. Combining the unconventional techniques of avant-garde auteurs like Stan Brakhage with the verisimilitude of traditional documentaries, the avant-doc expands the way cinema captures and chronicles events. Drawing on firsthand interviews with nineteen of the form's chief practitioners and participants, Avant-Doc constructs an oral history that provides the first insider's perspective on the phenomenon.

"American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary" is a critical history of American filmmakers crucial to the development of ethnographic film and personal documentary. The Boston and Cambridge area is notable for nurturing these approaches to documentary film via institutions such as the MIT Film Section and the Film Study Center, the Carpenter Center and the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. Scott MacDonald uses pragmatism's focus on empirical experience as a basis for measuring the groundbreaking achievements of such influential filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Nina Davenport, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Michel Negroponte, John Gianvito, Alexander Olch, Amie Siegel, Ilisa Barbash, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. By exploring the cinematic, personal, and professional relationships between these accomplished filmmakers, MacDonald shows how a pioneering, engaged, and uniquely cosmopolitan approach to documentary developed over the past half century.

Over the past twenty-five years, Scott MacDonald's kaleidoscopic explorations of independent cinema have become the most important chronicle of avant-garde and experimental film in the United States. In this collection of thematically related personal essays and conversations with filmmakers, he takes us on a fascinating journey into many under-explored territories of cinema. MacDonald illuminates topics including race and avant-garde film, the political implications of the nature film, the inventive single shot films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, why men use pornography and what they are looking at when they do, poetry and the poetic in avant-garde film, the widespread failure of film studies academicians to honor those who keep film exhibition alive, and other topics. Several of the interviews - those with Korean filmmaker Gina Kim, French nature filmmakers Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou ("Microcosmos"), Canadian media artist Clive Holden, formalist/conceptualist David Gatten, and New York's Film Forum director Karen Cooper - are the first substantial conversations with these filmmakers available in English.

Bringing alive a remarkable moment in American cultural history, Scott MacDonald tells the colorful story of how a small, backyard organization in the San Francisco Bay Area emerged in the 1960s and evolved to become a major force in the development of independent cinema. Drawing from extensive conversations with men and women crucial to Canyon Cinema, from its newsletter Canyon Cinemanews, and from other key sources, MacDonald offers a lively chronicle of the life and times of this influential, idiosyncratic film exhibition and distribution collective. His book features many primary documents that are as engaging and relevant now as they were when originally published, including essays, poetry, experimental writing, and drawings.

Reveals a crucial dimension of the history of American independent cinema

A "Critical Cinema 5" is the fifth volume in Scott MacDonald's "Critical Cinema" series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English. In this new set of interviews, MacDonald engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the interactive community of filmmakers that has dedicated itself to producing forms of cinema that critique conventional media.