Kevin B. Lee

Kevin B. Lee

Birth : 1975-10-01, United States of America

History

Kevin B. Lee (1975, USA) is a filmmaker, media artist, and critic. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning "Transformers: The Premake" introduced the “desktop documentary” format, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound and screened in many festivals including Berlin Critics Week, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Viennale International Film Festival. Through "Bottled Songs", his collaborative project with Chloé Galibert-Laîné, he was awarded the 2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Grant, the 2018 European Media Artist Platform Residency, and the 2019 Eurimages Lab Project Award at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. He was 2017 Artist in Residence of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. In 2019 he produced “Learning Farocki”, a series of video essays on Harun Farocki, commissioned by the Goethe Institut. In 2020 he is co-curating the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist with Will DiGravio and Cydnii Wilde Harris. He was Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor from 2011-2016, supervising producer at Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and has written for The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Slate and Indiewire. He is Professor of Crossmedia Publishing at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart.

Profile

Kevin B. Lee

Movies

Bottled Songs 1-4
Sound Designer
Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.
Bottled Songs 1-4
Production Design
Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.
Bottled Songs 1-4
Editor
Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.
Bottled Songs 1-4
Director of Photography
Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.
Bottled Songs 1-4
Producer
Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.
Bottled Songs 1-4
Writer
Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.
Bottled Songs 1-4
Director
Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.
Our Focus
Director
Video essay on the work of Jia Zhangke by Kevin B. Lee, specially commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum and IFFR as a response to the installation Close-Up.
Once Upon a Screen, Explosive Paradox
Self
‘Kevin’s piece on his childhood experiences with the film Platoon are an example of the very power of cinema to shape our relationship with the world, and the world’s relationship with us … an experience of childhood trauma so visceral, that I haven’t just gained new insight on the war epic itself.’ (Cidnii Wilde Harris)
Once Upon a Screen, Explosive Paradox
Director
‘Kevin’s piece on his childhood experiences with the film Platoon are an example of the very power of cinema to shape our relationship with the world, and the world’s relationship with us … an experience of childhood trauma so visceral, that I haven’t just gained new insight on the war epic itself.’ (Cidnii Wilde Harris)
Bottled Songs: Looking Into the Flames
Director
Kevin analyzes a video described as the “first feature film” produced by ISIS. Struck by the mainstream media’s fascination with the video as a movie, he explores possible cinematic connections: Nazi propaganda movies, Hollywood, and early leftist revolutionary filmmaking. Afraid of facing ISIS images directly, he adopts interruptive viewing techniques to bypass the video’s terrorist qualities and uncover insights into its contents.
Bottled Songs 1 & 2
Director
Two researchers investigate the dissemination of propaganda created by the terrorist organization known as the Islamic State and contemplate the media’s role in spreading this message. Exchanging video letters recorded from their computer desktops, the researchers share their thoughts and fears as they each dissect pieces of media produced by ISIS in 2014 that are still available online today.
Watching the Pain of Others
Thanks
In this deeply personal video diary, a young researcher tries to make sense of her fascination for the film "The Pain of Others" by Penny Lane. A deep dive into the discomforting world of YouTube and online conspiracies, that challenges traditional notions of what documentary cinema is, or should be.
Re-enacting the Future
Writer
A video essay by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee. Commissioned by Dana Linssen and Jan Pieter Ekker for Critics Choice V: Absence, 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam. Special thanks to Bero Beyer. Dedicated to the film I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS by Radu Jude.
Re-enacting the Future
Director
A video essay by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee. Commissioned by Dana Linssen and Jan Pieter Ekker for Critics Choice V: Absence, 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam. Special thanks to Bero Beyer. Dedicated to the film I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS by Radu Jude.
Harun Farocki: Presented
Director
What can be learned from watching only the moments when an artist appears in his own work? Harun Farocki appears in 24 of his own films; his time on screen totals 2 hours and 21 minutes: enough to form a movie in itself. The footage reveals a remarkable, evolving relationship between a man and his own images.
Harun Farocki: Lexicon
Director
Five decades of Harun Farocki's film and video material are transformed into an audiovisual vocabulary, teaching key Farockian concepts from A to Z. This video essay takes inspiration from Farocki's lifelong fascination with the teaching functions of film and media. Commissioned by the Goethe-Institut, a leading German-language educator in the world.
Harun Farocki: The Counter-Image
Director
This desktop investigation asks: how can one begin to learn about Farocki? Starting with a naive search for his name online, this film scans over his body of work and asks how one should begin to watch it. By using different methods to make sense of Farocki's images, a key concept emerges: the counter-image.
Reading Binging Benning
Director
How much can you see of a movie you can't see? A speculative video essay on the film READERS by James Benning.
Bottled Songs 3 & 4
Director
This video presents Chapters 3 and 4 from the series. « The Spokesman » (aka « A Guide to be driven ») investigates the online traces of John Cantlie, a British news reporter who was kidnapped and appeared in several Islamic State's propaganda videos. « My Crush was a Superstar » tracks a French ISIS fighter, Abu Abdallah Guitone, through a trail of messages, videos and postings to uncover his existence in both social media and reality. This leads to an uncomfortable first-person exploration of the gender dynamics behind ISIS recruitment strategies.
Playing Cinema with Lori Felker
Director
On the Chicago filmmaker's exuberant approach to the medium. As Lori says, 'You may never find an answer, because playing is the best part.'
Bottled Songs: The Spokesman
Director
Kevin investigates the online traces of a British news reporter who was kidnapped and appeared in several Islamic State propaganda videos.
Right Now Then Wrong
Director
“The film [Right Now Then Wrong] is really fascinating — it is basically the same story told twice, back to back, and the thing I really wanted to know is how the first version of the story compares to the second. If I took the same scene from both versions and played them at the same time, what could I find out? That was a wonderful exercise in critical viewing and side-by side analysis, but then I started to get a bit self-conscious: “Oh, maybe the audience doesn’t want to see this footage.” So, I thought maybe I can offer an alternative experience — if they don’t want to be spoiled, I can tell a story inspired by the film. This idea of having two video essays playing a the same time on different halves of the screen, the top and the bottom, and then at the beginning just instructing the audience that they can choose which one they want to see, they can simply use their hands to block the part of the screen they don’t want to see.
TR@N$F0RM3R$: The Premake
Editor
Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, will be released June 27 2014. But on YouTube one can already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.
TR@N$F0RM3R$: The Premake
Producer
Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, will be released June 27 2014. But on YouTube one can already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.
TR@N$F0RM3R$: The Premake
Writer
Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, will be released June 27 2014. But on YouTube one can already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.
TR@N$F0RM3R$: The Premake
Director
Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, will be released June 27 2014. But on YouTube one can already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present
Camera Operator
A portrait of the influential American film critic.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present
Editor
A portrait of the influential American film critic.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present
Producer
A portrait of the influential American film critic.