Shelby Shaw
SHELBY SHAW is a multidisciplinary writer based in New York, where she co-edits the biannual art and literary journal Storyfile. She is the program coordinator for Projections, the New York Film Festival’s section devoted to artists’ films and experimental moving images, and works with the IFC Center in Manhattan.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of New York
by Shelby ShawFEB 2018 | Film
Pulled 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: On Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives
by Shelby ShawOCT 2018 | Film
In 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.
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