Past Fellow Lecture Videos

Two Steps Back: Uprooting the Documentary
Real Video

From the darkly comic to the self-reflexive, from the experimental to the exposition of social injustice, the documentary film has taken a multi-dimensional peek inward. Since the introduction of "home movies," and the increasing financial ease of video production, the autobiographical camera HAS gained a significant identity as witness to a personal trajectory of ethnography, psychology, politics, or faith. With a filmmaker who has turned her own camera on to the Hasidic community of her youth, take a look at clips from filmmakers Ross McElwee, Alan Berliner, and Agnes Varda to explore the power of merging the chronicling of one's own roots and identity with the urgency of a universal theme.

PEARL GLUCK is a professional filmmaker and scholar of Jewish ethnography; she teaches Yiddish language and culture at Rutgers University. During her leave in the spring semester of 2007, she is spending three weeks at the Institute (February 8-28) researching video materials from the Archive of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories Project (AHEYM)--an archive of nearly 500 hours of videotaped interviews with Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe and professionally videotaped footage of contemporary Jewish life there--as well as consulting with faculty in Jewish Studies, History, Central Eurasian Studies, and Communication and Culture. In addition, she will visit several classes and participate in film screenings and in discussions of first-person narratives and oral history on the Bloomington, IUSB and IUSE campuses. For more information please contact the Institute (812-855-3658) or her primary sponsor, Jeffrey Veidlinger (jveidlin@indiana.edu), History and Jewish Studies, IUB. More information about Pearl and her work is also available at www.palinkapictures.com.