The Flaherty , livre ebook

THE FLAHERTY
THE FLAHERTY
DECADES IN THE CAUSE OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA
Patricia R. Zimmermann and Scott MacDonald
Indiana University Press
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2017 by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Scott MacDonald
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I remembered that he had always said that the motion picture was still an unknown continent, that no one had yet scratched the surface of its potentialities, that even his own best-loved films were only sketches, first studies for the great films of the future that might be made by the young of the future. It seemed to me that his name and spirit can best be perpetuated-can only be perpetuated as he would wish it-by an institution whose prime purpose is to help new talent to explore further and further into the possibilities of a medium so immense and so unknown .
-Frances Hubbard Flaherty
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Patricia R. Zimmermann: Imagining a History of the Flaherty Seminar
Scott MacDonald: The Logistics of Transcribing and Editing Flaherty Discussions
1. The Flaherty Way
1959 Frances Flaherty-Opening Remarks at the Seminar
2. A Seminar, 1955-1959
1958 Robert Gardner with John Marshall-On The Hunters (1957)
3. An Organization, 1960-1969
1963 Frances Flaherty-On Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926)
1967 Frederick Wiseman-On Titicut Follies (1967)
1968 Willard Van Dyke-Opening Remarks at the Seminar
1968 Jim McBride and L. M. Kit Carson-On David Holzman s Diary (1967)
1969 Michael Snow-On Wavelength (1967)
4. Politics, Cultural and Formal, 1970-1980
1970 Hollis Frampton-On Zorns Lemma (1970)
1970 Erik Barnouw, Paul Ronder, and Barbara Van Dyke-On Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945 (1970)
1977 Barbara Kopple and Hart Perry-On Harlan County USA (1976)
5. Shock of the New, 1981-1989
1981 Ed Pincus-On Diaries (1971-1976) (c. 1980)
1983 Trinh T. Minh-ha-On Reassemblage (1982)
1984 Bruce Conner-On Ten Second Film (1965), Permian Strata (1969), Mongoloid (1978), and America Is Waiting (1981)
1987 Peter Watkins and others-On The Journey (1987)
1987 Su Friedrich-On Damned If You Don t (1987)
6. Crises, 1990-1999
1990 Marlon Riggs-On Tongues Untied (1989)
1991 William Greaves-On Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1972)
1992 Ken Jacobs-On XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX (many performances after 1980)
1992 Kazuo Hara-On Extreme Private Eros (1974)
1994 Nick Deocampo-On Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song (1987), Memories of Old Manila (1993), and Isaak (1993)
1994 Mani Kaul-On Uski Roti (A Day s Bread, 1969) and Dhrupad (1982)
1995 Craig Baldwin-On Sonic Outlaws (1995)
7. The Brand, 2000-2015
2000 Sergey Dvortsevoy-On Paradise (1995); Vicky Funari-On Paulina (1998)
2008 Bahman Ghobadi-On Life in Fog (1997), A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), and Half Moon (2006)
2013 Eyal Sivan-On The Specialist (1999)
2015 Mounira Al Solh-On Rawane s Song (2006); Marie-H l ne Cousineau-On Before Tomorrow (2008, comade with Madeline Ivalu); Hassan Khan-On Fuck This Film (1998)
2015 Tariq Teguia-On La cl ture ( The Fence , 2002), Gabbla ( Inland , 2008), and Thwara Zanj ( R volution Zanj , 2012)
2016 Luke Fowler-On To the Editor of Amateur Photographer (2014, comade with Mark Fell), and Luis Ospina-On Aggarabdo pueblo ( Vampires of Poverty , 1978, comade with Carlos Mayolo)
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like the Flaherty Seminar itself, this book has been a collaborative process, not simply between the two authors, but between them and the many people who helped make documents and memories available.
Of course, we could not have begun this project without the assistance of the women and men who have directed Flaherty activities during the past ten years. Our sincere thanks to Margarita De La Vega Hurtado, Mary Kerr, and Anita Reher, and to program manager Sarie Horowitz. They enabled us to access the voluminous Flaherty files and to make use of the extensive archive of recorded discussions.
