Brussels Sprouts

In case anyone was curious about what Professor Streible meant by his reference to "Brussels sprouts," while we were discussing the state of academic publishing and so forth, you can follow this link to my 5 seconds of fame, or shame. (You have to watch the whole thing and not blink around 3 minutes and 40 seconds.)

Carr, for those of you who don't follow the arts and business reporting in the Times, is a media industries columnist who does a regular column called "The Carpetbagger," which follows awards show hysteria. His jibe (which I think is kind of funny, actually) isn't that far from what people say about writing on documentary when they're being more charitable: the pull quote from a positive review which now appears with the Amazon listing describes it as a "sobering reappraisal of documentary film," which I'm pretty sure is meant to be praise, but sounds a bit like "it's not fun, but at least it goes over things we already know." This is an echo of Bill Nichols's now-famous phrase (in Representing Reality) describing documentary as participating in the "discourses of sobriety."

Just for the record, I think Streible's book is excellent. And it's got a blurb by none other than Martin Scorsese, who knows something about Fight Pictures.

"Objective" Newsreel & the Discourse of Journalism

Last week, we went over a few topics in dealing with newsreel, fabrication, construction, and artistry. So, we learned that newsreel wasn't quite as mechanically produced "raw" materials. Indeed, in some cases, it possesses a tone, an "accent" toward a particular intellectual and emotional response from the audience. I wonder to what extend the evolution of newsreel were affected by the purportedly "objective" journalism that came to be defined as a result of a similar procedure that formed Movietone products? Here I am referring to the evolution of journalism through which the need to produce news that could be catered to various political views hence available for purchase across the political spectrum. 

hadi

Avant-Garde Film

This sounds silly but I am really studying Avant-Garde film for the
first time and I am intrigued by the statements in the reading that
take a stance on content and subject matter of film.

I always considered the term Avant-Garde in narrow terms, or defined
in terms of filming technique strictly. I never considered that the
Avant-Garde subject matter and treatment of subject involved in such
high notions of social importance and portrayal of reality.

Personally up until now I considered most Avant-Garde film full of hot
air with touching moments between people pushed by editing and camera
technique. I never considered it as trying to fill an important gap
that Hollywood creates as it pursues giant blockbusters and ignores
"life," "reality," "fact" or the "actual," borrowing terms that
Vertov, Grierson, Rotha, Wolfe and many other use.

Mostly "Notes on the Avant-garde Documentary Film" by Ivens and "The
Revolutionary Film - Next Step" by Hurwitz gave me this
interpretation. I would like to comment that in regards to Hurwitz,
his fatalistic vision of the masses leads me to view his work as
lacking any inherit truth - since I disagree strongly with his views.
His nihilism makes his arguments for a separate class of avant-garde
film seem elitist. Existentially he falls into a the category of
Fascist, and calls for revolution but fails to see the nuance between
rebellion and revolution.

The Rebel = good, Revolution often turns into fascism.

And as soon as I learn to comment on others post you will hear more
from me!

Aaron Howell
agh247@nyu.edu

(Left) Newsreel, cont'd

A few dangling threads, one or two of which will be picked up next class…

I think that a few of the questions that were being posed at the very end of class – about the pragmatics of Workers Film and Photo League newsreel production, circulation, and screening – might be answered by Russell Campbell's 1977 essay for the leftish film history/theory journal Jump Cut, which has put much of its back catalogue online. Campbell is the author of the best study of the WFPL; this article is a very abbreviated version of a longer study, which is required reading for anyone who wants to know more about the WFPL. (I think it's better than William Alexander's more-frequently-used FILM ON THE LEFT, which is an oral history of left documentary in the U.S. during the 1930s.)

