EzraWinton.com | Media arts and politics

It’s a busy month already: a book about to be launched in a few weeks (see last post), finishing up my Second PhD comprehensive exam (hopefully, fingers and discursive tentacles crossed), and the new POV Magazine is out with an article I wrote on documentary as a tool for education. The cover is pictured at the left so you can spot it on the newsstands - it comes out this week across Canada. If you can’t find it in the meat world, you can go to the virtual source and order a subscription online.It’s the first thematic issue and they chose education, a great theme for documentary of course. I argue in my piece that documentary cinema is an effective and much-needed tool for education - for students, teachers and the rest of us. Docs already provide an alternative, critical education and often accomplish much more than a textbook can. It’s for this reason and others I outline in the article that we need to seriously take up programs and policies of media literacy in Canada. The lens through which we view the world is increasingly audio-visual - it’s not time to fight it or engage in moral panics, but prepare our citizens with the abilities needed to critically engage with all the media saturating our daily lives. Check out my article if that mini-rant didn’t bore you….

Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canadais now on sale at Amazon.ca for the ridiculously low price of $22. The regular price for this 600-page book will be around $35, so if anyone is interested in what’s kept me locked in this tiny office for the last three years and wants to save a few bucks, I’d go to amazon.ca and pre-order this excellent book now.

This was a labour of love for sure, and it wasn’t exactly easy organizing 40 contributors and so much material into one coherent chunk of literature, but myself, Tom Waugh and Michael Brendan Baker did it! We start our book tour with the first launch in Toronto on February 25th, followed by stops across the country. For details on the tour, visit this page. Below is a description of the book, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Thanks for your support - my goal is for the publisher to need to print a second run within one year!!

Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada is a collection of thirty-eight essays and interviews written by the editors and other Canadian scholars, including a small selection from academics outside of the country. While in some published works there exists a tendency to discuss Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle exclusively as a romanticized revolutionary media experiment that empowered citizens, disseminated counter-narratives and impacted real change—and in other works a fair dose of postmodern skepticism around such naïve baby boomer idealism is found—the bigger project of complicating CFC/SN and interrogating its many (conflicting) facets is best reserved for a dedicated collection. The essays provide such a heterogeneous approach, and yield varied perspectives that together, house cultural theory, politics, historiography, film and media studies, and cultural policy discourse. The book is divided into four sections, “Historical Spaces,”  “Community Spaces,”  “Screen Spaces,” and “Discursive Spaces,” and book-ended by an introduction and conclusion by the editors. A “Resources” section complements the literature with details for further reading, research and viewing, along with a complete filmography of the CFC/SN collection, for the first time in one place.View the Table of Contents online

Whew!! It’s been a craaaaaaaazy month. Today I finally put the finishing touches on the first draft of my Second Comprehensive Exam Essay for my PhD and sent it off to my fearless supervisor, Ira. It ended up weighing in at 55 pages double spaced, a grand total of 13,000 words. Whether all the words add up to anything intellectually stimulating or not is another story, but I’ve definitely cornered the market on quantity this time around. The paper is on audiences, and much of it was a literature review where I was kind of staking out the terrain. I’m now convinced that I need to include a big section of my PhD thesis on audiences, so as an exercise in moving toward my end goal of finishing this PhD, I’d say it has worked quite well. Ira will get back to me in a week or so with feedback and I’m sincerely hoping he likes it and I can do some edits and submit to my committee. Once I’m done the Second Comps process, I’ll be focusing on my thesis - first the proposal, then the proposal defence, then the big one…

In the last month I also wrote a pretty big article for POV Magazine’s special education issue, which will hit newsstands at the end of January or beginning of February. Pick up a copy and check it out - I argue the case for documentary cinema as a form of critical, alternative education.

The book I spent the last three years working on with Tom Waugh and Mike Baker is finally coming off the presses next week as well. We should be getting our own hard cover copies and soft cover copies in about two weeks time. In the mean time you can actually pre-order the book, Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, from amazon.ca for super cheap ($21). It’s also for sale on the publisher’s site, McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Sunita Narain, on Democracy Now, is in one word, AMAZING. As the Copenhagen talks dismantle, Narain reminds us of what the leaders and elite of the wealthiest countries do not want to hear, face, address, or otherwise even acknowledge:

“The inconvenient truth is not that climate change is real, but that confronting climate change is about sharing that growth between nations and people. The rich must reduce so that the poor can grow.”
- Sunita Narain, Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi, India

Michael Brendan Baker, me, and the prolific and the inexhaustible Tom Waugh

Sickness over. Two weeks very ill. Hallucinated there was a doctor in our apartment (Svetla might be making that up, but I doubt it). Back in the saddle. Other macho epithets to follow. Now I’m sitting here ready to kick out my 40 page second comprehensive essay for my PhD (the last thing I need to do before I can begin actually working on my thesis) and I have a 2400 word article to write for POV magazine, and, nothin’. Got me a case of writer’s block. Hmmm. I guess I need a few days to adjust.

