Patricia R. Zimmermann

Patricia R. Zimmermann (February 10, 1955–August 18, 2023) was a renowned scholar of home movies,, amateur, community, participatory media; documentary and experimental film; film, video and digital history; feminist film theory; political economy and public policy; and digital cultures theory.

She was the Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College where she had taught since 1981. She was also the Shaw Foundation Endowed Chair at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2010, where she also taught as a Visiting Professor in 2002–2003. She was also a trainer and facilitator for SHOOT!2007 at the Nigerian Film Institute in Jos, Nigeria, in 2007.

She was Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), one of the world's longest-running environmental film festivals. With Thomas Shevory, she transformed FLEFF to include new media, installations, live performances, panels, and workshops on a redefined and expanded definition of environmental issues to focus on interconnections between war, air, disease, the land, health, water, genocide, food, education, technology, cultural heritage, and diversity. In 2023, actress and activist Jane Fonda made a video salute to FLEFF for its contributions to opening important discussions.

In addition to her scholarship on community and participatory media, she curated with Louis Massiah from Scribe Video Center the national touring exhibition, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media in 2019. The exhibition focused attention on "the hidden histories of place-based documentaries that situate their collaborative practices in specific locales, communities, and needs for social and political change." Venues included Bloomington, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Ithaca, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New Orleans, New York, and Whitesburg.

She was Editor-at-Large of The Edge, the online magazine of the Park Center for Independent Media.

She served on the Board of Trustees for International Film Seminars (Flaherty FilmSeminar) from 2005 to 2009. She had previously served as a trustee for the Robert Flaherty Documentary Seminars from 1989 to 1994, serving as Vice President from 1990 to 1993. She also served on the advisory boards for Center for African American Archival Preservation, Opera Ithaca, Search for a Common Ground Film Festival, www.konscious.com, Women Make Movies, Northeast Historic Film, 7th Art Cinema Corporation, University Film and Video Association (UFVA), and Vermont International Film Festival.In addition, she served on the editorial board for Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, and The Moving Image.

Scholarship

Zimmermann authored and co-authored numerous scholarly articles that address urgent issues, including women's rights, war, environmentalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic, that were not always covered in mainstream news media or film studies scholarship.

Education

Zimmermann completed a B.A. with high distinction at University of Iowa in 1976, an M.A. in Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1979, and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1984.

Selected publications

Books

• Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar, with Scott MacDonald (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021)
• Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019)
• Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice with Helen De Michiel (New York: Routledge Press, 2018)
• The Flaherty: Fifty Years in the Cause of Independent Cinema, with Scott MacDonald (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)
• Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds in International Public Media (St. Andrews: University of St. Andrews Press, 2016)
• Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Local Place, with Dale Hudson (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015)
• Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, edited with Karen Ishizuka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
• States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
• Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)

Edited Special Issues

• Dossier on Co-creation Documentary During Pandemic and Protest, Visible Evidence Forum, edited with Helen De Michiel (2021)
• A Festschrift in Honor of Erik Barnouw, co-edited with Ruth Bradley, Wide Angle, vol. 20, no. 2 (1998)
• The Flaherty Film Seminars: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, co-edited with Erik Barnouw, special quadruple issue of Wide Angle, vol. 17, nos. 1-4 (1996)
• Soviet and American Documentary Theories, co-edited with Michael Selig, special international issues monograph of Journal of Film and Video, vol. 44, nos. 1-2 (1992)

Selected Article and Book Chapters

• "Independent Documentary Producers and the American Television Networks," Screen, vol. 22, no. 1 (1981)
• "Seventeen: Race, Class, Sex and Spectatorship, Afterimage, vol. 13, no. 10: (1986)
• "Hollywood, Home Movies and Common Sense: Amateur Film as Aesthetic Dissemination and Social Control, 1950-1962",Cinema Journal, vol. 27, no. 4 (1988)
• "Fetal Tissue: Reproductive Rights and Amateur Activist Video", Afterimage, vol. 21 no. 1 (1993)
• "Geographies of Desire: Cartographies of Gender, Race, Nation and Empire in Amateur Film", Film History, vol. 8, no. 1 (1996)
• "Transnational Documentaries: A Manifesto", Afterimage, vol. 24 no, 4 (1997), with John Hess
• "Turn Back the Attack" in Socialist Review, vol. 25, no.2 (1995)
• "Matrixes of War", Afterimage, vol. 28, no. 4 (2001)
• "21 States of Emergency" in Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, ed. Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (Routledge, 2003)
• “Beyond the Screen: On Contemporary Feminist Media Re-Articulations” in Indie Reframed: Women's Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema, ed. Linda Badley, Claire Perkins, Michele Schreiber (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), with Claudia Costa Pederson
• "States of Environmentalist Media", Media + Environment, vol. 1, no. 1 (2019 inaugural issue), with Dale Hudson
• “Coronavirus Drones Genres: Spectacles of Distance and Melancholia” Film Quarterly Quorum (2020), with Caren Kaplan
• "Media in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Big and High, Small and Low", Jump Cut, vol. 60 (2021), with Dale Hudson
• "Co-creation in Documentary: Toward Multiscalar Granular Interventions Beyond Extraction", Afterimage, vol. 41, no. 1 (2020) with Reece Auguiste, Helen De Michiel, Brenda Longfellow, and Dorit Naaman.