COMD TALKS featuring Gerda Cammaer

The Department of Communication and Design is pleased to invite Bilkent students, faculty, and friends to a COMD evening talk session with filmmaker and professor at Ryerson University Gerda Cammaer on “The Creative Potential of Microcinema and Mobile Filmmaking”.

ABSTRACT:
Microhistory and Microcinema go hand-in-hand. Avoiding the canon, the big names, and the big works in Cinema, Gerda Cammaer’s work centers around forgotten and overlooked histories in film, as well as recent developments in smartphone filmmaking and microcinema. Microcinema as a “film genre” refers to various types of small independent do-it-yourself projects shot on low budget equipment. Since this is the era of the smartphone, mobile filmmaking practices have become the dominant production mode in microcinema (where earlier handycam videos or Super-8 films were the dominant modes).  Microcinema is a flexible term that covers various film genres such as animated shorts, video art, mobilementaries and iPhonography. The Key is that new technology (at the time of the creation of the work) inspired the filmmakers to do something different. During her presentation, she will give an overview of the creative potential of smartphone filmmaking, focussing on how mobile devices challenge the expectations and definitions of the documentary film, and how they contribute to the “demythologizing” of the filmmaking process in general. This will be illustrated with examples of her own work, including three collaborative projects that center around travel, migration, and mobility.

BIO:
Gerda Cammaer is a filmmaker, scholar and curator. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto (Canada). Her research interests include personal essay films, archival films, home movies, travel films and ecocinema, particularly documenting nature, landscape and climate change. Her own work entails found-footage films, collage works, abstract pieces and poetic documentaries. Her films have been shown in galleries and at festivals in Canada and abroad. She is the co-founder and director of the Moving_Image_Arts International Short film festival in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is also the co-editor of Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (McGill University Press, 2014) and of Critical Distance in Documentary Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her creative work is available on Vimeo and on her website: wwww.gerdacammaer.com

The talk will be in English.

Date: 27 November 2020, Friday   
Time: 18:30 – 19:30 / Toronto 11:30
Venue: Live from FFB08 via Zoom
Zoom Space FADA Meeting Room