In Her Own Time: The final Fieldwork of Barbara Myerhoff

Directed by:  Lynne Littman
Run Time: 60min
http://directcinema.com/dcl/title.php?id=225

This is a very touching film, and we (Christian, Emily and myself) were graced with the presence of Ms Littman for this viewing.  Myerhoff died, RIP, shortly after this film was made, according to Ms Littman, of a severe form of lung cancer.    It chronicles Myerhoff's search for some reprieve from her cancer, some meaning, and even a miracle.

As a participant-researcher she is brilliant.  In an attempt at reprieve she partakes and embraces an orthodox Judaism looking at her relation to religion in the face of death.  Considering the circumstances she is facing, this film couldn't be more about life.  She is so engaging and interesting it's easy to forget her illness.  One particular scene that I find brilliant is her interviewing "Sultana," in front of her bookshelf.  This scene is notable for not only the simple pointed and direct questioning, but also the camera work of Ms Littman.  The camera settles on a set of shelves containing numerous books – secular books.  Then Myerhoff asks her about her orthodoxy books as the camera pans to to several bookshelves of same size.  She's asking Sultana about the strictness of her religion and, trying to break her down a little.  As Sultana expresses her dogmatic view,  Myerhoff relates a quote to her.  With a big and understanding smile, she says, "When the heart is open, there's room for 'yes' and 'no'."  Later on, when Myerhoff is reflecting back on Sultana's stict and dogmatic adherence to this type of orthodoxy, she says, "when I look at this woman, it's across a vast and affectionate distance."  Again, the poetic nature of Myerhoff just pours out.  But, along with this, she looks at the people serving this religion and seems to be asking if the restrictions are actually a freedom.  Are they restrictions, or new possibilities to life?

I don't think Myerhoff needed to go find this strict form of religion, this spirituality.  She, in fact, exuded a spirituality on her own – she just needed to be reminded of her connection, I feel.  I'll never know, but I do know that in a brief 60-min, I found a wonderful spirit in Barbara Myerhoff.

Broken Pots, Broken Dreams

by Maris Boyd Gillette.

Broken Pots, Broken Dreams explores what the transition from state workers to private entrepreneurs means to the craftsmen and women of the porcelain workers of Jingdezhen, China.  Once a proud workforce who's historical memory of the porcelain craft is – "we made porcelain for emperors"– now all but forgotten. 

Narrated by the author and filmmaker in the 2nd-person – not normal in anthropological film – the author has said that she wanted her audience to try to "imagine yourself…."  Imagine yourself, laid off; imagine yourself believing in something almost religiously and then it all being taken away.  What would you do?  She wants the audience to imagine the hardships of her subjects.  It's sort of like that time as a child when you discover Santa is not real, or, possibly as a religious person, it is revealed to you that God doesn't exist.  I find that I sympathize with that which touched Gillette's heart – her empathy with her subjects – but I think that use of metaphor and editing would have produced a much more arresting film than her telling us to "imagine" that.


I found this film somewhat interesting as I am working in Eastern Germany with a culture who has similarly gone through a major political ideological change – from socialism to capitalism.  And, also relevant to me – this on a personal/professional level – is the transition and change of my career as a commercial photographer with the advent of digital technologies, and the transition of print-based media to web-based.  In both cases something fundamental has been changed in life.  To use a cliché, a rug has been pulled out from underneath.  However, it's only my tangential familiarity which made this film interesting.

Deep Inside Clint Star "My Porn"

With a sweet innocence Clint Star (aka Clint Alberta) focuses on issues of gender, identity and cultural heritage getting us deep inside Clint Star.  That's a terrible first sentence, and one for the cliche trash bin, but somehow it seems right for this film.  Not that the film is full of cliche's, and neither does it get us deep inside Clint, metaphorically, physically (thank God, since it is subtitled "My Porn"), nor very deeply on a purely emotional level.  What it does do however is utilize an innocence and an unrestrained, almost child-like abandon in it's style, revealing embarrassment, vulnerability, issues of ethnicity and gender and sexual identity–of his people: Canadian Native Americans. 

Problematizing ethnicity, people in Clint's film are refusing ethnicity.  The cliche Proud Indian line of ethnicity is what we expect, but his characters don't want to accept this.  It seems there is an embarrassment about it.  Tawny Maine, Native American in appearance, wonders about her Egyptian-Swedish ancestry.  Tawny's life seems to have been lived as someone she is not.  Using mostly talking-head interviews, and 1980's-90's music video-like cuts, Clint evokes memory from his characters as his storytelling line.  How is he framing scenes for us to read deeper into them?  What does he want us to read?  It's not always apparent on the surface, just like what resides below the surface of a persons skin is not always what we read on the outside.