If you blink, you'll miss an important point that Campbell makes: some of the WFPLers worked in the commercial newsreel industry. This pragmatic detail underscores something we noted frequently today: that the sharp opposition historians might like to draw between "mainstream" and "alternative" nonfiction traditions and practices, whether you measure those differences formally, politically, or otherwise, breaks down somewhat when one starts examining the "opposing" sides more closely. The point here might be less that there's no difference between a Movietone newsreel promoting the latest entertainment product from Hollywood and a WFPL newsreel promoting proletarian revolution – and of course there is a big difference at the level of "content"– and more that it's harder than one might think to generalize about those differences, and to make those generalizations stick to any aspect of the material the film historian looks at: the style of the camerawork; the lists of personnel; the audiences who went to one newsreel or another… (A case in point: the endless, excruciating debates in the Soviet Union about whether Vertov's experimental technique is in line with Marxist-Leninist theory or not; although he looks to us today like the very model of the political/artistic avant-gardist, many of his fellow revolutionary artists had no trouble calling him a "formalist," by which they meant a political reactionary.)

Another point to make here – a kind of historiographic, or meta-historiographic one – is whether a tradition or a form can contain its opposite and still be that thing. The Burkhardt film we saw at the beginning of class, for instance, which turns Manhattan into a "strange" place: is that a travelogue, or a parody of a travelogue; and what would be the difference? Is a newsreel that shows what the commercial newsreels won't show still a newsreel? (Pundits are fond of asking this question about The Daily Show.)

One could also ask it of the present-day organization Labor Beat, which one might see as following in the footsteps of the WFPL. Based in Chicago (like many important developments in American liberal and left documentary), Labor Beat disseminates information about workers' and others' efforts for social justice; the short video programs they produce have the size and shape of a newsreel. But are they newsreels? Or short documentary films? (If you look at the site, you can see that Labor Beat is aware of this historical resonance…) It might seem like a trivial distinction. But imagine that you are Raymond Fielding, updating your book for the third time. Do you count this kind of work in or out of the tradition?

jk

A Recent Short video from Ethiopia" by Werner Herzog

This is a short video I received through facebook. It is made by Werner Herzog as part of his trip to Ethiopia last year. The video is part of a trio project funded by SkyArts to promote opera. The whole piece seems to reflect Herzog's take on La Boheme Opera. I tried to gathered some information about the music piece through searching for "opera for dummies" but found little. Wikipedia explains that the title corresponds to exoticism, libertinism, and free-mindedness within the time frame of mid. 19 cent. France. While watching, I ask myself am I suppose to figure out the revisionism or decolonization? Talk of Herzog and travelogue format came up in last class, I thought to share this. Anyone figure something out, please let me know. I hope the local participant were paid for their "view" and "silent" performances.

here is the link: 

http://www.skyarts.co.uk/video/video-sky-arts-opera-shorts-werner-herzog/

hadi

Non-"Fiction" under the shadow of Art History...

Comparing my undergraduate notes about major art historical movements with Stam's coiling of art and film histories, (Film Theory: An Introduction) I notice that the formation of cinema coincides with "Realism" and Naturalism movements in literary and visual arts. My first impulse is that to what degree it is useful to think of such connections when making sense of non-fiction" or (using Dan's term) "non-theatrical" films? While "Realism" is considered as artistic response to Romanticism of aristocratic novelties, it faces a crisis when juxtaposed with the rendering of the "real" as a mere biological construct (promoted by Naturalism). To what degree non-fiction actualities fall into a field of contention and crisis already present through Realism vs. Naturalism discourse? Stam explains how well cinema incorporates the modernism and realism, the technological apparatus and old-fashion romantic melodrama related to Realism. This happens while literary and figurative arts are moving away from "Realism" to Modernism. This factor is highly present in feature documentaries we have seen so far. It seems to me that we can trace both "Realism" and Naturalism in non-fiction films, but is it helpful to draw ourselves further into art history problematics? I mean, does this help us to make a better sense of actualities? 

