EzraWinton.com | Media arts and politics

A portrait of me done by Amanda McCuaig for ArtThreat.net (we all got them....really) - thanks for making me look ten years younger!!

As March comes to a rainy end, I can finally take a moment to catch my breath. It’s been busier than usual around here, both for Svetla and myself. The book tour has been a real time-sucker, but it’s paid off: we’ve had great launches in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and just a few days ago in Vancouver where over 100 turned up. There’s one left, in Halifax, and Svetla and I will travel with co-editor Tom Waugh on April 15th by train for that one (21 hours - it’s going to be sooooo relaxing). We’re going to turn that trip into a bit of a getaway and stay on the east coast for at least a week. Svetla’s never been to Atlantic Canada, and we need a break as well as a change of scenery (not to mention some of that famous East Coast hospitality).

This past Friday marked the finale of a couple of other major jobs: Cinema Politica passed a referendum question at Concordia to increase our fee levy from two cents per credit per student to seven. This was quite a feat considering all the other fee levy questions failed, and despite still being by far the smallest fee levy on campus we remain subject to unfair attacks from bloggers like Steve Faguy. At any rate, provided it goes through Concordia’s Board of Governors smoothly, we’ve just ensured CP Concordia will be sustainable long after Svetla and I have finally left the school (the mother hens need to leave the nest eventually!). This was incredibly important to us - to make sure the original Cinema Politica chapter has a decent enough budget to hire a coordinator and keep going for as long as students want to show up to see documentaries (last semester we had almost 7,000 come through the doors, so apparently they still do).

The other good news on Friday was that I successfully passed my Second Comprehensive PhD Exam. For the last year I researched and wrote a huge essay on audience theory and research. Because it was largely a literature review, I admittedly struggled with it. On Friday, after several drafts and revisions, I successfully defended the paper to my committee. What is so relieving about this moment is that now I am in the final stretch of my PhD: for the next 12-18 months (I know what you’re thinking: how is that a final stretch?) I will only work on my thesis. The process starts with me writing then defending a 20-25 page thesis proposal, which I’ve already begun researching.

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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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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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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…

Patrick Lejetnyi interviewed us a while back and the fruits of his labour are published in this week’s Montreal Mirror. Rachel Granofsky also took a great photo of us (to the left) where we look some dorky art couple (OK I look dorky), but nevertheless, it’s a great photo. All this promo is to help kick off our 5th anniversary and 10th edition of Cinema Politica Concordia. Let’s hope it pays off!

Check out the article:

Celluloid Politics: Cinema Politica celebrates five years of free, weekly and controversial screenings.

And a couple of other articles on CP:

From Grassroots to Global Networks: Cinema Politica & the Cultural Reprise of Political Documentary, at artthreat.net.

On Screen Activism, at Concordia University Magazine.