Showing 3971 results

SIGHT/SEEING explores our relationship with notions of wilderness in a globalised era. Part dystopic travelogue and part wildlife documentary, the piece explores our relationship the natural environment, based on received notions handed down by the mass media. Tourism has created a process of commoditization of the natural world, typified by the modern safari, based upon experience as spectacle, consumed through the lens of the domestic camcorder. The video explores a phenomenon where spectacle undermines experience, and seeing becomes secondary to recording. Increasingly absurd photographic defects and the behind-the-lens presence of the tourist move us towards a position where the romantic tourist gaze is made concrete in the recorded image; a world seen through an experiential filter that cannot be removed.

Sift is an intimate glimpse into the thoughts of fifteen young Arab women as they sort through the shifting and often contradictory expectations accompanying the changes in the rapidly developing Arabian Gulf city of Doha, Qatar. As the first generation of graduates of Education City, a 2,500-acre campus in Doha which hosts branch campuses of some of the world\\\\'s leading universities, as well as many other educational and research institutions, the young women represent part of the very change they now contend with. The film juxtaposes their voices as they describe their experiences and reflections upon entering the professional environment with still and moving images of the desert, sea, and emerging urbanity of Doha. The relationship of sound to image establishes a gestalt of dualities that is characteristic of the current environmental, social, and economic transformation: modern - traditional, western - eastern; written - oral. Extensive video and audio editing captures Qatar's rapid development process - which removes the past and inserts the future on a daily basis – from a point of view somewhere between the viewer and subject. While audio interviews transition between individual, harmonious expressions and multiple, dissonant voices, video footage shows the new and remarkable alongside the old and taken-for-granted, revealing a time which is either past or future, but not present.

The video departs from the idea of symbolizing the material, physical and emotional exploitation in which colonization was based and embedded by the robbery of the Alger’s port by The French Colonial troupes. Taking into an account the personal and subjective experience of the city of Algiers, a double narration is built by the artist and an Algerian collaborator (Ahmed Chaabi) weaving between both a portrait of personal and historical feelings of the place. A poem of love about domination and mistrust, about everything we want to know in depth but that we know impossible to understand in its entirety, what the Kasbah had represented yesterday and what it is today, its myths and its realities, and an uncertain future that we all share under the threat of globalization. More than any other district of Algiers, the Kasbah represents the “otherness”. Its winding streets are a labyrinth to the unknown where you want to get lost and where, at the same time, you are afraid of being lost. An unknown world, even for the Algerians, where the real plays to hide.

Phil, new in his high school, follows his father's suggestion and observes the most popular students to determine what makes them popular. By offering to help others he becomes popular himself and sheds his shyness. (The Prelinger Archives are a source of educational material, mainly ordered by theme, giving a vision of the dark side, the underbelly, perhaps naive of the American dream and the America that is often hidden behind the media curtain.)