Sidify can simultaneously convert multiple files. Sidify Music Converter Mac is a very much structured sound converter for Spotify. Sidify music converter is a Spotify music download software program that helps you Separate payment for premium access; Exclusively for Windows and Mac users. Sidify Music Converter Crack is a highly defined audio converter for Spotify. Quoted in Nichols , In this passage Winston, one of the leading experts of documentary, not only lays out the limitations for social transformation set because of the above-mentioned disconnect in representing workers and their related problems, but reminds us that these social documentary iterations can have a larger impact on the genre, setting an agenda for future filmmaking.
This connects precisely to my concerns around the rise of the liberal consensus documentary and apolitical works at Hot Docs, a festival with considerable authority regarding taste making and gatekeeping in the documentary world. If political documentary is a catchall akin to the social documentary, or socially engaged documentary, and can therefore include films that do not advance a politically radical, socially progressive, community-supported socio-political agenda, what are the qualities of political films that do?
The author then proceeds to describe some areas where the two filmmakers differ, but the Greyson commentary and analysis is drawn on here because Greyson, as theorized by these scholars, represents an exemplary political documentary filmmaker, at least in the sense of the categorization for this thesis.
That is, the radical committed filmmaker. Radical committed documentary is a concept that draws together two lineages of documentary discourse and practice. In any given instance, both vertical and lateral purposes may be involved. In this regard, Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth , a film about Mayan resistance to global capital in the guise of Monsanto and Canadian mining companies and a reject of the Hot Docs program selection process, challenges both vertically and laterally the power structures impinging on indigenous independence and well-being local and vertical as well as the larger structuring containment of local culture by global capital global and lateral.
Further yet, within the delineation of documentary as an alternative media, this thesis argues that 18 Eric Black, email interview by author, August Waugh then situates many of the filmmakers he discusses in his work as committed to larger social movements and struggles that vary widely, arguing that all share a progressive political impulse, much like the filmmakers whose works I situate as radical committed documentaries.
Alternet writer Andrew Garib defines contemporary progressivism as non-ideological, pragmatic system concerned with fairness and democratic values. Lastly, with regards to defining radical committed documentary, this thesis acknowledges the often overlooked structuring mechanisms and forces that influence who makes which films and what political expression those films end up championing. This is yet one of many possible structural obstructions to the possibility of a radical committed documentary reaching fruition and finding an audience.
Two Ends of a Spectrum Among documentaries concerned with socio-political issues and subjects, some tend toward a more populist, liberal and feel-good variety, such as Babies or An Inconvenient Truth, while others tend to be more radical in form and argument , and challenge, implicate and confront, such as Kanehsatake: Years of Resistance.
Such docs are radical committed documentaries. These works I call liberal consensus documentaries, films that I leverage for my arguments throughout this thesis. Radical committed documentaries are works that dually activate and intervene in said dominant social orders and accompanying ideological frameworks. Unlike liberal consensus documentaries, they resist consumer regimes; that is to say they are not positioned as entertainment products to be consumed — they are tools to be used for social change, artefacts to satisfy both epistephilia21 and the desire to act or participate.
Radical committed documentaries tend to be marginalized at Hot Docs, while in contrast, the more commercial-friendly, crowd-pleasing, popular festival and liberal consensus documentaries, increase their significance. Neither of these distinctions are meant to be taken as solidified, cleanly demarcated sub-genres or documentary categories, rather they are tendencies or likelihoods in a vast spectrum of documentary cinema that includes a vast grey area where the more political, radical and niche documentary tendencies co-mingle with those of the more commercial, liberal and gratification-oriented documentaries.
Once such battles are won, they generally cease being remembered as battles. Couldry and Curran , 6 After all is said and done, the search for pleasure, however fleeting or futile, is at the heart of the festival experience. In approaching the history of the festival I have kept the underlying cultural politics and social relations at the forefront. I have attempted to identify both an institutional logic and structure of feeling associated with the festival, particularly as they have changed over its two-decade existence.
In order to face these challenges I have sought to avoid personal myth making, the narrow chronicling of events, and general politicking. Instead I have made efforts to rely on archival records where they exist, and on oral accounts in order to construct a historical narrative of this institution over the last twenty years.
