Shelby Shaw
The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of New York
By Shelby ShawPulled from an estimated 110 archived sources of home movies, background process plates, and ephemeral novelty films, Lost Landscapes of New York is the latest in film historian and archivist Rick Prelinger’s ongoing series of city symphonies of urban life during the 20th century.
Surveillance as the Shooting Script of Documentary
By Shelby ShawIn Watching the Detectives, Canadian filmmaker and programmer Chris Kennedy recounts the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing as it played out on public forum websites such as reddit and 4chan. At just thirty-six minutes in length, the silent 16mm film is a carefully assembled narrative of the pedestrian online attempts to collectively determine who was responsible, while news outlets were simultaneously updating the information they received from the FBI and continuously revising their theories regarding the identity of the culprit. Combining archival footage of the Marathon, and the bombing, with anonymously posted comments and photographs from the Internet, Kennedy’s film is a haunting rumination on digital anonymity in a world of public surveillance, online socializing, and above all, the assumed authority of asserting one’s suspicions and beliefs.
In Conversation
ERICKA BECKMAN with Shelby Shaw
By Shelby ShawAn icon of weaving game theory strategies into the subconscious systems of everyday life, multidisciplinary filmmaker Ericka Beckman recently had two early films screened as restored premieres at Projections at the New York Film Festival: You the Better (1983) and Cinderella (1986).
Dorothy Iannone: A Cookbook
By Shelby ShawWhile these popular kitchen aids were written by successful feminine personas selling their versions of commercial domesticity, artist Dorothy Iannone’s A Cookbook, published the same year, is stuffed with both an international catalogue of recipes and a generous helping of Iannone’s personal prerogatives.
