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Working with Our Children’s Trust, Double Bind Media has been busy filming the recent court case, Held v. Montana. This past August the Judge on the case ruled in favor of Montana youths. In this landmark decision the court found that young people have a constitutional right to a healthful environment and that the state must consider potential climate damage when approving future projects. Our Children’s Trust is a non-profit public interest law firm that provides strategic, campaign-based legal services to youth from diverse backgrounds to secure their legal rights to a safe climate. This recent ruling in Montana will have widespread impact on litigation in other states with similar constitutional environmental provisions and Double Bind Media is already planning to film these cases as they work their way through the courts.
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Many of the students within the TRIO demographic often feel a sense of ‘imposter syndrome’ yet paradoxically this demographic constitutes a large percentage of Helena College as a whole. Since the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, in-person filming was hampered. The film production transitioned to interviewing subjects remotely as well as asking them to document their experiences navigating the challenges of the shutdown itself. Surprisingly, the pandemic was revealing beyond this particular health crisis.
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The student filmmakers of the Humanities Through Film Summer Bridge Program present The People’s House, a documentary analyzing the past and present of the state Capitol to answer the question: who's in and who's out at the people's house? Appearing in over a dozen international film festivals winning several awards. Ari was the NEH Project Director and George was an instructor.
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How are we to understand the consequences of films that seemingly capture light in movement given how dominant light has been as a trope for truth?
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This film introduces artistic concerns about the limits of representation into the scientific production of images that are circulated and exchanged in the discourse on climate change. To those ends, we take serious and scientifically rigorous aim toward a potentially surrealist end: explaining climate change to a wolf in the Canadian wilderness.
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The project is a short, recycled footage film made primarily from closed circuit security footage, consumer electronic media, and 19th-century positivist photographs of ‘racial face types.’
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Many of the students within the TRIO demographic often feel a sense of ‘imposter syndrome’ yet paradoxically this demographic constitutes a large percentage of Helena College as a whole. Since the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, in-person filming was hampered. The film production transitioned to interviewing subjects remotely as well as asking them to document their experiences navigating the challenges of the shutdown itself. Surprisingly, the pandemic was revealing beyond this particular health crisis.
read more
How are we to understand the consequences of films that seemingly capture light in movement given how dominant light has been as a trope for truth?
read more
The project is a short, recycled footage film made primarily from closed circuit security footage, consumer electronic media, and 19th-century positivist photographs of ‘racial face types.’
A double bind is an impossible situation in which any path forward seems to be confronted by two equally strong prohibitions. An example: racial essentialism is wrong; we should never represent race as a set of “natural” characteristics that define a group of people. Yet, social justice and racial equality require political representation. Without drawing boundaries that define a group, how can we make and mark progress? Another example: technological advancements and capitalist exploitation have brought the human species to the brink of global ecological catastrophe, but without these mechanisms, how can scientists and policy makers correct course and steer us toward a sustainable future?
We named our collective enterprise Double Bind Media because as filmmakers, writers, professors, documentarians, and media artists, we embrace the paradoxical constraints of the double bind as the governing ethos of our practice. For us, truly creative work arises from a profound engagement with the unworkable. Our focus is on media projects that achieve social change by transforming expectations of form and genre, bringing together innovation, critical analysis, and accessibility.
Dr. Ari Lee Laskin is the co-founder of Double Bind Media is currently a National Endowment for the Humanities Project Director. For the past decade he has served as an Andrew W. Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow, media historian and film Professor teaching courses in global cinema, comparative media studies, critical studies, and film production. He frequently works as a writer and editor in academic publishing, film programming, and also serves on film festival juries. As a filmmaker, his films are shown internationally, and he is currently in production on a film exploring the relationship between the Holocaust, documentary, and the invisibility of trauma.
George received his master’s in English literature from the University of California Irvine. He is the co-founder of Double Bind Media, a production company specializing in experimental documentary film and other visual media based in Montana, Los Angeles and the Netherlands. Currently, he resides in the Netherlands where he develops and produces a range of multidisciplinary new media work. He is also a writer interested in contemporary Chinese culture, environmentalism, endangered species, climate change, and science studies.
Elliot Glass received his degree in narrative film production from The University of California Los Angeles School of Theater, Film & Television. For over a decade he has worked full-time as a Freelance Producer, Writer, Director, Editor, and Cinematographer on projects ranging from commercial television to narrative shorts, music videos, web series, educational, branding, and advertising content. His clients have included: Google, Big Beach, Nerdist Industries, Dangerbird Records, Lolipop Records, Whirlpool Corporation, and Igloo Studios. His work has won him multiple awards, such as the Script Pipeline Semifinalist (Features), Peter Stark Memorial Grant, and Fuji Professional Tape Award.