2014•Oxford University Press eBooksRequires access
Nina Davenport
Scott MacDonald
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Abstract
A student of Ross McElwee’s and Robb Moss’s at Harvard, Davenport discusses her history as a personal documentary filmmaker influenced not only by McElwee (she appears in and was an assistant editor on McElwee’s Six O’Clock News) and Moss, but by avant-garde filmmaker, Peter Hutton. Her first important film, Hello Photo (1995), for which she spent months in filming in India, was funded by Robert Gardner. If her early films are a feminine/feminist version of McElwee’s personal documentaries, her Operation Filmmaker is a breakthrough work in revealing the struggles between a filmmaker and her subject, a young Iraqi would-be filmmaker. This is Davenport’s first extensive interview, and it covers Hello Photo and the series of films that have followed it, including Always a Bridesmaid (2000) and Parallel Lines (2003).