Moreover, associating Orientalist readings to non-Europeans solely (as Stam does) is also problematic. Dan's coiling of "non-exotic" term to both Europe and Africa draws the attention toward the shortcomings of geographically loaded "reductionist" terms. Should we separate the discourse from the geography altogether? Isn't this where Third Cinema was heading? Can we take the idea and apply it to early cinema? 

More I think about the term "non-fiction" more I find it problematic. Non-fiction term implies that it tell stories that seem to be predicated on an indexical and authentic relationship with the world outside of the film but that is yet to be verified. Furthermore, they all (maybe not all but mostly) tell stories but we associated them as "real" not "fiction" in similar ways that historiography is communicated through storytelling. But in both cases, the story must be verified and chances are (good chances are) that the stories are not authentic. But even if they are, the stories are nevertheless subjective against "objective," outside of us, facts, or based on Plato's definition of "universal truth." Non-fiction somehow resembles a film that is not a feature fiction film, at least that is what it reminds me, but then who can call Flaherties films or Grass non-fiction? Documentary as a rubric for them simply opens another can of worms. I prefer Dan's "non-theatrical" as a less problematic term, but it does not work for everything that is not "theatrical" by definition. In case of films like those of Flaherty, maybe we should stick with documentary while gently throwing the terms subjective, fictional, and quasi-indexical into it.

hadi

The Anti-Nanook

I mentioned the Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian retrospective at MoMA in an email. A couple of nights ago, I went to see the couple's best known film, Dal polo all'equatore [From Pole to Equator] (1986; 101 min.). According to the filmmakers and Jeffrey Skoller, who writes about the film in a very interesting essay in Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, Dal polo is based on a film by Italian cinematographer (or, according to some, "documentary filmmaker") Luca Comerio, using travelogue footage he shot between 1899 and 1920. (Comerio was trying to get a job at the new institute for cinema set up by Mussolini; the film appears to have been a kind of demonstration of his breadth of knowledge of the art.)

Comerio's film makes use of many of the forms of non-fiction we've encountered already: not only safari and expedition footage, but actuality footage of various kinds and, at the very beginning, some white-knuckle images from moving trains and ice-breakers. ARL and YG re-printed the film, slowing sections of it down quite radically, and making other changes that focus the viewer's attention on the beauty and horror of Comerio's cinematography.

Quite a bit of the film falls into a category I will call "animal porn," by which I do not mean pictures of animals copulating, but rather images of wildlife that demonstrate how much of man's control and domination of nature is left out of most wildlife documentary, even (or especially) those films which purport to show us how animals "really are." (I am leaning here on the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, who describes the relation between human porn and narrative fiction film in an analogous way, in Looking Awry and elsewhere.) This material is both fascinating and somewhat difficult to watch. I highly recommend the film (playing again on Feb. 19) to anyone who wants to think about the afterlife of the nonfiction genres we've been studying, and the possibilities for their critical re-use by later filmmakers.

Multiple Modernities, the Question of "What If..."

In last class, Dan responded to my question about methods of storytelling in historicity and its ideological component by bringing up the "what if..." question to refer to a comparison between the ideological viewpoint of a Moslem versus that of a Christian religiosity in media portrayal of the Other. Afterward, I thought about the nature of hypothesis itself and the possibility of raising the "what if..." question in dealing with history versus theory. I guess I pose a question whether we can really talk about such hypothecization without the consideration of the relations of power and the hegemony of discourse? Moreover, I thought, the distinction between historicity and theoretization in matters of "what if..." makes quite a difference. How do we really know what if...? In this specific case, we are dealing with multiple modernities, for example, with vastly differing trajectories of power and hegemony of one over the other. Can we exclude the relations of power and reach to a comparative equilibrium? This makes me think of the overall discourse of humanities and media analysis and the resistance to more "ideological disciplines" (Edward Said's term) of social sciences in the study of cinema and visual mediation overall.

hadi

Music In Grass

          I had the chance to watch Grass completely and realized that my observation about the music in the film was premature, at least. Here is what I found: All the performers are Iranian except for the producer of music score, Richard Einhorn who studied classical music composition. He has been writing film music, among other works, for years. I was disappointed to see his name in the credit since it did not confirm with my expectation after hearing the music. Einhorn does something that can hardly be perceived as a music composed by a non-Iranian artist. I will research this a bit more and will hopefully share my findings with class. In regard to my opinion, I say this as a listener who lived 27 years in Iran and spent sometimes in Pakistan listening extensively to various classical and folk Iranian music. 

