"Rethinking Nonfiction: Educational Film and the Documentary Canon"

A lecture by Prof. Devin Orgeron, NCSU

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The Cinema Studies Series at Duke University, in collaboration with AMI Showcase and the Triangle Film Salon, presents its inaugural event with a lecture by Dr. Devin Orgeron. The excision of the educational film (films that teach) from the larger nonfiction conversation is a product of our evolving assumptions about documentary's capacity for artfulness. Artless, direct, unmotivated, and objective, films made for the classroom, for example, seem to exist outside of our humanistic talking points.

Looking closely at a selection of classroom films focused on the natural world, this presentation aims to demonstrate the meta-pedagogical intentionality of golden era educational films in a manner that has implications for our understanding of educational media more generally.

--Q&A to follow!

Devin Orgeron is Associate Professor of Film Studies at NCSU. He researches and writes about cinema and mechanical mobility; cinematic masculinity; contemporary American cinema; film authorship; realism; advertising and commercial images; educational films; and postmodernity. He also collects, shows, and writes about home movies from the 1940s-1960s.

Dr. Orgeron is the author of Road Movies: From Muybridge and Melies to Lynch and Kiarostami (2007). His articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, The Moving Image, The Journal of Film and Video, CineAction, College Literature, Post Script, and Film Quarterly. He is the co-editor of Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, (Oxford University Press, 2012). Dr. Orgeron also co-edits The Moving Image (University of Minnesota Press), the Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists.

Cost: Free and open to the public.

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), the Program in Literature, and the Center for Documentary Studies.