[-empyre-] COVID-19 Movement II: Adagio

Tue Apr 28 15:23:57 AEST 2020

COVID-19 MOVEMENT II: ADAGIO

We canceled the proposed VT salons in mid February.

I am the codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, now in its 23rd year.  I love this job.  Slowness marks my theoretical and historical scholarly work.  Festivals work in the opposite tempo:  fast, changing, adapting, responding, intervening, infiltrating, convening.  While as a scholar I write alone, as a programmer I collaborate on so many levels and with so many people, I can't even list them.  So my appointment at IC condenses a contradiction between slow and internalized entwined with fast and externalized. Control on one hand, surfing the rapids on the other.

 I watched our programming slowly disintegrate, like water slapping against sand on a beach.https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/

 They were first cancellations of what would be a cascade of disappointments. Our festival theme this year is INFILTRATIONS.  Apt? Or prescient?  Or eerie? Or creepy?  It all happened slowly, like the second movement of a symphony where after the rollicking opening movement, the pace abruptly drops down, the key changes, a new mood juts against the first movement.

Tom Shevory, the other codirector of Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (besides me), had collaborated with VR artist and activist Liz Miller from Montreal for over a year. Matt Holtmeier from Eastern Tennessee State University was also on the team.  He had bought a headset.  He and Liz were figuring out various VR projects.  He had a spot for a salon.  The festival would run March 23-29, with VR on campus and also downtown at our local art cinema, Cinemapolis, a key festival partner.

For a year, we had picked apart the public health issues of VR headsets at festivals. We learned about a problem at Sundance, where 20 people from one lab all contracted conjunctivitis. We analyzed how MASS MOCA cleaned their headset.  When attending the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal in Fall 2019, I went to two VR exhibitions, taking notes on the disinfecting process:  alcohol wiping of all surfaces, the attendant wearing surgical gloves, rules that headsets could not be shared.

In January, we read about Wuhan.  Then, in Febuary, Seattle.  Finally, a viral spread noone had ever seen before.  As an environmental film festival, we devour news about land, soil, health, war, migrancy, disease.

Tom and I chatted quickly on the phone. We decided with the outbreak, there was no way we could keep the headsets safe. We canceled the VR salon.  I informed the interns.  No VR. Not safe.

Then, we talked about how to maintain public health in a movie theater and then in a concert hall.  An administrator told us to buy up gallons and gallons of hand sanitizer and have it all placed prominently in Cinemapolis, the movie theater.  In late February, we could not find any.  I was bringing Lysol wipes to my classrooms to clean keyboards and desk surfaces.

We decided on a new protocol:  noone on our staff or interns would shake anyone's hands at the festival.

A VP who I happen to like took me out to dinner to discuss how to leverage the festival for Ithaca College. It was March 11. She said, don't worry, the college is shutting down all large events over 100, but FLEFF, although large, aggregates many small events.

>From March 5 on, we could not focus.  We went through the motion on tweaking timing of films at the theater, hotels for guests, master classes, salons.  Every day we spoke on the phone: will we be canceled? Or will we continue with smaller gatherings? It was almost impossible to fire up the energy to attend to the myriad details of a festival two-three weeks before it launches.  Designs for programs and PPT slides were still coming back for feedback from our designer. I simply could not focus at all even though I made list after list of details.

Tom and I followed the entertainment trades closely. We asked other festival directors what they were planning to do. Some said they were moving totally online to various platforms. Some said they were just canceling.  It was a slow,arduous process of emails, phone calls, moving slowly, trying to figure out what to do and knowing our decisions were not our own because they were about others. We also wondered how does one have a festival, which produces fun and community as well as art encounters, during a virus like this?

We saw SXSW canceled.  And laid off enormous numbers of staff. Then, the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capitol. We chatted on the phone: with these two cancelling, we knew.  Everything we had worked on for a year would slow down, and then, dissipate.  Slow. Slow.  Then done. Over.

The administrator in charge of FLEFF, Dr. Tanya Saunders, called on a Monday afternoon, March 9.  The Provost decided to cancel FLEFF, it was too large.  I spent the evening unable to sleep, but I was relieved, in some crazy way, as the burden of figuring out public health in a crisis at a festival lifted.  I was also sad that a year of work evaporated, gone. But festivals constantly adapt and morph and we knew  the programs could slide to 2021.  Tom and I were both relieved to not bear the responsibility of the health of others when noone seemed to understand the disease.  The red ball with the spikes, the image of the coronavirus, irritated me, as it was everywhere on the news and on social media.  A stand in, an emblem, a placeholder for the unknown.