Svetla and I have been asked to go to Toronto as consultants in a day-long meeting with Canada Council for the Arts people and other media arts organizers, to help with a new plan the Council is developing around media arts dissemination. We’re going by train next Tuesday. I actually can’t wait - I love travelling by train, and it will be pretty great to have some input and simultaneously learn about the inner workings of Canada’s largest arts funding agency. We’re also getting ready for our trip to Amsterdam later this month. Going to the Amsterdam documentary festival (IDFA). I’ve got press accreditation with POV, but this means the aforementioned 2400 word article needs a-writing…

And Cinema Politica continues apace, the large all-consuming web it is. We have so many people suddenly contacting us from Scandinavia wanting to start up CP locals it’s quite odd…And the book I just spent two and a half years working on with Thomas Waugh and Michael Brendan Baker is now OFFICIALLY in the hands of the publisher!! Oh yeah!! We have book launches planned across the country beginning in Toronto on February 25th. Can’t wait to hold that hard work in my hands and just feel the weight of words (I’m including the editor’s picture submitted to the publisher just so everyone knows I’m still a giant dork, as if there was ever any doubt)…

OK, I was hoping this little update would cure my writer’s block - time to see if it loosened up the gears a little…

Me and my little brother, "L'il Ty"

Days. The days go by filled with hours filled with minutes all of it filled with moments. Moments of seizing the time, living for the present, then the future, disembodiment from the past, thinking about wasted or at least foggy years, hours, minutes, moments. As I trudge through the trenches of a body of work - of literature on audiences - I’ve had many moments to pause and reflect on why it is we do the things we do. Why do I forsake the ignorant, malicious rich and all their playtime and profit-making? Why have I built a shaky moral fortress around my own body, my habits, my beliefs if I could call them that? Why do I feel it is good to do good and reprehensible to do nothing? Why do I think my version of good is the “right” version? How have I come to these conclusions? This morality-laden sensibility?

Rumour has it that a friend of a friend recently sold a celebrity titty website and used the megabucks to buy a home. Smut peddling, but not even. It’s really lowest-common-denominator facilitating and I don’t denounce its existence, I just denounce a system that elevates the purveyors of such seemingly worthless flotsum into self-sustaining, comfortable beings who can enjoy the material comforts of life while others go without. (But why?) And all the while we can distract ourselves with a nipple slip from some cookie-cutter pubescent starlet, so entirely irrelevant to the rhythms of life, to the cruel oscillations between the haves and the have-nots. But how long can we sustain the distraction? And here I am at this end of the spectrum, the activism-is-the-only-way-out-of-this-mess position that I certainly defend with the will of the vanguard, that is the largely inaudible few who rail against the currents of the mainstream only to sit in the world’s bars staring at old diaries, looking for old faces in the shadows of a past mis-remembered, a past kept gilded by the secrets of a conscience at odds with any sense of a present, reflective moment.

And yet here I sit, writing for a mis-remembered me - a disjointed, arrogant, talented (but in what?), awkward world traveller who stares back at me from old photographs and seems to say, “Wish you were here, chump.” But what do those moments add up to? I have my books, my friends, my partner, my love, my family. I have the endless patter of humanity to contemplate without looking into a past of moments that beckon me backward toward sunrises and sunsets so full of illusion and glory they should be in a museum. If, like atoms, I’m made up of these moments, and they all conspire in my bodyspace to invisibly guide me to the next moment, to each next moment, then how can I arrange them to make some right out of who I am, what I do, and who I think I am and what I think I do? Is being and doing enough? If you are right? Am I right? Do I show it? Feel it?

The costumed little ones are parading past our dark doorwell through cool but pleasant Montreal streets awash in the velveteen cover of leaves that burst in flames at your feet this time of year. They walk with ambition, insecurity, pride, oppression, smiles and secrets. Their moments are barely recognizable to them and shan’t be, likely, for many years to come. How can my Halloween wish of a more just, fair and equitable world transmit into their miniature but enormously important worlds? How can I make each moment matter?

How will I?

The Cinema Politica Ad

Well I’ve been silent on this site long enough: we’re home! We’ve been back in Montreal for almost three weeks and it’s been three weeks of scrambling to catch up on our insane lives that we put on hold while in Europe. We’ve mostly been working on Cinema Politica, a big enough chore in itself.

For those who haven’t heard the great news, we got funding approval for a second year in a row from the Canada Council for the Arts. That’s not the end of the story though, the Council called us this week to let us know some of the feedback from the committee who oversaw our application. They say it’s extremely rare that when the committee is given the task of highlighting the “negatives” and “positives” of the project, that they do not put one single point down in the negative column. The committee had incredible things to say about Cinema Politica, not the least of which is that we should be a model for other groups applying and that the Council should continue to fund us annually.

