Robert Flaherty Seminar: Landscape and Place
Wells College, Aurora NY
Summer 1996
BY:
(For permission to use contact: nasubi@juno.com)
The 42nd Annual Robert Flaherty Seminar was held at Wells College, Aurora NY from August 3-8 1996. It was my first chance to attend. What follows is a summation which in no way hopes to cover the wide range of topics and comments made by film and video makers, as well as scholars and the Flaherty programmers. I was able to attend, along with a sizeable contingent of Ohio professionals due to a grant from OVRMAC and the support and recommendation of Ruth Bradley and Jack Wright.
The theme of this year's Flaherty was Landscape and Place. Each of the selected works presented a particular way in which we visualize, conceptualize and deal with space. Landscape and Place was meant to contrast (though not necessarily to polarize) the differences in viewing, travelling through, making use of, manipulating, and documenting social and personal space. Some examples of the range in which featured works fit, inevitably brought up a classic divide between avant-garde or experimental films and the more straightforward narrative documentary of the social realist mode. Of the latter, Black films and Native films from Canada comprised a block of work exemplified by Ngozi Onwurah's AND STILL I RISE and Alanis Obomsawin's KANEHSATAKE: 270 YEARS of RESISTANCE, RICHARD CARDINAL: CRY FROM A DIARY OF A METIS CHILD and Merata Mita's BASTION POINT, among others. These filmmakers also had their own particular spin on the use of the medium. Onwurah's film was composed as an essay tackling the stereotypes of Black women and Black sexuality. Thus, she made rhetorically use of argumentation and evidence.(This position was twisted around and re-invented in her later work WELCOME II THE TERRADOME.)
Both Alanis and Merata framed their pieces inside a different sense of history that is, the reprivileging of their erased history as a people colonized and exploited by European history. Onwurah, Alanis and Merata also pointed to the use of storytelling as a recourse to reclaiming their history and traditions as well as the way in which they perceive their world.
In terms of the avant-garde, James Benning's NORTH OF EVERS was perhaps the intellectual or structural brick wall that sent the first ripples of unpleaure through the audience. Speaking more as an observer, it seemed that
There were of course other viewpoints. One woman, who identified herself as a woman of color, was grateful for Benning's film because it allowed her access to a whole range of places that she would not have otherwise been able to see or enter, not just in terms of physical movement, but in terms of personal safety. Personally for me, I appreciated Benning's commentary and positioning throughout the seminar. He identified himself as very much influenced by the structuralist mode popular in the 60's and 70's. It's precision and attention to micro and macro details is something I can appreciate beyond its intellectual control and its resistance to the obvious.
If memory serves me correctly, it was the day after Benning showed his first work that George Kuchar showed his first WEATHER DIARY and Steina Vusulka gave her latest performance piece of VIOLIN POWER. Fueled as we were on a long series of works dealing with the land issue in Canada, the Native situation in New Zealand, the Black diaspora in Europe and America, Kuchar's work was openly attacked as the video exemplifying the privileged white male.
"It's interesting that an $11 video is being bandied as the work of the privileged white male," quipped Benning at the BBQ that followed that afternoon's eruption.
Loretta Todd came to that session equipped with a long quote whose source I have forgotten, but whose substance seemed to voice what others in private discussions also seemed to be interested in. Namely, that the sophisticated intellectual cultural critiques seem most useful when voiced from the armchair perspective of the academic institution (read as Anglo-European, shortened nowadays to Western perspective). However, when the Native American or Black African (or presumably other "minorities") seek to invoke the critique, or to question it against Western configurations, they meet with resistance. Of course, for any one who remembers the confrontation with Kuchar, it did not go down quite this succinctly. (Loretta Todd at one point claimed that her position was being called "savage.") Matters weren't helped by Kuchar's reaction that everything he had seen up to that point had been disgusting, particularly the mess raised by the social realist documentaries put forth by Natives and the Black diaspora.