I had to cancel about 85 guests:  musicians, performers, filmmakers, new media artists, scholars, moderators. It might have been even more than that.  I felt awful telling the local art cinema we were canceling, as FLEFF brings in not only large crowds but generates financial resources.  It's the biggest box office of the year for the theater.

The methodical deductive thinking of curatorial work worked itself out of our heads.  It is slow work to respond, as moves must be considered. We asked our digital curators, Dale Hudson at NYU ABU and Claudia Pederson, at Wichita State, if their Radical Infiltrations new media exhibition could be moved and go live.  I spent hours loading it. Dale spent more slow time adapting the essay for the films.  Here is the exhibition, Radical Infiltrations: https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/infiltrationsnewmedia/

We decided we need to do more.  Many listservs for media studies faculty of all persuasions, areas, and methods exploded with requests for online material.  Most faculty had only a week or so to move to remote instruction.  Not every school boasted the large library staffs like the one we have at Ithaca College who can digitize titles.

 We collaborated with the Park Center for Independent Media to mount an exhibition of online analog short videos and some interface projects like Coronavirus Dashboard in an exhibition entitled INFILTRATIONS:  A DIFFERENT MEDIA ENVIRONMENT. Our festival cut line is FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT.  In our slowness, which felt like walking through water in a pool on a cold day with the wind blowing, we decided to play on the title.  The exhibition includes community media from groups like Scribe Video, COVID related pieces from Indonesia and the Philippines from EngageMedia in Indonesia/Thailand, disability rights work from Insights International, Indigeneous media of resistance playlists from Cinema Politica in Montreal, the experimental videos of Wenhua Shi.  You can see the exhibition here, and even use this work for your remote teaching to fill in the holes from moving online:  https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/infiltrationsnewmedia/

Cinemapolis shuttered. As Board members, Tom and I were pulled into a meeting to figure it out. I suggested my partner Stewart, a professor of public health, be brought in.  We closed. But we committed to a fundraising campaign so the employees could earn their salaries.  Within four days, the community donated sufficient funds to cover one month. Slowness defined this process, slow deliberations, thinking through every corner and angle, every implication, the impact on low wage workers.

Two weeks ago, Brett Bossard, the executive director of Cinemapolis, approached us. The independent distributors like Kino, Icarus, Oscilloscope and more were offering a new idea:  virtual cinema.  The current release could be on the theaters website. You clicked a link, paid $12. A 50/50 split, so the theater could earn some money and so the release could be out.  Brett saw that 8 of the titles we had programmed for FLEFF were available from these boutique distributors, such as BACURAU (Brazil), WHITE WHITE DAY (Iceland), THE WHISTLERS (Romania), CORDILLERA OF DREAMS (Chile), DYING FOR GOLD (South Africa), and more. See these films here:  https://cinemapolis.org/virtual-cinema/  ($12 dollars a view, good for five days!)

 We said let's do it, let's try it, let's start slow, with a few titles.  Let's promote in a slow methodical way.  Let's get these films out into the world for whatever audience is left. Let's slowly see if the art film and festival audience will do this, if they are sick of TIGER KING and Netflix bingeing, and want to immerse, slowly, in something denser, more nuanced, with cinematography that is not shot in thirds with a close frame. .  You don't have to live in Ithaca to watch. Support local art cinemas everywhere while you are slowed down.

 If you are in your home, see the world through your screen.

See digital art and community media online (through FLEFF or through other initiatives).  These works vaccinate us all against the virus of transnational capital.

 See films that are not shot to center characters in middle of the screen and edited to enter your synapses and alter them for the networks of capital.

 See films that with each click of the keyboard slowly, incrementally, save cinema, save our senses from the barrage of streaming the middle brow, the American-centric, the easy.

 Save ourselves from the incessant harassment of commercial media culture that pounds our hearts and brains into dust.

Save ourselves  from the fast of CNN and Netflix with the slow of new media art, community media, art films in Virtual Cinemas.

None of what I elaborate here was done fast. The moment fills us with and humbles us, requiring detangling, new routes, methodical thinking, listening, absorbing, knowing you must get it right but probably will get it wrong.  Bravado fades here.  Interventions disintegrate.  What remains are slow infiltrations and recalibrations, constant listening, watching, adjustments.

Slow. Adagio.

Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
Professor of Screen Studies
Roy H. Park School of Communication
Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Ithaca College
953 Danby Road
Ithaca, New York 14850 USA

http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff

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