Filmmaker Tom Davenport
“Streaming Tradition on the Web: Folklife, Public Access, and Public Education at FolkStreams.net”
Date: Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Time: 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Place: Toy Lounge, 4th Floor of Dey Hall, UNC-CH
The Curriculum in Folklore is proud to host a presentation by Tom Davenport--longtime independent filmmaker and founder of Folkstreams.net--on Tuesday, March. 25, at 3:00 p.m. in Toy Lounge, on the fourth floor of UNC’s Dey Hall. Producer of such acclaimed documentaries as “A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle” and “The Ballad of Frankie Silver,” Davenport will be speaking about “Streaming Tradition on the Web: Folklife, Public Access, and Public Education at Folkstreams.net.” Davenport will be joined in this presentation by Dr. Daniel Patterson, Kenan Professor Emeritus and the former chair of UNC’s Curriculum in Folklore. Please join us as we discuss the relationship between community-based ethnography, documentary film, and public accessibility.
Tom Davenport is the founder and director of Folkstreams.net, a much-heralded website that has come to serve as a national preserve of documentary films about American roots cultures. Recognizing that independently produced documentaries often have short public lives, Davenport created a framework to stream many such films on the web for free public access. Not content to merely present the films, he also built a structure whereby they are accompanied by an educational package that includes essays about the documented traditions, transcriptions of the films, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites. The result is a ever-growing site that not only has become an important national repository of documentary films, but also has emerged as one of the nation’s premier resources for educators interested in teaching about local cultures and the dynamics of tradition.
Tuesday’s presentation will also include a screening of “Bodhidharma's Shoe,” one of Davenport’s recent documentaries that offers an insider’s view of an American Zen retreat. Davenport has been a student of Zen for over 40 years; this short film documents a 2003 retreat with his nearly 100-year-old teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi, a legendary Zen teacher who first came to America in the 1960s.
