Past Image Present: An Evening with Rebecca Baron April 4, 2007

Spare Time
Directed by Humphrey Jennings
UK 1939, 16mm, b/w, 15 min.

A poetic look at the leisure time of the British working class and an extension of Jennings’ involvement with Britain’s Mass Observation movement.

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The Idea of North
Directed by Rebecca Baron
US 1995, 16mm, b/w, 14 min.

Photographs recovered from an 1897 polar expedition (a failed attempt to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon) stimulate a reflection on “the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph” (NYFF program notes).

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okay bye-bye
Directed by Rebecca Baron
US 1998, 16mm, color, 39 min.

Combining epistolary narrative, personal meditation and journalism, okay bye-bye examines the possibility of comprehending something as monumental as the genocidal slaughter of Cambodians during the Pol Pot regime. The discovery of a scrap of super-8 footage of an unidentified Cambodian man spurs Baron’s “private research” into the Khmer Rouge and the archived photographs of the Tuol Sleng death camp, generating a reflection on the complicated relationship between image and memory, the past and the present.

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How Little We Know of Our Neighbors
Directed by Rebecca Baron
US 2005, video, color, 49 min.

Reaching beyond the history of the Mass Observation movement (an eccentric social science enterprise that combined surrealism with anthropology), Baron’s video traces the development of portable photographic cameras in the late 1880s to their quick adaptation into spy cameras, How Little We Know of Our Neighbors invites the viewer to contemplate what is driving various acts of surveillance and how technology easily shifts between being a tool of authoritarianism, art, voyeurism, entertainment and commerce. Text from David Dinnell’s TV Eye.

Official Website: http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2007spring/baron.html