          The instruments were Tambur, Setar, Dohol, and Daf accompanied by the voice in some areas. These instruments can be found in the Turkish, Persian, and even Arab regions with slight variations in their physical make and sound. Having said this, the classical Iranian ensemble is quite distinguished from say Arab or Turkish pieces. (As much as I know.)

          Attempts were made before revolution to record and popularize the rich heritage of folklore music in Iran including that of Bakhtiyari nomads, which are portrayed in the film. We see them playing Setar and other instruments. Before revolution, the archiving and preservation of folk music were mostly channeled toward pop music through using their lyrics, an approach which were looked upon as Westernization of music after revolution. The whole idea of recording the folk songs (partly even sacred in some cases) and turing them into watered-down sexualized pop songs were controversial before and after revolution. Having said this, a rich tradition was accumulated on channeling these songs toward Iranian "classical" music, which were find in the film. For an Iranian audience the music resemble both elite and pop musics. It creates a paradoxical response which is hard to explain.

          To some extent, the music and specially songs compete with orientalist and tourist-minded intertitles and tries to mystify the tribes or to form a different national allegory in the film, as Jonathan explained in class. At some points the Western-minded intertitles and Eastern-minded music (this is a metonymic stretch) compete to claim Bakhtiyaries as their own national heritage each romanticizing the tribes in their own images. Poems of Baba Taher, an 11-century Persian poet and mystic known for his short poems and aphorisms, and other relevant lyrics are recited throughout the film beautifully. I strongly suggest viewing the film completely to get a sense of competing forces and their directions. 

Here is a link to Wikipedia for Baba Taher: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Taher)

hadi

Europe is not exotic; nor is Africa.

First, today, Feb 5, is Rick Prelinger’s birthday.
Second, here are the titles of the short pieces we screened on Feb 4.

The three from the Exotic Europe DVD:

[The Most Beautiful Water Falls of the Eastern Alps]
Die schönsten Wasserfälle der Ostalpen (Germany, ca. 1905-1910)
Santa-Lucia (Italy, ca. 1910)
Le Port de Barcelone (France, 1913)

I notice that a library cataloguer describes the collection thusly: “Short documentaries showing various scenic areas of Europe with emphasis on tourism and modes of transportation.”

The full dope on the DVD is this:
Exotic Europe: Journeys into Early Cinema (1905-1925)
(Berlin: FHTW, 2000) with booklet in Dutch, German, and English.

Contributing institutions:
• FHTW, Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (Berlin), in English called the University of Applied Sciences
• the Nederlands Filmmuseum (Amsterdam)
• the Cinema Museum (London), a homeless charitable institution with a great collection
• and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Germany’s federal archive)

Here’s where the Filmmuseum sells the DVD.

Other exotica on the disc:
How They Make Cheese in Holland (France 1909)
Durch die Vogesen (Germany 1911)
Rapallo (Italy 1912)
Industria del sughero in Francia (Italy 1913)
Hungarian Folklore (France ca. 1913)
Seebilder aus Swinemünde (Germany ca. 1913)
The "Lago Maggiore" Picturesque (ca. 1913)
Sarajewo, die Hauptstadt von Bosnien (ca. 1915)
Frauenarbeit vor 1920 (Germany 1917)
Cheddar (1920)
In the West of England (UK 1921)
Seebäder in der Vendée (ca. 1925)

About other items on our syllabus:
We did not watch Cities of Other Lands: Bucharest, Rumania (ca. 1919), figuring you got your fill of xenophobia. We will watch this parody of travelogues: “Seeing the World”: Part One, A Visit to New York, N.Y., by Rudy Burckhardt (1937, 10 min.).

