{"id":2,"date":"2011-11-23T16:29:28","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T16:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2013-03-01T14:53:23","modified_gmt":"2013-03-01T14:53:23","slug":"sample-page","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=2","title":{"rendered":"Short Pieces"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>This page of my website is devoted to the publication of presentations and various writings that might not otherwise find their way into the public sphere.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Editor Max Tholl at The European, which bills itself as &#8220;the debate magazine,&#8221; asked me to write something about the recent spat of political\/historical movies coming out of Hollywood. I don&#8217;t go to the local cineplex very often these days, so it gave me a reason to go see <em>Argo<\/em> and <em>Zero Dark Thirty<\/em>. There is a German translation somewhere, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theeuropean-magazine.com\/1005-musser-charles\/1007-the-historical-accuracy-of-zero-dark-thirty\">here is the link to the English language version<\/a>. I like the way they give it a few different titles so one can choose (none of them were my original title but otherwise the piece is pretty much intact).\u00a0 It was a interesting exercise and a way to plug a few of my favorite documentaries!<\/p>\n<p>I have been involved with <a href=\"http:\/\/actionspeaksradio.org\/\">Action Speaks Radio<\/a> now for several years.\u00a0 It&#8217;s based in Providence, Rhode Island, and I am on its advisory board (aka Board of Scholars).\u00a0 I&#8217;ve been on two of its radio programs&#8211;one on Oscar Micheaux&#8217;s <em>Within Our Gates<\/em> (1920) and another on Charlie Chaplin&#8217;s <em>Modern Times<\/em> (1936). Let me confess that <em>Modern Times<\/em> had not been one of my favorite Chaplin films.\u00a0 Nevertheless, when I started looking at it closely and investigating its historical context, I changed my opinion and became an enthusiastic fan.\u00a0 As part of my responsibilities,\u00a0 I wrote an essay on the film for the Action Speaks website.\u00a0 It can be found <a href=\"http:\/\/http:\/\/actionspeaksradio.org\/chaplin-by-charles-musser-2012\/#.USzFsOiAHbl\">here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>At the annual 2012 conference of the Society for Cinema Studies, I was on a panel about about Audio-Visual scholarship, organized by Brigitta Wagner (Indiana University).\u00a0 My presentation is entitled:\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=723\">&#8220;Writing, Filmmaking, Scholarship: Working with Errol Morris<\/a>.&#8221; I wrote it in the wake of a confrontation within Yale&#8217;s Film Studies Program about the validity of graduate students taking my year-long course Documentary Film Workshop. While I obviously believe in documentary as a mode of filmmaking, I also think it can be a valid form of audio-visual scholarship that can complement the written mode in valuable ways.\u00a0\u00a0 As I try to suggest, filmmaking has always been a critical component of my scholarly pursuits.<\/p>\n<p>Yale&#8217;s Film Studies Program has just gone through an external review\u2013\u2013the first such review in the program&#8217;s 25+ year history.\u00a0 In preparation for this occasion, we authored a self-study.\u00a0 John MacKay did most of the heavy lifting, and my principal contribution was to write a history of media production at Yale.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t see this history as particularly controversial or confidential, so I am publishing it here as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=349\"><em>&#8220;On the Creative Side: A History of Film and Media Production Courses at Yale.&#8221;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the festival\/conference <em>Remnants of Utopia: European Film, ca. 1975, <\/em>which was held at Yale University on December 2-3, 2011, I had the pleasant task of introducing two films by Agnes Varda<strong><em>: <\/em><\/strong><a title=\"Varda, Daguerr\u00e9otypes (1975), and Women Respond (1975)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=141\" target=\"_blank\"><em><em>Daguerr\u00e9otypes <\/em>(1975),<\/em> and <em><em>R\u00e9sponses de femmes<\/em> (1975)<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I assembled a small panel of Yale faculty and graduate students to discuss \u201cPublic Humanities, Documentary Filmmaking and the Academe&#8221; on November 28th, 2011.\u00a0 It was followed by the screening of a new cut of my documentary<em>\u00a0 Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch<\/em>, primarily for my students in Documentary Film Workshop.\u00a0 <a title=\"November 28, 2011  Panel Discussion: \u201cPublic Humanities, Documentary FIlmmaking and the Academe\u201d\" href=\"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=246\">Here are my remarks and a list of the panelists<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This page of my website is devoted to the publication of presentations and various writings that might not otherwise find their way into the public sphere.\u00a0 Editor Max Tholl at The European, which bills itself as &#8220;the debate magazine,&#8221; asked me to write something about the recent spat of political\/historical movies coming out of Hollywood. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}