This, as you can imagine, was the best news we’ve heard in a long, long time. It comes after years of hard work and it gives us that extra umph we need to keep CP alive and kicking! We’re at 50+ locals in Canada and at least 40 of them appear to be active. There’s also the handful in Europe and Asia and Australia. Svetla is working around the clock on running the network (along with a TA job and a union-drive job) and I’ve been doing my usual job of programming new titles, negotiating for rights, and getting our incorporation papers in order.

But we have funding for another year!! The trick now is to not let CP consume us at every level. We’ve both fell behind in our academic work, and tonight I went for the first time in a long time and studied. We run CP out of our home and we’ve realized that we need to get out to do school work. So I went to the National Library tonight and got three hours of reading in. I’ll need to pump that up to six, then eight per day if I’m going to finish my PhD in the next 20 months, but it was a good start.

That’s it for now, we’re swamped as usual. Svetla’s grandma is here for a month from Bulgaria and the woman is a reading machine!! She reads and read and reads!! Talk about inspiring for a PhD and Master’s student…

The following post was written ten or so days ago…we’re now in Istanbul and this is the first moment I’ve found to post it belive it or not!….

Maybe it’s the Rakia talking, but I’m laying here in this bed, Bulgarian crickets if there is such a thing, mixed with melody of rough hound voice in folds of a small coastal village, and I’m thinking about caring and having a higher purpose. I just watched REPORTER, where the idea is put forward that knowing is not enough, the West especially needs to CARE. We’ve been staying in this village for three days in a nice B&B of a friend of a friend of Svetla’s. The owner has a penchant for Dutch furniture and design. The house is actually built from wood, not stone or brick as is customary in these parts. But a large dog has made herself known in the back garden daily and nightly with barks of what I soon discerned to be longing. A large beast needs to move. So, after being supplied with some leather gloves and a rusty chain, I took the thing out for a walk, or rather it took me for a jog.

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One of the many beautiful streets of Lisbon

So a recapping of our time in Portugal is in order. We left Paris on June 20 and landed in Lisbon where we stayed for two nights before taking a train to the breathtaking Algarve in Southern Portugal, where we spent a week. Lisbon was as charming as I remembered it: a small city on the sandy banks of the Tejo river, built up of layers of history that one can literally see in the form of an open archaeological excavation on display in one of the city’s oldest churches, Sé Catedral de Lisboa, where pre-Christ Phoenician homes were intermingled with layers of Roman shops, canals and steps. Svetla had left Montreal a little sick, and by Lisbon the bug had become a night-time cough that kept both of us awake and made us zombie-like during the daytime. But we had a nice, affordable hotel room right in the heart of downtown Rossio square, and next to the city’s most famous and oldest cable car, Elevador de Santa Justa, that goes up and down a steep incline.

The downtown has some sketchy parts, but it’s mostly pick-pockets and drug sellers, nothing too major. That first evening we wandered around and plunked down on wobbly chairs atop uneven stones at one of hundreds of small traditional street restaurants. I had been having one of my hunger fits so the spot was chosen purely out of utility and not intuition. Sitting there eating our fish dinners (we ate a lot of sardines in Portugal since June was the Month of the Sardine) and sipping on local wine, a steady stream of men whispering “hashish, coke, weed” streamed by.

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Poster in Sofia promoting Madonna's "Sticky and Sweet" Tour

It’s hot. The heat makes you sticky; turns you into a walking fly paper strip. Dirt sticks to you, bed sheets, clothing. Chairs stick to you when you get up to leave cafés. Other people stick to you, and not always the ones you’d even like sticking to you. The keys on this lap top are sticky. The stickiness seems to spread to everything. A viral tactile sensation that even this super duper high powered fan (announcing as it does on it’s box “Your Perfect Choice!”) aimed directly at me cannot combat. When the heat hits, Sofia is one sticky place. Add to this our residence on the sixth floor in an A-shaped attic appartment, and you will begin to appreciate my new obsession with things that go stick in the night.

In the evenings, after days wandering around doing this and that, then eating dinner with friends or at Svetla’s parents, we return to this little space of ours. After climbing the stone stairs all the way up, we arrive at a tiny door and undo the formidable locks. We both hesitate before entering, waiting for that pent up but now released, waft of hot air that feels like it’s been pushed out of a giant hot air balloon by a giant’s fist. Once inside we alight to our stations: Svetla darts to the bedroom and opens that room’s skylight, I struggle through the invisible inferno and grapple for the number “3” switch on the floor fan, then pop open the skylight in the common room, where I sit now. The two skylights opening at these times must have the effect, from the outside, of gaskets releasing high-pressure heat plumes from the red-tiled slopes of this apartment building’s roof top.

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