Dan Streible (who programmed the 2011 Flaherty) and his colleagues in and around the master s program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University were instrumental in an effort to make the recordings of Flaherty discussions accessible. Thanks to Dan and to Julia Kim, Alice Moscoso, Yvonne Ng, Laurainne Ojo-Ohikuare, Brent W. Phillips, Erik Piil, and Kimberly Tarr for their hard work and goodwill. They have been instrumental in opening the way for scholars to work with this remarkable archive.
Ithaca College provided generous grant support for archival research, final manuscript production, photographic illustrations, and time away from teaching. Numerous summer research grants and reassigned time awards from the Office of the Provost and the Center for Faculty Excellence supplied money and time to assist in thinking through the complex history of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. The Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College supported Patricia Zimmermann s attendance at a multitude of Flaherty Seminars, key ethnographic participant observation. Large and small grants from the Park School s James B. Pendleton Research and Production Fund facilitated primary archival and photographic research. These grants were essential in hiring ace research assistants in New York City who mined the vast archives of International Film Seminars and the Flaherty Seminars: Joshua Deal, Erin Ferro-Murray, Steve Holmgren, and Sarie Horowitz.
Hamilton College made possible Scott MacDonald s attendance at numerous Flaherty Seminars; thanks in particular to Deans Patrick Reynolds and Margaret Gentry. The college also provided a generous subvention to assist with indexing; thanks to Deans Samuel Pellman and Margaret Gentry. Various Hamilton colleagues assisted with the transcription of Flaherty discussions; thanks, in particular, to Benjamin Salzman for patient technical support of various kinds.
Collaborative spirit infused the research process to produce this book. An amorphous, constantly changing, ephemeral organization, the Flaherty produces conversations rather than products. As a result, historical research has extended beyond primary documents into exchanges and interviews with key participants who contributed insights into particular periods of the seminar and shared a sense of the affective surround of the experience. For their analyses and memories and time, we thank Charles Benton, Sally Berger, Linda Blackaby, Mahen Bonetti, Patti Bruck, Phred Churchill, John Columbus, Jack Coogan, Nadine Covert, Kathy Geritz, John Gianvito, Faye Ginsburg, Tony Gittens, Marlina Gonzalez-Tamrong, D. Marie Grieco, Carlos Guti rrez, DeeDee Halleck, Ed Halter, Richard Herskowitz, Margarita De La Vega Hurtado, Bruce Jenkins, Tom Johnson, Mary Kerr, Lucy Kostelanetz, Irina Leimbacher, Juan Mandelbaum, Louis Massiah, Ann Michel, Gabriella Monroy, Alyce Myatt, Dorothy Oshlag Olson, Bill Pence, Julia Reichert, B. Ruby Rich, Jay Ruby, David Shepard, Cecile Starr, Caspar Stracke, William Sloan, Barbara Van Dyke, Phil Wilde, and Chi-hui Yang. Patti Bruck and Juan Mandelbaum shared critical internal board documents as well. Jay Ruby imparted not only his own experience of the Flaherty and its offshoot Arden House as a board member and programmer but also his analytical perspectives as an anthropologist and fellow scholar of documentary.
We thank Erik Barnouw for spurring the writing of a book on the Flaherty Seminar and Ruth Bradley for having the courage to publish a substantial early foray into Flaherty history: the quadruple issue of the journal Wide Angle (vol. 17, nos. 1-4, 1995), edited by Erik Barnouw and Patricia R. Zimmermann, and made available for the fortieth anniversary of the Flaherty Seminars. Barnouw argued that an organization as important-and invisible-as the Flaherty Seminars deserved a scholarly book so its history could be recovered, analyzed, taught, and argued about.
Finally, we thank the many thousands of participants in the Flaherty Seminars over the decades. Although the seminar grounds independent media arts culture in beautiful and daring films, videos, and (in recent years) installations, its argumentative, collaborative, engaged, passionate audiences sustain it.
THE FLAHERTY
INTRODUCTION
The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema represents an unusual collaboration between two scholars and two ways of doing history. Throughout the evolution of this project, Patricia R. Zimmermann has focused on writing the institutional history of the annual Robert Flaherty Seminar, while Scott MacDonald has explored the recordings of the discussions that have taken place at t