Alisa Lebow

Alisa Lebow joined the Brunel School of Arts Screen Media department in April 2007. Prior to coming to Brunel she lived and taught in Bristol, Istanbul, and New York. Her theoretical work focuses on the margins and limits of documentary filmmaking. As both a scholar and a practitioner, Lebow is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, most recently from the British Academy and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

She is the author of First Person Jewish (Visible Evidence Series, University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and numerous articles on various aspects of documentary. Lebow is the co-organizer of the annual London-based conference, Documentary Now! and has also organized Visible Evidence XVII in Istanbul, as well as a series of symposia on first person documentary from around the world. She is the editor of The Cinema of Me (Forthcoming, Wallflower Press).

She is also the co-editor of another volume, The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, with Professor Alexandra Juhasz (Forthcoming, Blackwell Publications). She is a founding member of docIstanbul, an organization dedicated to advancing the cultural awareness and theoretical debates around documentary in Turkey and writes a monthly column on documentary for the Turkish film magazine, Altyazi. 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 Overview

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.

Teaching Activity

Alisa teaches Documentary theory, history, and production. She is interested in supervising PhD students in the areas of documentary practice (AVPhD), subjectivity and representation, the contested borders of documentary, experimental and art documentary, political filmmaking, migrant and diasporic film, gender and sexuality, films from Turkey and the Middle East.

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
“First Person Political” BFI Companion to Documentary, ed. Brian Winston (BFI Publishing/Palgrave McMillan, Forthcoming 2011)
“Shooting with Intent” Image in Violence, eds. Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer (Wallflower Press, Forthcoming 2011)

“Camera as Peripatetic Migration Machine” The Cinema of Me: the self and subjectivity in first person documentary, ed. Alisa Lebow (Wallflower Press, Forthcoming, 2011)

"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” 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) Cineaste, Vol. 25, No.2 (March 2000)

“Lesbians Make Movies” Cineaste, Vol. 20, 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

Publications

Journal Papers

(2008) Lebow, A., AVPhD: supervising in the dark, Journal of Media Practice 9 (3) : 201- 214

(2008) Lebow, A., Worldwide wigs: Kutlug Ataman and the globalized art documentary, Arab Studies Journal XV No 2 / XVI No 157

(2007) Lebow, A., Strategic sentimentality: Nostalgia and the work of Eleanor Antin, Camera Obscura 22 (3) : 128- 167

(2003) Lebow, A., Memory once removed: Indirect memory and transitive autobiography in Chantal Akerman's D'Est, Camera Obscura 18 (1) : 35- 82

Book Chapters

(2012) Lebow, A., "First person political". In: BFI Companion to Documentary Film. Palgrave McMillan

(2012) Lebow, A., "Shooting with intent". In: Ten Brink, J. and Oppenheimer, J. eds. Image in Violence. Wallflower Press

(2012) Lebow, A., Camera as peripatetic migration machine. In: The cinema of me: The self and subjectivity in contemporary documentary. Wallflower Press (Forthcoming - June 2012)

(2006) Lebow, A., Faking what?: Making a mockery of documentary. In: Juhasz, A. and Lerner, J. eds. F is for phony: Tthe fake documentary and truth's undoing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 223- 237

(1996) Becquer, M. and Lebow, A., 'Docudrag’: Or ‘realness’ as documentary strategy. In: Noriega, CA. and Lopez, A. eds. The Ethnic eye: Latino media arts. University of Minnesota Press 143- 170

Books

(2012) Lebow, A., The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary. Wallflower Press

(2008) Lebow, A., First Person Jewish. University of Minnesota Press