From IDS reports
The Media School at IU has established a new center supporting the production and research of documentary film.
The Center for Documentary Research and Practice will begin operations in September. It will serve as a multidisciplinary unit bringing together scholars and artists from across the University who will work on an array of nonfiction media projects, according to an IU press release.
The center will work closely with the Black Film Center/Archive, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction and the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive for several different events.
Many of its events will take place at the IU Cinema.
IU has a long and distinguished history in film studies, pioneering the development of film courses for the humanities in the 1960s and creating one of the first film studies programs in 1973, according to the Media School website.
“Documentary film is enjoying a resurgence as its availability across media platforms brings it to new audiences,” James Shanahan, dean of the Media School, said in the release. “This center will put our school at the forefront of the new movement, both in terms of understanding documentary film and encouraging its production.”
The release said the center’s impact will be felt right away. In the coming academic year, it will host a series of five inaugural lectures and team with IU Cinema to bring internationally-acclaimed documentary filmmakers to campus.
The center has already received a prestigious Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant vauled at $175,000 to support the yearlong seminar.
The center is designed to support faculty and graduate students who make documentaries as part of their research agendas and to serve as a research hub for those doing historical, theoretical and critical research on nonfiction film and video, according to the release.
It will offer technological and creative support for projects and serve as a forum for faculty and graduate students to present completed and in-process work.
The center will capitalize on the University’s nonfiction film collections and institutions by partnering with several well-established entities at IU, according to the release.
Joshua Malitsky, an associate professor in the Media School, will direct the new center.
He teaches courses on contemporary and historical issues in documentary, ethnographic film, 1920s Soviet cinema and art, media theory, film and propaganda, Marxism and cinema and sports media, according to the Media School website.
“Documentary has become one of the dominant forms of political, artistic, personal and increasingly, academic speech,” Malitsky said in the release. “It informs so much of how we speak in and through new media culture.”
Malitsky said the center will provide a forum for collaboration and research about the history and contemporary uses of ?documentary.
At the same time, it will offer space for faculty and graduate students to experiment with new forms of multimedia scholarly publications, such as incorporating documentary media into digital dissertations, online journal publications, academic forums and digital books.
“We aim to be more intellectually and disciplinarily expansive than any other institute related to documentary in the U.S.,” Malitsky said.
Bailey Moser
