Alisa Lebow

Dr. Alisa Lebow
Lecturer Fim and Television Studies

Room: GB113
Email: alisa.lebow@brunel.ac.uk

Tel: 01895 267090

Alisa Lebow joined the Brunel School of Arts Film and TV department in April 2007. Prior to coming to Brunel she lived and taught in Bristol, Istanbul, and New York. In the past three years she organized a series of symposia on first person documentary from around the world and is currently compiling a volume of essays on the topic, tentatively entitled Frontiers of First Person. She is a founding member of both Bristol Docs and Doc Istanbul, organizations dedicated to advancing the cultural awareness and theoretical debates around documentary. Her theoretical work focuses on the margins and limits of documentary filmmaking. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, most recently from the British Academy and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Lebow was a Visiting Fellow at the NYU Center for Media and Religion in Autumn 2005. Her documentaries have been aired on US television and have been screened in festivals and museums worldwide.

Research Interests, broadly defined: Documentary Studies, including: first person filmmaking; mockumentary; documentary reconstruction; art and experimental documentary; Middle Eastern documentary. Also: exilic/diasporic cinema; activist media and globalisation; gender and sexuality in representation.

Education: Ph.D. Cinema Studies, New York University 2001
M.A. Cinema Studies, New York University, 1998
B.A. Anthropology, Vassar College, 1985

Teaching

Documentary theory, history, and production, undergraduate and post-graduate

Selected Publications

Books

In First Person Jewish, Alisa S. Lebow examines more than a dozen films by Jewish artists to reveal how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively (and at times unwittingly) with historical tropes and stereotypes of the Jew. Focusing her efforts on Jewish filmmakers working on the margins, Lebow analyzes the work of Jonathan Caouette, Chantal Akerman, and Alan Berliner, among others, also including a discussion of her own first person film Treyf (1998), made with Cynthia Madansky. The filmmakers in this study, Lebow argues, are confronting a desire to both define and reimagine contemporary Jewishness. Using a multidisciplinary approach to first person films, Lebow shows how this form of self-expression is challenging both autobiography and documentary and, in the process, changing the art of cinema and recording the cultural shifts of our time.
“First Person Jewish is a remarkable work—wide ranging in scope and detailed in its attention to the complexities of Jewish self-representation in film. I cannot think of a comparable study.” — Judith Mayne, author of Claire Denis
“Opens new ground in Jewish studies and adds Jewishness as a serious category for discussion in recent film and video scholarship.” — Laura Levitt, director of Jewish studies, Temple University

First Person Jewish, Visible Evidence Series, University of Minnesota Press (2008)

For more information: http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/L/lebow_first.html

Articles
"Supervising in the Dark" Journal of Media Practice (Volume 9, No.3, Autumn 2008)

“Strategic Sentimentality: Nostalgia and the work of Eleanor Antin” Camera Obscura 66 (Winter 2007)

“Worldwide Wigs: Kutlug Ataman and the Globalized Art Documentary” Journal of Arab Studies Journal (Vol XV No. 2/Vol XVI No. 1, Winter 2007/Spring 2008)

“Faking What?: Making a Mockery of Documentary” in F is for Phony eds. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)

“Memory Once Removed: Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est” Camera Obscura 52 (Spring 2003)

“‘Docudrag’: or ‘Realness’ as Documentary Strategy” co-written with Marcos Becquer, in The Ethnic Eye eds. Chon Noriega and Ana Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Popular Press and Reviews

Lebow writes a monthly column about documentary film called "London Dispatch" (Londra Postasi) for the Turkish popular film magazine, Altyazi.

Elsewhere her film reviews include:

Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (Jennifer Fox), Feminist Media Studies Journal Vol. 8, Issue 4 (2008)

A Jihad for Love (Parvez Sharma), Cineaste, Vol. 33 No.3 (Summer 2008) http://www.cineaste.com/articles/a-jihad-for-love.htm

Head On (Fatih Akin), Cineaste, Vol. 30, Issue 3 (July 2005)

Sobibor: October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (Claude Lanzmann) Cineaste, Vol. 27, Issue 2 (March 2002)

The Children of Chabannes (Lisa Gossells and Dean Wetherell), Vol. 25, No.2 (March 2000)

“Lesbians Make Movies” Cineaste, Vol. XX, No. 2 (1993)

Selected Productions

For the Record: The World Tribunal on Iraq (2007, 44 min, video) co-Produced with Basak Ertür, Zeynep Dadak and Enis Köstepen. This video documents the culminating session in Istanbul of the World Tribunal on Iraq, a three day intensive people’s court of conscience, that takes the perpetrators of the Iraq war to task, in the absence of any international legal body. Featuring interviews with Arundhati Roy, Eve Ensler, Richard Falk, Hamid Dabashi, and other committed anti-war and human rights activists from around the world.

Treyf (1998, 54 min, 16mm) Co-Produced/Directed with Cynthia Madansky. Treyf charts the shifting terrain of contemporary Jewish-American identity, through the semi-autobiographical construction of its two lead characters. Broadcast: Sundance Channel and LoGo TV in the US. Women Make Movies, NY. http://www.wmm.com/filmCatalog/pages/c434.shtml

Internal Combustion (1995, 8 min, video) An experimental video made in collaboration with Cynthia Madansky, redressing silence and stigma vis a vis lesbians and AIDS. Distributed by Video Data Bank, Chicago.
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?INTERNALCO

Outlaw (1994, 26 min, video). A video-verité manifesto challenging gender normative social constructions, with transgender writer and activist, Leslie Feinberg. Broadcast on Reel NY, WNET. Distributed by Women Make Movies, NY. http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c214.shtml