Lifelong Learning Spring Session 2: Tuesday Class cont.

Storytelling, Truth-Telling and Documentary Film
Tuesdays cont., March 31 and April 7, 14, final date TBD at the Nashville Film Festival (April 16-25)
Instructor: Ted Parks, Co-curator of Lipscomb University’s HumanDocs Film Series, Associate Professor of Spanish

Film historians look to Auguste and Louis Lumie`re as key figures in the birth of the cinema. More than a century ago, the Lumie`re brothers thrilled audiences with what they called the actualite´ — one-minute snippets of French life on the cusp of the 20th century. The modern documentary can be said to trace its roots to the Lumie`re brothers and their belief in cinema as a way to represent the real world. In this class, we will begin with classic examples of non-fiction filmmaking — such as Robert Flaherty’s pivotal Nanook of the North (1922) — then view more recent documentaries, asking how the way documentarians represent truth impacts our understanding of the world and our responsibilities in it.