I had hoped we would be able to compare
Introduction to Haiti, Mary Darling, U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs (1942, 9 min.) to Haiti, Rudy Burckhardt (1938, 10 min.). But we’ll not have time. You can watch Mary Darling’s film on-line. (Notice how much more often women filmmakers turn up in this non-Hollywood world than they do in classical Hollywood cinema? More unwritten history.)

Final note: Watch this before Feb 11.
South American Medley: Brazil,
National Geographic (1948, 10 min.).

National Geographic is too important for us to pass it by. We’ll briefly examine NG’s on-line database, which can be used to access its “stock footage” library.

Big Oil and Documentary

Here's a trivia question that I forgot to pose to the class this afternoon: can you name the multinational petroleum giant that, under a different name, supported the production of GRASS?

For anyone keeping a list (I am), that makes at least two of the most famous travelogue-style documentaries – films about an exotic "other" whom the filmmakers develop (our) sympathy for – supported in one way or another by Big Oil. LOUISIANA STORY (Robert Flaherty, 1948) was funded by Standard Oil of New Jersey, ancient ancestor of today's ExxonMobil.

- jk

Non-Fiction Film and Postcolonial Discourse

This is a sticky point. This is like talking about racism in academia. In one respect, there is such a thing as African American Studies so we don't have to bother dealing with racism all over the place, so we can accumulate the knowledge in one place, so we don't have to deal with it all the time, so we get rid off it for God's sake. After all there has been enough said about racism or colonialism, but has there? Not if one thinks of racism and colonialism as asymmetrical power over the majority of the world while the Western nations rode triumphantly toward "untouched" lands and "new" frontiers. Not if one makes an assumption that the Western institutions of knowledge would not get upper hand if they did not enjoy the overwhelming financial backing resulted from colonial policies. Maybe we can simply remind the reader that such a thing as colonialism also exist and then we are entitled to happily talk about whatever else that matters. Gunning makes a great use of this strategy in his article "Before Documentary." While he is busy categorizing early cinema into further and further compartmentalization, a term trop is going to save him from any association with an institutional analysis of a project of an empire.

In the context of both documentary and non-fiction, can we simply leave the job to poctcolonial studies and think of both film categories, which by the way hold an overwhelming body of images taken in the context of colonial expansion and policies all over the world? Colonialist image-making is not a title, is not a kind of film, is not an style of filmmaking; it is a discourse spanning the history of image-making for the very reason of its expansion and dissemination: The ability to travel, to go around the world and to film the Others, to bring back the shots and talk about them for the locals while the Others remain unable to do the same, at least. It is an unparallel power implemented over a subject who in turn becomes exotic, fantasy, a figment of imagination, a past.

Another sticky point is that we refer to "non-fiction" to imply to "non-fiction films everywhere" while the project becomes solely associated with Western films. This does not happen in studying Chinese or African documentaries, does it? The Other is compartmentalized by definition. What about "American or European non-fiction or documentary? We have been talking about offering titles to early films and there are quite a number of them out there. Well, obviously there is place for more titles.

Best.

hadi

Thoughts on the 16mm travel film ...

This post is in response to the article describing the typical 16mm travel lecture film, by Jeffery Ruoff, which I'll be talking a bit more about in class tomorrow.

My reaction to this piece broke down into a few parts. First, I was struck by how much these travelogue films mirror our own immediate relationship with filmmaking. Ruoff makes one off hand description on page 232: "They approach it as if they are showing home movies."Later, on page, he brings the idea up again on page 234: "Although the delivery is typically quite polished, [the films contain] features that recall home movie screenings rather than TV programs." In this sense, and given the occasional familial orientation of the filmmaking team responsible for the picture, I wonder if travelogue films represent a halfway point between amateur home movies and the mass entertainment with which we are most commerically familiar. Of course, this notion is troubled by the fact that most travelogue films try to eliminate narrative and focus on facts and tips for travelling. In this regard a partial transcript of one such presentation would have been helpful in establishing the exact tone of speech the presenter utilizes.

