“Though he does have a beard, Professor MacDonald is not a tweed suit wearing dour academic, rather his passion for cinema and music has led him to the streets, showcasing the hardscrabble life of artists attempting to win fans one gig at a time.”
michael b macdonald is a cine-ethnomusicologist and associate professor of music at MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
Michael B. MacDonald is an award-winning filmmaker, cine-ethnomusicologist, and professor of music in the MacEwan University Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
My research areas include the use of digital cinema to study music (cine-ethnomusicology) and I focus on methodological issues in screen production research (Batty 2017) and research-creation (Loveless 2019; Manning 2016; Stévance and Lacasse 2019). I am particularly interested in ethnofiction for its ability to tell stories about musical worlds that are difficult to tell in print. Can screenplays and improvisational films, co-realized with musicians, tell us something about living musical lives that single-authored professional writing cannot? And are there ways of telling scholarly stories beyond the familiar documentary form? This asks questions about what cinema does and can do as cinema-thinking. Is it possible for scholarly fiction to support social movements? To understand complex ecologies made up of biosphere, semiosphere, technosphere and their complex ecological zones of interrelations. How might these cinematic journeys lead to teachings that may contribute to popular media education, and increased ecological awareness of worldings? Can we learn to make digital cinema in order to learn more about each other and our shared worlds?
What is it to have a musical idea in cinema?
- Gilles Deleuze on Cinema: What is the Creative Act?, Conference Lecture, March 17, 1987.