Lastly, I have also relied on institutional discourse found at www. Creation Myths! His book, as with discussion and debate for a considerable length of time in the middle of a festival that Hendrie was busy managing.
With this chapter I hope to offer a historical account that contributes to the literature on alternative and niche festivals. External social conditions—including dominant attitudes, ideologies, traditions, trends, and conventions—contribute to the structures of feeling that Hot Docs is indelibly linked to and which the festival reciprocally helps shape and express.
Internally, the festival has developed its own logic, shaping a micro-world or subculture that intersects with larger structures of feeling. Hot Docs joins a disparate community of documentarians and attendant publics, fused by common goals, interests and sensibilities, once a year for just over one week in Toronto. Over time, the structure of feeling that encompasses Hot Docs has morphed from local community oriented or grassroots and filmmaker focused to globally oriented and audience focused or commercial.
I use structure of feeling in much the same way Raymond Williams first developed the concept, as the differential quality of experience at a given time and place, especially 4 That is to say, it is the process—including strategies deploying populism and liberalism—of migration from the margins to the mainstream through the process of commercialization.
Over the twenty years of the festival, this generational change in the structure of feeling has suggested a shift in artistic forms and conventions that favour commercial orientation over community- oriented art, politics and advocacy. Structures of feeling suggest the way this relationship comes to be lived.
As Williams notes, the structure of feeling is an effect of a totality that cannot be separated from the constituent parts of experience: It is in art, primarily, that the effect of the totality, the dominant structure of feeling, is expressed and embodied.
To relate a work of art to any part of that observed totality may, in varying degrees, be useful; but it is a common experience, in analysis, to realize that when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some element from which there is no external counterpart. This element, I believe, is what I have named the structure of feeling of a period, and it is only realizable through experience of the work of art itself, as a whole.
Hot Docs, as an expression and embodiment of structures of feeling, has responded to, developed and fortified specific conventions that find tacit consent in both the documentary and film festival communities. These conventions have also undergone massive change in the last twenty years.
In Toronto, TIFF was nearing two decades of activity, a feat that was much celebrated as it increasingly made a name for itself and the city of Toronto. By the late eighties and early nineties TIFF was established firmly in the business camp.
TIFF established Toronto as a fertile location for festivals, with its commercial orientation leaving all kinds of space for niche, alternative and other festivals. Today, that process of nicheing has expanded past those three categories and one can choose between film festivals focused on labour, Brazil, Asia, silent films, trans politics and more.
From the beginning, Images has been at the forefront in identifying and supporting work that has been marginalized or unrecognized by existing exhibition venues, and was crucial in opening up dialogue in the media arts community around issues of race, culture, gender and sexuality.
An offspring institution of the trend-setting TIFF, Hot Docs began around the time other smaller special interest festivals began springing up in Toronto. These were events and showcases offering programming differentiated from that of TIFF and the mainstream in general. In his introduction, he writes: Since the early s, a distinct group of filmmakers and videomakers has set out to rejuvenate the documentary in Canada.
Their films and videos break new ground in subject matter and form, take up social and political themes in a manner that challenges the status quo, and are produced in co-operation with groups that have often been pushed to the sidelines in Canadian society.
How can we constructively avoid being divided and conquered? Where are the needs and confines of television taking the documentary form? How can independent producers work out questions of editorial and creative control with broadcasters? What criteria should funding agencies use to evaluate and prioritize their investment decisions?
Her emphasis on authenticity suggests that Hot Docs functioned as an organic extension of the documentary filmmaking community in Canada, at a time when there were few significant outlets and platforms for documentary outside of television and existing state institutions like the NFB or CBC. Speaking of those early meetings, Barri Cohen—a founding member of the festival as well as a filmmaker, and a longstanding member of the Documentary Organization of Canada—recalls: We were concerned with finding ways to support documentary.
