$15 ($12 for Belcourt members) or free with purchase of a Doc Spotlight Ticket 5-Pack

Presented in conjunction with the Belcourt’s Doc Spotlight series, this seminar is for anyone interested in the documentary form. Documentary filmmaker and Vanderbilt cinema and media arts assistant professor Carmine Grimaldi will explore the trajectory of documentary film from the birth of cinema to contemporary trends. He’ll discuss documentary styles and practices and explore multiple ways of looking at documentary films, including some of the titles featured in the Doc Spotlight series. The seminar will challenge viewers to see documentaries in new ways, and send participants home with a list of films for recommended viewing.

About the speaker
Carmine Grimaldi is a filmmaker and a historian of media, technology and science. In both his creative and academic work, he is particularly interested in the way that aesthetic experience inflects everyday life.

His films often inhabit the unstable boundary between fiction and non-fiction, and he usually develops them through creative collaboration with the subjects. Over the years, he has made films about a disgruntled foreclosure inspector, a dwindling church in the Southwest, a traveling carnival based in rural Kentucky, and the making of a melodrama about the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. His films have screened at venues that include True/False, Visions du Reel, the Museum of the Moving Image, Maryland Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Montreal International Film Festival (RIDM), Chicago International Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, and Dokufest, where he received the prize for best short film. In 2017, he was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine, and he has been a fellow at the Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard’s Film Study Center and Department of the History of Science, and the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Center for the Humanities.

In addition to his filmmaking, Grimaldi is currently working on a book project that explores the early history of videotape. His manuscript focuses on the era before video became a mainstay in the world of art and documentary — when various researchers believed it was a radical social technology that could transform the structure of institutions such as classrooms and psychiatric wards. His article on the subject, “Televising Psyche: Feedback, Style, and the Seductiveness of Video,” was published in Representations. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Intercept, The Atlantic, MUBI Notebook and Filmmaker Magazine.