Work: Selections from the 2010 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar

The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, which every year brings together a diverse group of films and filmmakers for an intensive week of screenings and discussions, has a reputation as a testing ground for filmmakers and a battle zone for ideas about their work. The 2010 seminar, programmed by Dennis Lim, the editor of the Museum’s website Moving Image Source, centered on the theme of work. Conceived around the notion that work remains an underrepresented cinematic subject (Harun Farocki once noted that most films take place in “that part of life where work has been left behind”), the program explored the impact and implications of taking labor and working lives as a cinematic subject—as well as the multiple ways in which contemporary filmmakers are testing the boundaries of the documentary form—through a wide range of films and videos, including essay films, experimental shorts, observational documentaries, and doc-fiction hybrids.

Organized by Dennis Lim, Editor-in-Chief, Moving Image Source, and programmer of the 2010 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.