Via Cheryl Ball’s post on Tech-Rhet comes this project, a remake of Man With a Movie Camera. Basically, the project asks for folks to re-shoot scenes from this movie, which is a 1929 experimental/documentary film I had never heard of before (which perhaps proves the fact that I am not really a film scholar). Conveniently, the original is available at the project site in the form of a google video.
I’m not sure if there’s any way I could use this in my teaching, and I’m not completely sure I should even if I could. This seems to me to fall into that fuzzy space of not exactly writing, even though writing includes a lot of different things. I could go on and on about this, and I did write an article about these questions in 2004. I’m not sure I still agree with the arguments I made back then, but at the same time, this probably isn’t something that would fit well in anything I teach.
On the other hand, this might be a fun thing to try on my own. I’ve got my FlipVideo camera (not to mention access to the English department’s super-nice camera), and it might make for a fun little side-project during sabbatical lite. Of course, I’m getting more and more of these side projects….