Docuverse Snapshots #5: Modern Day Flaneuse

Discussing various film and research projects she has worked on, Gerda will expose how her artistic and scholarly career is that of a flaneur, marked, as Baudelaire would say, by being "away from home, and yet to feel at home; to behold the world, to be in the midst of the world and yet to remain hidden from the world." A consistent theme in her work has been time and the experience of time, and by extension the linear and non-linear possibilities of different moving image media. Although most people would qualify her work as experimental films, they are all grounded in reality and are essentially explorations of the poetic potential of documentary. Paraphrasing Trinh T. Minh-ha, she aims to be in touch with the ordinary in non-ordinary ways so that it can become something extra-ordinary in an ordinary frame. Gerda is currently working on several new projects – such as Viewfinders, an international collaborative project with Dr. Max Schleser that looks specifically at the impact of small portable camera devices such as smartphones on travel experiences and on mobile creativity.

About Gerda Cammaer

Gerda Cammaer is a film scholar, curator, and filmmaker. As a scholar and a maker she specializes in experimental and documentary film, overlooked histories and small media. Her PhD thesis (completed in 2010) included a major film/video project that built upon her passion for collage film, documentary and new narratives. Her current research focuses on the revival of microcinema and their lineage with historical forms of amateur short films and videos, focussing particularly on travel films. She has published articles on a variety of subjects, she is the co-editor of Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (McGill University Press, Fall 2014) and the co-writer of Forbidden Love (Arsenal Pulp Press, Fall 2015).  She curated multiple experimental film and video programs, has been a jury member and co-programmer of the Mobile Innovation Network Aotearoa (MINA) screenings founded by Max Schleser, and she is the co-founder of the international Moving Image Arts short film festival at Ryerson University. Her own films and videos have played at various festivals in Canada and worldwide. She is Associate Professor at the School of Image Arts of Ryerson University in Toronto, where she teaches in the film program (BA), the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management Program (MA) and in Documentary Media (MFA). She is also the co-director of the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC), located in the School of Image Arts. She is the recipient of a Faculty Scholarly, Research and Creative Activity award in 2013 and the Outstanding Contribution to Graduate Education award in 2016.