The Program in Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts will present an end of semester screening featuring the recent film and video work of 32 students in Keith Sanborn’s course “How to Make a Film” and Su Friedrich’s two courses, “Documentary Filmmaking” and “Narrative Filmmaking: Working from the Script.” The screening will take place on Thursday, May 12, in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street. Work by students in “How to Make a Film” will be shown from 2:30 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. and work from “Documentary Filmmaking” will be shown from 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.; work by students in “Narrative Filmmaking: Working from the Script” will be shown beginning at 7:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. The screening is free and open to the public.
A still from the film Bike Crime and Princeton, produced by sophomore Danielle Duseau in the course “Documentary Filmmaking,” one of several films that will be screened from among work done by Princeton students in three spring film and video production courses.
The course led by Sanborn, “How to Make a Film,” teaches students the basic tools and approaches for film production with digital media through hands-on studio work, screenings, critical readings, and group critiques.
Friedrich’s course “Documentary Filmmaking” introduces students to documentary film production using digital video, with an emphasis on the practical challenges of working in the real world.
In Friedrich’s other course, “Narrative Filmmaking: Working from the Script,” students were each given a different segment of a script and were asked to interpret that text as creatively as possible, in whatever style they felt represented their individual visions as filmmakers. The final result is a feature length film of all the segments strung together.
Both Sanborn and Friedrich are award-winning and highly prolific filmmakers themselves. Friedrich has produced and directed 23 16mm films and digital videos, which have won many awards, including Best Narrative Film at the Athens International Film Festival, Outstanding Documentary Feature at Outfest in Los Angeles, and Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival, among many others. Her work is widely screened in the United States, Canada and Europe and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Friedrich is the recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, an Independent Television Service production grant, an NEA Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a DAAD grant as artist-in-residence in Berlin, as well as multiple foundation grants. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Library of Australia, as well as many university libraries.
Sanborn’s media work has been featured at festivals such as the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, OVNI in Barcelona, and the New York Video Festival. His work has been included in the Whitney Biennial of American Art twice and was included in the Whitney’s “American Century” survey as well as the Pomidou Centre’s survey “Monter/Sampler.” He has had numerous one-person shows at a range of institutions throughout the United States and in Europe. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Department of Cinema Studies of New York University, Bard College, and Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg, among others. His theoretical and critical essays have appeared in a range of periodicals including Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail and in collections such as Kunst nach Ground Zero. His media work has been supported by the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Art Matters, the Experimental Television Center and The Thing.