We wanted platforms for documentarians to get their name out, to get the issues out, and to build audience appreciation, while at the same time hopefully providing some financial support too. Source: Interview with author. These early objectives, which would be articulated in the early editions of the festival, reflect a different set of expressed conventions, which in turn reflect a different structure of feeling in the documentary world of the early nineties, whereby local or community concerns took precedence over marketing and branding preoccupations.
He writes: Convention, however, implies not only tacit consent but also accepted standard, and it is here, in the flux of the present, that the most serious difficulty arises. For if it is true that the conventions of an art, in any period, correspond, essentially, to the structure of feeling in that period, it is possible to argue that, at any given time, the existing conventions are necessarily right, and that those who criticize them, or seek to change them, are merely kicking against the pricks.
Only a handful of doc- focused festivals existed worldwide at the time and still fewer dedicated to POV docs , while television and broadcasting management up to that point had generally defined documentary standards. By documentaries had come to make up fully In Canada documentary production almost tripled in the late s, with most of the programming geared for foreign distribution.
Clearly, Canadian documentary television had begun to relocate itself in a global marketplace. The demand for expression documentarians were responding to in the early nineties in Canada was a demand split between two options: visibility and conservatism on television or invisibility and less restrictions in exhibition.
A festival dedicated to POV films would offer a third option. With this in mind, it is important to note that the original instigators of Hot Docs, including Jay, were all artists working at a time when documentary TV markets were opening up, especially in Europe. Their efforts reflected and responded to a structure of feeling in the documentary world that was hitherto shaped by 16 Conventions and standards that included the talking head, or show-and-tell formats commonly found in documentary television.
Or put differently, an industrial model was about to be challenged by an art- and-advocacy model at Hot Docs. The plan, significantly, was launched on the heels of a period of deregulation ushered in by neoliberal governance, and reflected not only a survivalist impulse for documentary, but an alternative in the face of free-market commodification, privatization and unequal economic globalization. Immigrants were arriving in larger numbers from Asia than they were from Europe or the U.
Designed as a platform for filmmakers to show each other and initially to a lesser extent, audiences their work, as well as a forum for critical engagement with the art and craft of documentary filmmaking, encounters at the first edition were set up as very intimate, earnest and self-reflexive.
Exclusively constituted for artists-only, the space of the first Hot Docs events was meant to bring together interested filmmakers rather than industry or spectators.
She gives shape to these nascent festival moments here: And in , that summer, we [CIFC] were not fully a national organization…we were going broke very quickly. Activities include organizing events usually workshops with filmmakers and screenings , drafting policy, presenting at policy hearings, launching public campaigns, conducting research and publishing information on documentary in Canada — to name a few.
At the time the CIFC was broke and members felt the organization could be doing more to support documentary and promote the genre in Canada, and once the first edition proved successful and encouragement came back to organizers from the community, the CIFC set in motion plans for an annual event that while at first focused on filmmakers, would eventually include a wider, ticket-purchasing public. Community Programming Establishing a local, alternative media space parallel to mainstream, commercial spaces dominated by American media at the time, the first Hot Docs editions were almost entirely bereft of American content, determining the festival as a decidedly Canadian event focused on local and national cultural expression.
The first festival program contained a total of 18 films, all of which were Canadian. With an emphasis on socio-political and committed filmmaking as well as on very diverging lengths from the epic Manufacturing Consent to the short Minoru the first program is a collection of films highlighting confrontational politics, radical activists and activism, ethnically-oriented identity, racism and war Moving the Mountain; Minoru; English for Yu , social movements and political history The Black Sheep , poverty and survival In the Gutter and Other Good Places , marginalization and ability Les Fiances de la Tour Eiffel , the environment Battle for the Trees , and aboriginal culture Bowl of Bone.
While under the CIFC stewardship the festival had several peer juries in place at various cities in Canada. Between and Hot Docs screened documentaries, of which were Canadian, 11 American, and 50 international titles, mostly from Europe.
Using my guidelines to gauge the political nature of a documentary outlined in previous pages, of the films screened over are works that reflect and respond to communities of activists and documentary publics engaged in socio-political activities.
