Ben Mendelsohn is a PhD student in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University where he focuses on environment, infrastructure, and experimental film. He is co-directing a documentary about human earthmoving and the Anthropocene and developing a dissertation project about coastal land reclamation.
Ben Mendelsohn
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Writing on Public Books
Organic Machines
Matthew Barney and Edward Burtynsky are two contemporary artists not typically discussed in the same sentence. Barney is a provocateur known largely for his elaborately staged films filled with outlandish costumes and graphic imagery. Burtynsky is a large-format photographer known for his epic depictions of anthropogenic landscapes like dams, factories, and shipbreaking yards. While Barney’s […]
Humans and Other Animals
Toward the end of Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana (2013), an elderly mother and her daughter enjoy fast-melting ice cream bars while returning from their pilgrimage to a hilltop temple in rural Nepal. “We’re like children still learning how to eat,” the younger woman comments, as much to her mother as to the camera. […]
Changing Landscapes
The Museum of Modern Art recently completed its 13th annual Documentary Fortnight, a two-week festival of international nonfiction film. In a city flush with film screenings, the Fortnight is notable for its wide-ranging social interests as well as its commitment to the limits of documentary form. “So much that defines documentary today is about the […]
