Posts tagged Documentary

Got Audio? Enter the Third Coast International Audio Festival

Via our inbox:

Entries now being accepted for the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s 13th annual Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition!

The TCIAF invites producers around the globe to submit their finest radio/audio stories in the following categories: Best Documentary (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Directors’ Choice, Honorable Mentions), Best New Artist, Radio Impact and Best News Feature.

The TCIAF accepts stories that document people, places, times, events, phenomena and issues. These include but are not limited to: investigative reports, narrative stories, personal essays, profiles and audio portraits. Podcasts and documentaries that redefine the documentary form are also welcome.

Winners receive cash awards - $4,000 for the gold prize - to support their future creative endeavors. They also receive national recognition in Best of the Best: The 2013 Third Coast Festival Broadcast, airing on public radio stations across the country this fall.

Deadline: June 19.

Contest Site: TCIAF.

Image: Toshiba Vacuum Tube Radio, via Wikimedia Commons

The History of Cuss Words

Salon’s featured excerpt of Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing, provides an in depth look at commonly used swear words of the 18th and 19th centuries.

According to Mohr, a cuss word is defined by its impact:

Along with grammatical flexibility, this figurativeness is the hallmark of a fully obscene word, a word used not as a literal descriptor but to shock, offend, or otherwise carry emotion — a swearword.

Some of the popular curse words and phrases from Mohr’s excerpt include the following: 

• “Arse-opener,” “arse-wedge,” “beard-splitter,” ”chinkstopper,” and ”plugtail” were used to describe the act of ”splitting the woman’s anatomy” or “plugging a hole.”
• “Bloody” was one of the most popular swear words of the time, but it’s hard to pinpoint its exact origins. It’s assumed that it’s derived from “the adjective bloody as in ‘covered in blood’ or, as the OED proposes, it referred to the habits of aristocratic rabble-rousers at the end of the 17th century, who styled themselves ‘bloods.’”
• “Breasts,” “bubbies,” and ”diddeys,” were common words for boobs;  ”bushelbubby” specifically referred to a woman with large breasts. “Tit” didn’t catch on until the early 20th century as a variation of ”teat” which was used in the Middle Ages.
• “Bugger” referred to a person giving anal penetration.
• “Burning shame” was a term that meant “a lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman, certainly not intended by nature for a candlestick.” 
• “Burnt-Arsed whore” was used during the Renaissance and literally meant “infected with venereal disease.”
• “Fartleberry” is the early version of the modern “dingleberry,” which refers to the fecal matter that hangs from hairs around the butt-hole. 
• “Gamahuche” meant “mouth on genitals” for both cunnilingus and fellatio. 
• “Godemiche” was a word imported from France meaning “dildo.” 
• “Larking” could have meant blow job or the act of “having sex with the man’s penis between the woman’s breasts.”
• “Lobcock” referred to a large, “dull, inanimate” penis and “pego” was a popular word for dick. 
• “Monosyllable,” “quim,” “pussy,” “madge,” and “a woman’s commodity” were all names for vagina. 
• “Nackle-ass” was an adjective that meant “poor, mean, inferior, paltry: applied as a term of contempt to both persons and things indifferently.” 
• “Rantallion” referred to a scrotum that sags lower than the shaft of a man’s penis.
• Slang for sexual intercourse included: “roger,” “screw,” and “have your greens.”
• “Tip the velvet” originally meant “french kiss,” but after a hundred years passed, it also referred to the act of preforming cunnilingus. 
• “To bagpipe” meant to give a blow job. 

FJP: More bloody fun: Nine Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Swear Words. You should also check out, FUCK — the documentary about “fuck’s” origins and uses. If you don’t — it will surely be a “burning shame.” Figuratively, of course. (Let’s hope.) — Krissy

Image: Screenshot from The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Witness: Juárez. In praise of war photographers

fjp-latinamerica:

HBO Docs is releasing a 4-part series on war photojournalism around the world, two of them located in Latin America (Ciudad Juárez, México and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). 

Journalist Mike Hale introduces the Juárez episode, via The New York Times:

“Witness: Juarez,” the first in a series of four HBO documentaries about contemporary war photographers, is the visual equivalent of a fast-paced duet, like Mozart for still camera and video camera rather than violin and viola. The photographer Eros Hoagland and the cinematographer Jared Moossy travel the deadly streets of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in tandem, and our view jumps between their lenses; their photographs and moving images echo and amplify one another.

The half-hour “Juarez,” on Monday night, is a bracing, at times mesmerizing introduction to the “Witness” series, a project of the filmmaker Michael Mann and the documentarian David Frankham, who directed three of the films. (Mr. Frankham’s contributions are “Juarez” and “Rio,” about Mr. Hoagland, and “South Sudan,” with the French photojournalist Véronique de Viguerie; Abdallah Omeish directed “Witness: Libya,” next week’s installment, which features Michael Christopher Brown.)

Mr. Hoagland, a freelancer who works frequently for The New York Times, tracks down the scenes of drug-related murders in Ciudad Juárez with the help of a Mexican photographer, Guillermo Arias, and also embeds with the Mexican police, a practice he defends as “a free ride to a place we couldn’t go alone because we’d be killed.”

He offers practical tips — “You don’t want to arrive too soon, because the gunmen are still going to be there” — as well as philosophical guidelines. After he and Mr. Moossy (who photographed all four documentaries) race to the scene of a shooting and film the victim as he staggers out of his car, calling for help and dying on the street as soldiers and police officers stand by, Mr. Hoagland says: “I wasn’t there to mourn for him. I wasn’t there to console his family. I wasn’t there to — I was there to document it. It’s a piece of history.”

FJP: A few weeks ago, we asked this question: ‘Can photojournalism erase Ciudad Juarez’s bad reputation?’

Image: Juárez, via HBO Docs.

Photographing the Invisible

Marcellus Shale Documentary Project is a collaborative effort by photographers to document the effects of fracking throughout Pennsylvania. Its director considers it a modern-day equivalent to the 1935-1944 Farm Security Administration mission that sent photographers across the United States to document the challenges of rural poverty.

A profile by the New York Times though gets to a singular difficulty: “The problem facing [the] photographers… is that what they wish to describe cannot be seen — an invisible gas buried deep underground.” 

Solution? Focus on people, places and processes. Via the Times:

The group’s photographs depict a heavy industrial process scattered across a rural landscape: amid miles of lush green forest or farmland, suddenly there is a shaved patch. Atop the clearing is a battery of drilling equipment: a tall derrick, bright klieg lights and lined troughs full of chemical wastewater. In some photographs, a long, steel pipeline snakes through the frame. In others, the flare from a drill rig lights the night sky. There are pictures of people, too: farmers who leased their land for drilling, homeowners with enough methane in their groundwater to light a tap on fire; and here and there, an industry employee.

Image: A natural gas pipeline under construction in Franklin Township, by Noah Addis, via the New York Times.

Google’s Online Culture Museum

The Google Cultural Institute has gone live with 42 online exhibitions that span the 20th century.

Via the Daily Mail:

Google have teamed up with the world’s museums for a massive update to their online ‘cultural institute’ that offers users the chance to learn about some of the major figures and events of the past century.

The latest additions to the Google Cultural Institute archives, available to view from today, are intended as an online educational resource to preserve history in a place that is accessible to people when they need it.

Major world events like D-Day, the Holocaust and the fight against Apartheid are described with a mixture of photos, historical account and contemporary quotes.

Image: Screenshot, Nelson Mandela Prison Years, 1962-1990, via Google Cultural Institute.