Second, as Ruoff suggests, the travelogue film speaks to an older style of filmmaking. Movies are often a way of seeing places one could normally never see. The Sean Connery James Bond blockbusters were a chance to see exotic locales in a time international travel wasn't nearly as accessible as it is now. With the travelogue film, all the superflouous narrative and spectacle are done away with. But the connection remains, nonetheless. However, it must be noted that the upper middle class crowd the films typically attract could probably travel to those destinations fairly easily.

Third, it would seem to me that the United States in particular created a suitable match for the travelogue films. Ruoff describes the travelogue film as a detour film, a car and road film, as opposed to the train and track film of most narrative cinemas. Given the geographic expanse of the US, even when focusing on West and mid-West, it is the thoroughly paved and highwayed nature of the country to would give itself over quite well to the filmmaking strategies of the travelogue director. One book that explores this idea quite well is Cross Country by Robert Sullivan. It's a travelogue exploring the author's own meandering journeys with his family on America's intricate highways, and the qualities of travel he discovers often mirror quite closely the kind of journey that would prove fruitful to a travelogue director as described by Ruoff.

MoMA in February

Last class, I mentioned the films of Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, experimental filmmakers who make use of a lot of different kinds of nonfiction footage and genres in their work, some of it quite disturbing. Some of these films are for those with strong constitutions only: they use footage that makes BATTLE OF THE SOMME look like BAMBI. And the music that accompanies this footage is no picnic, either. I hated their films when I first encountered them at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (aka "the Flaherty seminar" – see Barnouw) a few years ago, and then began to like them much more when I reflected on why they were so disturbing, and what it means to hate images, especially those which the filmmakers themselves haven't taken. But they fit very well with our course, and if they weren't so hard (more or less impossible) to get on video or 16mm rental, we'd be watching some in class.

The Ricci Lucchi/Gianikian retrospective which starts at MoMA tonight is part of an embarrassment of riches of documentary and nonfiction at MoMA this month, including a series of Oscar nominated docs from the early years of the Oscar category (and one or two films we will be watching in class), and the annual MoMA "documentary fortnight," a showcase of some very interesting new work in documentary from all over the world.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/film_screenings.php

jk

Part Test, Part Question

This blog post is part test, and part a question. After reading
Professor Streible's "The Nontheatricality of Nontheatrical Films" I
am intrigued by the few paragraphs dedicated to the term "useful
cinema." I am curious if "useful cinema" is essentially nontheatrical
in essence, but garners its name from archival old actuality footage
today repurposed for a look back into the past, or to illustrate
specific instances in history.
In this way it seems very useful, but as Professor Streible points out
it it then loses its historical importance as nontheatrical, that as
Rick Altman remarked in his essay began simply as a backdrop for art,
lecture and show.

Aaron Howell

3 Travelogues from Archive.org

The Screen Traveler (Damascus and Jerusalem)

Andre de la Varre (1936; 10 min.)
www.archive.org/details/ScreenTr1936

___________________________________________

Introduction to Haiti,

Mary Darling,

US Office of Inter-American Affairs

(1942, 9 min.)

http://www.archive.org/details/Introduc1942

___________________________________________

Brazil: South American Medley

National Geographic (1948, 10 min.)
http://www.archive.org/details/BrazilSo1948

Somme documentaries, and others: p.s.

p.s. Further confusing the facts, the liner notes for disc 1 on the DVD set Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, say that the photo of Billy Bitzer and his camera on Engine No. 856 is from 1896, in Boston.  However, note that disc 1 ("The Mechanized Eye") includes no films from 1896, or from pre-1900 for that matter.