In assessing these early films I have relied on a discursive reading of the film synopses, and when necessary for clarification I have looked at third-party discourse around the film texts. From queer identities to war to racism to colonialism, the approximately titles from the CIFC era represent a diversity of committed and engaged films by mostly Canadian filmmakers whose works have strong POV voice and that, to varying degrees, intervene in the public sphere, policy and mainstream media arenas to challenge the status quo, validate radical politics and activism, provide tools for education and organizing and serve as alternative media sites.
Great efforts were made to represent local filmmaking culture from across Canada, and films were decided on by committee consensus,33 not by management or individual decree. Hot Docs was indeed born out of a community response and need to provide an alternative and challenge to dominant cultural traditions, conventions and institutions.
It is significant that in their efforts to do this, the early festival organizers turned to community programming as a way of staying connected with the community of filmmakers the festival was meant to serve, who in turn were serving their subjects and counter publics, many of whom were undoubtedly involved in various social movements.
Sometimes this involves the group suggesting the film to us, other times we find a film that fits. The collaboration continues through to the screening, where the group is invited to speak or find speakers to speak, to table with information, and to help promote the screening and use the screening as a mobilizing and informational tool and platform. Hot Docs, in its original incarnation, resembled an alternative media initiative: community-oriented organization, challenges to the status quo,39 advocacy-focused, and a concern with critical engagement across multiple borders and barriers, including but not limited to artists and broadcasters, North America and Europe, experimental and narrative documentary and more.
The gala dinner was a big deal because it was all about raising the profile of the films and the Hot Docs awards. So the gala dinner was completely sold out, and everybody came, all the main broadcasters came, and industry people came, and lots and lots of filmmakers came. Later, the authors provide examples of such concentrations of alternative symbolic power, a list that could include niche festivals such as the early Hot Docs festival. It is the argument of this thesis that Hot Docs began as an alternative media institution seeking to contest media power.
I would add a second division to those who tell the stories and those who consume the stories: those who exhibit or disseminate, and advocate for, those same stories. In the early days of Hot Docs, these divisions were collapsed, because the festival was organized and programmed laterally, that is, by and for filmmakers. The divisions grew over time as Hot Docs incorporated, gathered its own staff, branded itself, and developed a professional separation between the artists and the cultural managers.
The development of a film festival should not simply be seen in isolation but rather as the articulation of a relationship between cultural factions in society at a time of transition.
Hot Docs organizers were responding to various forces that inevitably helped shape the festival: globalization, neoliberalism, broadcast television,41 and the general structure of feeling of the conservative eighties. Evidence as to the inner workings of early Hot Docs comes from CIFC meeting minutes, recollections from interviewed subjects who were active between and , and Hot Docs discourse contained between the covers of the programs from the period.
Like most proto-mainstream film festivals Hot Docs divided its programming into sections reflective of the undercurrents informing the organization of the festival. Therefore, the programming sections were a diverse lot, displaying a range of 41 Including commissioning editors who exercised as much or more control over voice than filmmakers.
With the inclusion of cultural, political, social and experimental throughout the categories, the early Hot Docs editions also foregrounded films that could not find a place outside of standard commercial platforms and venues. Finally, there was no section set aside for Canadian content in the early Hot Docs programs because the festival was responding to and promoting local culture, which meant that programming and critical interpretative activities were already principally Canadian in nature.
In this way, the discursive and organizational efforts to situate the local as a diffuse spectrum of categories has given way to the subjugation and marginalization of the local into its own diminutive section of the festival. CIFC Period Institutional Chronology Hot Docs began, in , as a small community gathering space for independent documentary filmmakers to screen their work to each other and audiences and critically engage with various issues facing the industry.
As such, the initial edition consisted of screenings at Bloor Street Cinema, Jackman Hall, and hotel venues; an opening night party at The Left Bank and an awards gala at The Palladium. In year two the festival organizers articulated the challenges of putting on the festival while juggling their own production schedules Hot Docs , 9 reflecting once more the artist-run nature of the institution.
This positioning is followed by a paragraph once again extolling the regional diversity of the Canadian films, organizers, judges and delegates. It is also the first time the program notes from organizers focus on numbers with vigour, charting the increase in film submissions, screenings, attendees, and more, over the past five years.
