Framing Media #7 - Anne Kaun on Prison Media Work

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Today's episode features Anne Kaun, as Associate Professors at Södertörn University in the Department of Culture and Education, co-editor of Making Time for Digital Lives, and the author of Crisis and Critique: A Brief History of Media Participation in Times of Crisis. We discuss her co-authored article with Fredrik Stiernstedt entitled “Prison Media Work: From Manual Labor to the Work of Being Tracked,” from Media, Culture & Society. We discuss both the historical and global trends in the relationship between prison work and media infrastructures. Anne examines both the traditions of prison labor in building media as part of rehabilitation and professionalization, but also how it has evolved under neoliberal transformations to no longer reflect these goals. Most pointedly, she takes us through the new role of work for prisoners: acting as subjects for data analysis by large private companies looking to strengthen their algorithmic computation. Prisoners no longer do media work themselves as much as are a subject of being worked upon by media. In bringing light to this history, Kaun brings light to the complex network we live in that in many ways is shaped by prisons and the incarcerated without our knowledge.

Framing Media #2: Katie Bird on the Labor and Art of Steadicam Operators

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Today's episode features Katie Bird, an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, who researches technology and craft histories in Hollywood film production. We discuss her video essay, "Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam, Labor, and Technology (1974-1985),” published in the Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies. Bird emphasizes the operator's role in this unique technology's early history in both major films like The Shining and Halloween, as well as demo reels, industrial works, and more. She emphasizes how the choices of the operators—both physically and affectively, often referring to their own work closer to dancing—ultimately shaped the images we saw and how we respond to them. Bird challenges viewers to see the craft as labor beyond just invisibility, appreciating the art of production at every step. 

Episode #86 - Gordon Quinn (One Way Or Another)

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"You're not just like your subjects. You're a filmmaker. You need to acknowledge who you are."

If cinema can achieve more than simply be art but a form of action, how does one negotiate the role that the camera plays in reality. Celebrating its 50th Year, Kartemquin Films has used cinema as a tool for addressing social, political, and economic inequality through the documentary from, spearheaded by its co-founder Gordon Quinn. In this wide ranging interview, Gordon reflects on the early days of the collective—from films about retirement homes and the general state of happiness to more direct political engagement through filming labor strikes. He talks with Peter about negotiating the role of the subject, the role of his own identity in filming the stories of others, the importance of character, and the fickle nature between making a statement and making a dollar. Finally, the two discuss a film that shows all of the work in action: Sara Gomez's landmark documentary One Way Or Another, which stages fabricated drama in the midst of real turmoil in 1970s Cuba to a powerful effect.

0:00-3:29 Opening

4:19-10:04 Establishing Shots — Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women

10:49-1:20:13 Deep Focus — Gordon Quinn

1:20:56-51:51 Sponsorship Section

1:24:33-1:42:01 Double Exposure — One Way or Another (Sara Gomez)

1:42:05-1:43:44 Close