PLAY
THE 62TH ROBERT FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR
JUNE 18 – 24, 2016, COLGATE UNIVERSITY, HAMILTON, NY
PROGRAMMER: DAVID PENDLETON
Cinema at play is a cinema that breathes—a cinema open to the shifting rhythms of the world. Play implies looseness, experimentation, chance, a suspension of judgment in favor of a child's open-ended curiosity. Play allows cinema to be a vital, living thing, one that faces the world with innocence, hoping to experience rather than persuade.If spectacle demands a taut cinema, with no time for digression, the 2016 Flaherty Seminar is dedicated to a cinema of wandering, of curiosity and wonder. The filmmakers featured use the camera to encounter the world in all of its unpredictable glory and horror. The forms taken by these encounters are equally unexpected in their poetic depth and political range: visual sonnets, alternative histories, and diary films. As these films show, cinema at play is not aimless or fanciful but open—the kind of open-endedness that exists in any system with room for variation, like an image whose meaning is not fixed, a country caught between colonial past and capitalist present, or simply an individual who feels the tug of history.
2016 Seminar Programmer - David Pendleton
As the Programmer of the Harvard Film Archive, David Pendleton curates many of (and oversees all of) the screenings that make up the Archive’s ongoing cinematheque programming for the public. He has organized wide-ranging retrospectives of such varied filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, John Akomfrah and Warren Sonbert and has taught courses on 20th century film history and on the representation of masculinity in contemporary cinema. Since receiving a Ph.D in critical studies at UCLA’s School of Film and Television (with a dissertation on exoticism and homoeroticism in the films of Murnau, Eisenstein and Pasolini), he has published interviews, reviews and scholarly articles on topics including documentary, contemporary cinema, and film theory.