Apparently, irrational eruptions like this are a usual occurrence at the Flaherty. Such was Laura Marks' comment to me. I was unclear whether she meant that around day three the fatigue had set in. We were getting tired of asking and fielding easy questions and thanking film and video makers. In short, we were tired of being polite and wanted to really get into it. But, I think Marks meant just that the disparity between the social realist documentary and the avant-garde smacked of the cool handed space between academic criticism in an "art for the spirit's sake" (to paraphrase Scott MacDonald) and the responsibility of art within social and political discourses.
It struck me as interesting, in the eruption, that no one thought it necessary to apply the same critique to Steina's performance piece. All the raw materials were there as much as in Kuchar's. Landscapes seized without attention to inhabitants, images and sound manipulated beyond their "original" formations - even to the point of Steina's playing interfering with the spectator's view. But in my mind, the intellectual exercise, fueled as it was by a political agenda, found its target in Kuchar. And that was wrong.
As a final aside to that most memorable event, the issue of high and low art was raised (again by Loretta Todd). Though this was merely a beginning platform for what her larger statement was. The question did make Steina ask "Which of us (meaning George or her) is high and low ?" In a discussion I had later with Jesse Lerner, I came to see this observation in a simpler light. Some of us did not understand what Steina was doing in her piece.
Simply put, the electronic signals from the violin travel through the MIDI box where certain signals trigger certain effects in the computer. According to Steina, each of the 5 strings is responsible for altering the video signal. This is basically the equivalent of guitar pedals that add reverb, chorus, or whatever to the basic sound. Steina also was able to address and change programs on computer disks by assigning one of the strings to that task. This is equivalent to punching up a particular track and section on a CD player and playing along with it, with the difference that Steina also influences output as well as controlling playback. The point is, the concept is rather simple and is not terribly "new" technology.
One final comment on this topic - as Steina raised it - was that she was more interested in the love of the camera and producing images. Stressing the artist's side of the work against the often misplaced intellectual intrusions into that space. Her stance was that a certain level of visual literacy has to be enforced otherwise you end up with questions that completely miss the form of the art and become overly involved with its contents.
The final night, Marlon Fuentes (who will forgive me if I don't delve deeply into the many layers and insights that his film BONTOC EULOGY brings to light) held sesshin until 5:30 in the morning. His group wanted to know if there was a larger system in which the Flaherty participants operated. To know, whether or not these distinctions between film and video maker, between artists and scholar, or even between makers, viewers, and programmers - whether or not that wasn't the real agenda.
One can factor out the asides of conversations gone awry because of misplaced political missiles shot at quarry all to willing to take the fight in a different direction. The inevitable question arises: So what ?
Presently, the struggle of the artist is that the work takes place inside a reward system, which places value on originality. This reward system has not been questioned on these grounds and thus we are complicit with this system and give it tacit approval. Being that this is the case, the development of discussion and the stop gaps that occurred seem related to this system.
Entrenched academics as well as artists know but cannot necessarily reveal the whys and hows of their success. They cannot give away their map or their navigation skills. This particular community does not answer questions such as these in direct succinct ways.
The question for me then, is how does one know whether or not they belong?
Belong to the art world, or the academic world, or surfing between all the spaces "wearing many hats" - as Jesse would say.
Marlon, as I understand it, came to film from still photography to grapple with issues that took place in time - and thus he had to deal with motion. Through his studies in Tibetan Buddhism, his interests in cartography, and his background in anthropology, he summarized the Flaherty Seminar as follows: Each of us has Time. We work though this matrix by way of landscapes and places manifested to us through memory. We navigate it using the toolbox of Cinema.
At the end of our sesshin, Marlon questioned whether or not the Path he is on now would eventually lead him to forsake art. I am at the crossroads where an MA in International Cinema inside an institution meets the outside. In introducing myself to the Flaherty community I said "My parents are from the Philippines, I was born in the States, but I speak Japanese. I got a Bachelor's in Comparative Literature and am now pursuing an MA in International Cinema. So I guess I'm lost." I was joking. But the truth is I thought the Flaherty Seminar might give me some insight on Real Estate.
An MA in International Cinema isn't the answer, just an indication of the journey ahead.
As a personal note, on August 2nd 1996 the last of my Clan died in the Philippines.
"... america
the loneliest of countries
my words change...
sometimes
i even forget english"
---Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters