short bio

I am an ABD (all but dissertation) graduate student in a PhD program in Communication at UCSD  and a documentary filmmaker.  The starting point of my research is in the domain of documentary studies, traditionally a subdiscipline of film studies.  A key problem for documentary theory is to define how filmic texts understood as documentary differ from those understood as fiction.  Where and how is it, in other words, that spectators understand particular films or moments within films as documentary as opposed to fiction?  One strain of theory identifies the subjective experiences of viewers, the sensory “charge of the real,” as a suggestive point of departure for documentary theory in a digital age.  This is the starting point, as well, for my documentary film About Face! Reenacting in a Time of War, 91 min., completed in January of 2012.

Conceived as a gently critical response to nationalist sentiment in the United States after the September 11 attacks, About Face! documents my experience participating in Revolutionary War reenactments with His Majesty’s Tenth Regiment of Foot, a reenacting group that portrays the 18th century British soldiers garrisoned in New England at the start of the American Revolution in 1775.   I take up the faux-perspective of the United States earliest enemy between April of 2002 and September 11, 2011 to find out who performs this story of Americas violent national origins and why, how it has been interpreted, where it circulates today, and what it feels like to play a Redcoat at a time when the contemporary American military is sending its professional soldiers to fight wars far from home. 

My dissertation applies phenomenological film theory on documentary to analyze the subjective, embodied experiences of participants in reenactments and simulations, away from screens per se, while offering points of connection with the experiences of observational/participatory documentary filmmakers regarding the world from behind a camera.   To date, I have written about and presented on reenactments of battles of the Revolutionary War in post-9/11 Massachusetts (the subject of my documentary About Face!), the aims of filmmakers working within the discipline of sensory ethnography, performativity in personal documentary camerawork, and documentary representations of embodied training simulations at the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin as the military shifted its focus from conventional to counterinsurgency war.

Prior to graduate school, I spent nearly ten years working as a documentary filmmaker and teaching video production classes in a variety of venues.  I have completed two feature length videos, and screened a rough cut version of About Face!, at the Athens International Film Festival in Ohio.  In recent years, I have worked more on activist media projects in response to the economic crisis in 2008 and the ensuing budget cuts and fee hikes within the UC system.

From 2010-2012, I worked on a project with Professor Zeinabu irene Davis on the LA Rebellion film movement, in conjunction with an initiative of the UCLA Film and Television Archive to revisit this work, sponsor a series of film screenings, restore prints of films, and publish an edited anthology of articles about the LA Rebellion filmmakers.  This project is currently in the midst of fundraising, but expects to be completed by the end of 2012.

Trailer for About Face! Reenacting in a Time of War (2012)

Filmmaker’s Statement

I was trained in an observational cinema filmmaking tradition that conceptualizes daily life as the starting point for constructing documentary films.  This lineage of filmmaking traces its roots to the direct cinema and cinema verite movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with turns toward autobiographical filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s. The usual goal of this style of filmmaking is to create for spectators the illusion of “being there,” either psychically or physically, with the cameraperson and subjects.  The filmmaker stands in as a reliable representative for the viewing audience.  But in an era when daily life is increasingly defined by individuals’ interactions with documents and screens, the utility of this approach seems to fall into question.  What would an observational documentary about watching television or reading on the Internet reveal about “being there”?  And how is it possible to represent subjects as they “actually” are when the presence of the camera seems to demand a performance from those in front of it?  Partly in response to these questions, I have become most interested in subjects that are imagined rather than directly observable.  In an era of globalization and ubiquitous media, imagined connections sustain threads of logic, interpretations of shared historical events, ideals about one’s identity, and notions of right and wrong across time and space.  My work seeks to represent the intersections between daily life practices and these imagined connections, and to draw out their political ramifications.  In my most recent project, About Face! Reenacting war in a time of war, I explore the subculture of reenacting as a reenactor, in order to see the processes involved in “making” history in a post 9/11 context.