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.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Sheafe Satterthwaite, "Francis in Her Inglenook" 2. Jonas Mekas, "A Screening of Flaming Creatures in Vermont" 3. Jay Ruby, "The Aborted Indigenous Seminar" 4. Amalie R. Rothschild, "I Was Taken Seriously as a Filmmaker" 5. Nadine Covert, "Reminiscences of Flaherty" 6. Linda Lilienfeld, "Notes on the Flaherty Seminar" 7. Dierdre Boyle, "Video Slowly Emerges at the Flaherty Seminar" 8. Juan Mandelbaum, "Forty Years" 9. Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Get Out Your Shovel" 10. Lucy Kostelanetz, "Godmothers, Godfathers, and an Organization with a Soul" 11. Bruce Jenkins, "Bordering on Fiction" 12. Richard Herskowitz, "My First Few Flahertys" 13. Ann Michel and Phil Wilde, "Video Projection at the Flaherty" 14. Michael Grillo, "A Mediaevalist's Projection" 15. Lynne Sachs, "Refractions" 16. Tony Buba, "Taking the Plunge" 17. Linda Blackaby and Tony Gittens, "Media Matters and Meteor Showers" 18. Jeffrey Skoller, "Thirty Years Later" 19. Helen De Michiel, "The Flaherty in 1986" 20. Louis Massiah, "The One Who Names You" 21. Philip Mallory Jones, "Sparks" 22. Tim Murray, "On the Road to Flaherty" 23. Su Friedrich, "One Lake and Two Kerfuffles" 24. Scott MacDonald, "Without Anesthesia" 25. Mark Geiger, "In over My Head" 26. Patti Bruck, "Simply Put" 27. Stacey Steers, "The Flaherty Laboratory" 28. Margarita de la Vega Hurtado, "Practical Difficulties and Different Locations" 29. Ayoka Chenzira, "At the Table" 30. Andrei Zagdansky, "Notes from the 1990 Flaherty Seminar" 31. Steven Montgomery, "Overcoming Contempt" 32. Laura U. Marks, "The Scent of Places" 33. Aviva Weintraub, "Folders" 34. Ken Jacobs, "THE TO-DO OVER XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX" 35. Portia Cobb, "Points of Departure" 36. Jason Livingston, "Many Moons" 37. Kathy Geritz, "Programming the 2000 Flaherty" 38. Sami van Ingen, "Coming of Age at the Flaherty" 39. Marlina Gonzales, "Flaherty 1995" 40. Ayisha Abraham, "Aurora, Bangalore, Mysore" 41. Grace An, "Beginnings/Endings" 42. Dorothea Braemer, "Talking" 43. Ulises A. Mejias, "Recovering Lost Memories" 44. Thomas W. Bohn, "I Never Met Robert Flaherty" 45. Jacqueline Goss, "Tendon Stretches" 46. Dan Streible, "Up All Night" 47. Tan Pin Pin, "The Art of Asking Questions" 48. Alyce Myatt, "Indelible Marks" 49. Erika Mijlin, "An Unruly Endeavor" 50. Vicky Funari, "Familiar and Strange" 51. Brian L. Frye, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Flaherty" 52. Ed Halter and Matt Wolf, "Remembering" 53. Chi-hui Yang, "A Radical Openness" 54. Simon Tarr, "Flaherty Reflections" 55. Lucius Barre, "Flaherty Replaces Cannes" 56. Howard Weinberg, "Film vs. TV—Flaherty & INPUT" 57. John Gianvito, "I Remember Being Profoundly Moved and Inspired" 58. Ilisa Barbash, "Five Reflections in Search of the Flaherty's Zeitgeist" 59. Sam Gregory, "'Witnessing' and Witnessing at the Flaherty" 60. Carlos A.Gutiérrez, "I Drank the Kool-Aid" 61. Joanna Raczynska, "Four Flaherty Seminars" 62. Roger Hallas, "Critical Humility" 63. Jean-Marie Teno, "Long Walks" 64. Andrés Di Tella, "Breaking All the Ordered Surfaces" 65. Leandro Katz, "Un banquete at Claremont" 66. Amir Muhammad, "The Sound of White People Talking" 67. John Knecht, "Flaherty Finds a New Home, at Colgate University" 68. Jim Supanick, "Stranger Comes to Town" 69. Dale Hudson, "Patty Sent Me" 70. Shannon Kelley, "Tilting, Torqueing, and Shuffling between Dimensions" 71. Jason Fox, "Returning to the Scene of the Crime" 72. Amalia Córdova, "Indigenous Media Detonations" 73. John Muse, "Forgetting Flaherty" 74. Marit Kathryn Corneil, "Breathing through the Screen" 75. Richard Shpuntoff, "The Act of Seeing Attentively" 76. Frances Guerin, "From Colgate University to the Central African Republic" 77. Dagmar Kamlah, "A Virus and a Mission" 78. Paweł Wojtasik, "I Didn't Know What I Was Doing" 79. Dayong Zhao, "Scents" 80. Josetxo Cerdan, "My Own Private Rayuela" 81. Karin Chien, "Reverberations and Amplifications" 82. Caroline Martel, "My Imaginary" 83. Susana de Sousa Dias, "From DocsKingdom to the Brotherhood of the Crystal Skull" 84. David Gracon, "Homecoming" 85. Joel Neville Anderson, "My First Flaherty" 86. Bo Wang, "Everyone Recommended It" 87. Gabriela Monroy and Caspar Stracke, "Turning the Outside in Again" 88. Ohad Landesman, "The Tactile Unconscious" 89. Alberto Zambenedetti, "Small Victories" 90. Eli Horwatt, "What the Flaherty Taught" 91. Hend F. Alawadhi, "Certain Voices Were Painfully Missing" 92. Ekrem Serdar, "Learning Things, Losing Things" 93. Jonathan Marlow, "Time Travels" 94. Roy Grundmann, "A Cinema that Breathes" 95. Lina Žigelytė, "Grass, Rocks, Water" 96. Jiangtao (Harry) Gu, "Not Exactly a House of Prayer" 97. Greg de Cuir, Jr., "Speaking Nearby Flaherty" 98. Sheafe Satterthwaite, "No Longer an Odd Voice at the Flaherty" 99. John Bruce, "Uncertain Expeditions" 100. Anocha Suwichakornpong, "In That Silence" 101. Scott MacDonald, "Alas, the Logo!" 102. Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Seeing Bill Sloan, 1928-2017"