Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar

Flash Flaherty, the much-anticipated follow-up volume to The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, offers a people’s history of the world-renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an annual event where participants confront and reimagine the creative process surrounding multiple document/documentary forms and modes of the moving image.

This collection, which includes a mosaic of personal recollections from attendees of the Flaherty Seminar over a span of more than 60 years, highlights many facets of the Flaherty experience. The memories of the seminarians reveal how this independent film and media seminar has created a lively and sometimes cantankerous community within and beyond the institutionalized realm of American media culture. Editors Scott MacDonald and Patricia R. Zimmermann have curated a collective polyphonic account that moves freely between funny anecdotes, poetic impressions, critical considerations, poignant recollections, scholarly observations, and artistic insights.

Together, the contributors to Flash Flaherty exemplify how the Flaherty Seminar propels shared insights, challenging debates, and actual change in the world of independent media.