Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Author at Public Seminar

Art & Design

Fleabag, Let Things Get Lost

Wonder, confusion, and why film needs more of it.

September 19, 2019 • by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

I want to talk about wonder in film. Wonder isn’t some starry-eyed luxury. It’s tantamount to messy, confused, vulnerable searching where all the possibilities of one’s world are up in the air, and one’s bearing is anxious. Wonder peeks out in mainstream film, but filmmakers should follow it and see ...

Beyond Gestures in Socially Engaged Art

Community processing and ‘A Color Removed’

September 6, 2018 • by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

On November 22, 2014, in Cleveland Ohio, Officers Frank Garmback and Timothy Loehmann responded to the dispatch of a young man pointing around a gun outside the “Cudell Commons,” a public recreation center in a largely African-American neighborhood tense with gun violence. The dispatcher neglected to emphasize that the caller said ...

How To Do Things Without Words

Silence as the power of accountability

June 28, 2018 • by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

A jarring phenomenon of the Trump presidency is that words are cheaper than they’ve ever been in my half-century-long life. Yet behind this cheapness, silences appear, difficult and important to feel. There is the silence of an estimated 4,645 deaths in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria. There’s the ...