The festival provides a time to praise and critique, to discuss and debate and to appreciate great work…In the last five years, documentary culture across Canada has matured and developed: there are more documentary windows than ever before. Yet, there is pressure to decrease point of view filmmaking. In this respect, the role of public broadcasters and the National Film Board has never been so crucial. We need documentaries that provoke, advocate and inspire.
All documentary forms are important, but the pov documentary, an endangered species, needs to be preserved. Jay and Bienstock in Hot Docs Program , 5 The program note managed to distil many intersecting concerns and objectives that the festival had come to reflect and embody.
By Paul Jay and other CIFC members had come to the conclusion that a conflict of interest had developed between showcasing and supporting independent documentary at Hot Docs each year and the ongoing advocacy efforts of the organization.
Facilitating meetings between government commissioners, funders and filmmakers one day and lobbying the same government the next day were proving difficult and Jay proposed the festival become separately incorporated as a non-profit. This year period saw 1, films screened, of which were Canadian, and American, illustrating a shift in programming that increased the presentation of work produced outside of Canada. By the halfway mark of this period , the numbers had shifted somewhat, but mostly in favour of non-American international works.
For the second half of the new management period trends and conventions in programming followed the first half. This little phrase is significant to tracking the changes afoot in , as the festival came under new management, headed by CIFC outsider Chris McDonald.
But these changes, however fleeting, provide insight into the directional shift of the festival prior to the new millennium. The perceived success of this formula was articulated by McDonald in , when, after announcing the numbers of the edition how many submissions, selections, sponsors, etc.
Independent filmmakers worked off their kitchen tables. CIFC and Hot Docs were born out of a perceived need to serve a marginalized art community largely shut out from the industrial commercial machinery of the day. Nemtin 65 At least as it is understood to be the widening of the net of appeal and access to the public at large.
As volume is going up, budgets are going down, and our creative content may be suffering a downgrade as a result of our industrial success. Ibid Nemtin68 acutely identified many of the problems, issues and challenges that faced the documentary community in Canada around the time Hot Docs underwent rebranding.
Yet Nemtin also identified the growing market and audience interest in reality programming. Audiences have access to hundreds of specialized channels, most of which are affiliated with large multinational corporations.
This has created an imbalance between demand for distinct programming and the economic means to supply it, in both the global and domestic marketplace.
That same year marked the first festival-to-festival exchange, as Hot Docs sent a delegation to the Documentary festival in Amsterdam IDFA , thus reflecting the globalizing forces at play throughout the nineties for the festival circuit, while also setting up relationships for future co-production and festival collaborations and schemes. In Hot Docs began ambitious lateral expansion of audience and markets, domestically with Doc Soup, a monthly screening series now held in several Canadian cities where popular Hot Docs documentaries are selected by the festival for local audiences to experience once a month throughout the year.
In the festival expanded the scope of its audience by offering free daytime screenings to seniors and students, a policy that continues to the present day. In Hot Docs set up its headquarters on the University of Toronto downtown campus, at the Rogers Industry Centre near Bloor and University avenues, where it is still situated, providing a central location for the festival.
A significant programming shift occurred in , when Hot Docs transitioned from institutionally-constituted programming by management to individually-constituted programming one Director and hired TIFF programmer Sean Farnel in the new role.
In the festival further formalized international relations by launching International Co-production Day and continued accelerating cross-border exchanges. Two decades later, Hot Docs is one of the largest and most successful documentary showcase events in the world. It is a twenty-year journey that has seen the festival migrate from the margins to the mainstream and thus from community to commercial and local to global spaces, goals and objectives.
There is the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of a period. Concerning the culture that gathers around Hot Docs, I have provided some history to hopefully connect the lived experience with the past, and in the following sections will draw out its selective traditions as they become conventions of commercialization and mainstream efforts.
This means they make films outside of the commercial broadcast system. I use a softer definition whereby independent means the artist has total control over the production, distribution and exhibition of their work in contrast to those who work for editing commissioners for broadcast TV, or the rare few who make feature docs for commercial exhibition.
