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Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald was the opening speaker at the new OpenDocLab, a salon for filmmakers, film scholars and other cineastes interested in documentary filmmaking, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT.

An article on The Washington Post website titled “Atheists find a new venue for the godless: on film,” and released by the Religion News Service, quoted Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate.  “An independent faith film festival will create film fests for similar reasons — to be with other, like-minded people, to laugh together and cry together and think together,” Plate said in the article that focused on the San Francisco-based, annual Atheist Film Festival. Published on Aug. 17, the article also appeared on the The Times-Picayune site.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood has named Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald an Academy Scholar for 2012. Each year the Academy chooses two scholars nationwide, awarding each a grant to pursue a research project.

Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald’s interview with filmmaker Pawel Wojtasik, “Perception as Transcendence,” has been published in the winter issue of Film Quarterly.  

Visiting Professor of Film History Scott MacDonald was the lead programmer at this year’s Brakhage Symposium at the Brakhage Center of the University of Colorado in Boulder on March 11-13.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies Brent Plate’s perspectives on this year’s Oscar nominees and the themes conveyed by them appear on several major media sites including CNN.com, Religion Dispatches and beliefnet.com. “It’s kind of an unusual year – almost all of the top films have relatively little explicit religious dimensions to them,” said Plate. “But these films are asking the same questions that religions ask: Where did we come from, how did we get here, where are we going and who are we?”

A feature article by Professor of Cinema and New Media Studies Scott MacDonald has been published in the Winter, 2010 issue of Film Quarterly. In “Avant-Doc: Eight Intersections” MacDonald reflects on links between documentary and avant-garde filmmaking traditions.

Professor of Cinema and New Media Studies Scott MacDonald participated in a Futures Seminar at the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, on Nov. 18 and 19. He was one of three guests invited to the seminar.

Two Hamilton students and three faculty members participated in the Flaherty Film Seminar at Colgate University June 19-25. Jori Belkin ’11, Cameron Breslin ’11, Edmund A. LeFevre Professor of English Patricia O'Neill, Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald, Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Su Yun Kim, watched and discussed documentary films from around the world with the filmmakers, and with film scholars, programmers and educators.

Visiting Professor of Film History Scott MacDonald's interview with Indonesian/Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich appears in the current issue of Film Quarterly, and his essay on Russian montage filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian appeared in the February issue of Artforum.