EzraWinton.com | Media arts and politics

From left to right: Svetla Turnin, Deirdre Boyle, Dorothy Todd Hénaut, George Stoney, Tom Waugh, Ezra

So, February is thankfully gone. This winter has been a slow, protracted grey gloom that is only now lifting with the first week of March. We had far less snow than usual (making our ski passes not worth the money we spent on them) and dark dark days. As the clouds lift and the sun begins to thaw us, I’m preparing for the next stage in my triad of work: PhD, CP, CFC/SN.

In PhD news, I’m waiting to hear back from my committee on my Second Comprehensive Exam, which was really an essay the student has to write to show an expertise in one particular area of the field of study. I’m not surprised it’s taking them a bit of time given I handed in a real monster of a paper - it is double the length it should be, at 69 pages. I wrote a literature review of scholarship on audiences and discovered it was a much more difficult task than I had anticipated: there is a insane amount of literature out there and I am by nature not a very organized person. I hope the committee approves the essay, which will mean I will defend it at the end of March, and following a successful defense, I will then move on to my PhD Thesis Proposal (writing it, then also defending it). Then the epic part will happen: the writing of a 200 page tight, seamless thesis.

In CP (Cinema Politica) news, things are as frenetic and busy as ever. Svetla and I are desperately trying to delegate work we do to others, and some amazing people have recently come forward to help us, which is so welcomed I don’t have words to even describe it. We have a new intern who is busy writing funding applications in French for Quebec arts funding agencies. We have undergraduate students at Concordia running a fee levy increase campaign. We have Svetla’s sister, Yoana, working her way through a huge list of tasks. And we have an office (that we haven’t had time to move into yet). And lastly, today we are being presented an award for Concordia Sustainable Champion at Concordia at 5 PM - Woohoo!!

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Thanks to Sarah Spring at Loaded Pictures, Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada now has its very own trailer!! The three minute video features clips and music from some classic Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle works. Feel free to cut and paste this anywhere online and help spread the word about the book and the Challenge for Change project. Look for the book online at Amazon.ca.

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