This chapter has charted those changes and pointed to significant features of the transition of Hot Docs in to a large, popular and commercial festival. This historical chapter also provides an introduction to some of the key tensions and negotiations that come into focus more sharply in the chapters that follow, where in each case an ideological critique of a significant Hot Docs film is used as a jumping off point to discuss and analyze some of the contentious aspects of the cultural politics of the festival.
As such, Babies is a true docbuster. These films are often elevated to prominent programming spots like opening nights and included in festival press releases and promotional material. Hot Docs is no exception to this, and this chapter looks at the deployment of festival films and docbusters at Hot Docs.
Further yet, what does the screening of Babies reveal about the intersection of documentary and the international film festival with regards to cultural politics, populism and liberal impulses at large Western media events like Hot Docs?
In particular, I look at the ways in which populism is harnessed as a liberal programming strategy, as well as the ways in which it is deployed in the construction and management of the social, mediated and discursive spaces at Hot Docs. That is to say, I will look at the deployment of cultural and political liberalism as well as populism as tactics in the larger strategic plan of commercialization. The association of these terms—populism, liberalism and commercialization—with a large, successful film festival may seem apropos to anyone familiar with tent pole industry events like Cannes, TIFF, Tribeca, LAFF1 and Sundance.
But it is the unique cultural and political history of documentary cinema— with its opposition to the forces at play at those above industry events—that nudges this discussion from mere description to critical intervention, by way of an ideological critique of Babies.
Some are documentaries designed for niche audiences, such as the Witness documentaries, geared from the early stages toward policymakers and political decision-makers. Other niche documentaries are made for ethnically-constituted audiences or politically minded activists, or by niche interest groups documentaries about motocross racing or WWII history, for instance. Cultural theorists like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall helped justify the study of popular media, like daytime soaps on television, as well as their associated audiences.
This work ushered in a theoretical companion to socialism, feminism, anti-racism and pro-labour movements and politics. McGuigan clarifies: Cultural populism in cultural analysis certainly came from the Left, initially neo- Marxist socialism, followed by feminism and anti-racist multiculturalism. Yet, the positions it took in the s and since have unwittingly been homologous with neo-liberalism. He argues: In fact, consumption became the cardinal term of a one-dimensional form of cultural-populist analysis.
This remarkable individual was virtually the source of meaning-making in cultural exchange, in effect, much more powerful than the agents of authorship and production.
Ibid, 9 It is the assertion of this thesis that the practical corollary to this theoretical equation is found in commercial international film festivals, Hot Docs included.
As is clear, the festival foregrounds rush lines, indicating an equation with sold-out screenings and success. This focus shows that the festival considers the audience member as a quantitative measure of success, in addition to the qualitative disposition of taste that would lead them to a festival like Hot Docs. That is to say, one could propose an altered version of the passage to suit the context as such: the oppositional power of documentary is neutralized by incorporation into dominant hegemonic arrangements whilst also, however, winning genuine concessions.
The degree to which this historic oppositional characteristic of documentary has been neutralized by dominant cultural formations like Hot Docs, and which impact such a process has wrought, cuts to the heart of this dissertation.
It's the filmmaking. A feature-length observational documentary that follows the first year of the lives of four babies in San Francisco, Tokyo, and two smaller, rural communities in Mongolia and Namibia, Babies is more aesthetically expressive than politically expository in nature. Sequences typically feature infants in various states of play, rest, fuss, feeding and other activities common to toddlers.
Medium-to-close range shots ensure that the focus remains on the babies so that even 2 McDonald, interview; Farnel, interview, By being selective within the frame, this makes it more universal to an audience.
Documentary can indeed function as a mechanism to bring us into intimate spaces, but some, like Babies, offer no context or complexity and as such facilitate a gaze that is guided only by aesthetic considerations.
Stylistic choices can help construct a beatific touristic aesthetic, but also shape the communication of the film — in this case a message of universal humanism against which politics can only be seen as, at best, a distraction. The main motive was to make a modern law website that is clean, comfortable, and has few ads. Everything is going well. This is because of law students, advocates, judges and professors like you, who give me satisfaction, hope and the motivation to keep working.
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