We as Visual Anthropologists study visual representations.  The idea of memory as a narrative symbolic landscape representing a deeper truth is what I believe Clint is trying to do.  As a talking-head interview-type film, which can be quite boring and non-revealing, Clint's playful style and in-your-face sexual questioning seem to touch on a different and unseen plain of memory's landscape.  And, if we are able to realize this, we see below the surface of just Native American, of just gay and deeper inside the human that Clint wants us to see.

Sweetgrass, and other shorts, Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Sheep.  Lots and lots of sheep.  About 3000 head.  Billed as "the last ride of the American cowboy,"  Sweetgrass documents the perilous journey of moving 3000 sheep over the treacherous Absaroka-Bearthooth mountains to summer pasture.  It's a masterpiece.  However, I want to blog about the forthcoming films we were privileged to see last Friday.  

Castaing-Taylor is a professor of Visual & Environmental Studies and of Anthropology as well as the director of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab.  If this is what Sensory Ethnography is, I like it.  Is this to be considered at new genre of ethnographic film?  I think so.  We were lucky enough to watch his mini-movies – different edits of footage used in the feature length film, Sweetgrass – assembled to engage the senses (visual and audible) with Castaing-Taylor himself.  These short films seem to be intended as installations.  Art installations.  Gallery or museum installations.  

Two films we watched were Coom Biddy, and Kinship, both to be released in 2010.  Coom Biddy, according to Castain-Taylor is a derivative of "Come I thee bid."  This is the call of the sheep herder "bidding" the sheep to come; to follow him. Kinship, suffice to say, is a relationship between animals and humans.  Since they are not released, I don't feel right detailing the scenes, and anyway this is for our class, and we all saw it.  

I do want to say that I'm completely inspired and, in conjunction with our reading of John Dewey's Art as Experience, I think I've found something that speaks to me on the esthetic level of which Dewey writes.  According to Castaing-Taylor, documentary has some privilege on "reality," however, real life does not have the markers of subtitles and explanations.  The experiences are internalized and, and if crystalized and condensed within the person, it goes beyond culture to "tie to our natural selves," said Castaing-Taylor.  This experience of having "an experience," (Dewey) is what Castaing-Taylor is going for, I believe.  Dewey says that an esthetic experience can exist all around at anytime, and Castaing-Taylor embodies this in his films of Sensory Ethnographic work.  

I like this very much, and am thinking of sensory ethnographic work of my own.  I think a new genre of ethnographic film is upon us, and for me this representation of an experience of life is what art is, and it's great.  

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, by
Merian Cooper (concept),
Ernest Shoedsack (camera),
Marguerite Harrison (author)
Terry Ramsey (writer)
B/W, 1925

I thought I would blog about this movie today as it is the celebration day of the Persian New Year.
This movie is a tour across Asia minor along the Angora passage.  We begin in Angora (present day Turkey) and head east to find…'The Forgotten People.'  These 'forgotten people' are the Bakhtiari, a nomadic people of Persia (today Iran). 
Though deeply Orientalist I love it!  Like Nanook it is a document of the struggle with nature for survival. Although not entirely 'deep,' it does reveal where and how people live, and what they eat, and how they manage the world about them.
It's a silent film narrated with titles, and overlaid with Persian music.  The music is brilliant, and I wish in fact, I could obtain a sound track from it.  Beautiful. 
The opening scene–a caravan of camels spread out across, and splitting the screen horizontally–hooks one visually, immediately.  For the rest of the film we encounter incredibly gorgeous scenery, thanks to the talented Mr. Shoedsack.  We encounter remote mud villages with dancing bears, and bleak landscapes fronted by formidable sandstorms.  We arrive with an encounter of Haidar Khan, "Chief of Tribes, Master among Men." 
Here the chief tells us that he must do the impossible and move his people–animals, men, women and children–hundreds of miles over treacherous terrain to escape the drought which has killed many. 
One of the most incredible scenes of the movie, and indeed, possibly that I've ever seen is the crossing of the river Karun. 
Chief Haidar Khan has to cross this huge river with it's glacial waters and torrential flow–with his entire community of 50,000+ people, and another who-knows-how-many in animals!  It's incredible.  It takes 6-days.  Roaring waters, screaming tribesmen, bellowing herds of goats and sheep.  The cries of the drowning.  What a description!  To cross the chief takes the hides of slaughtered goats, inverts them, and inflates them like balloons.  Goat balloons!  These are strapped together and lashed cross-ways with wood to make rafts.  All the people and belongings cross first.  The animals are the last to cross and must swim.  In all directions horses, goats, sheep, men trying to make it to the other side.  It's so amazing, and (again) the music is so beautiful, and the admiration I conjure up for this hardship makes me almost cry. 
The film is full of amazing landscapes and encounters with exotic peoples and ways of life: eating, dancing, smoking, playing games, transportation, craft work, etc. 
Although many of the titles are a bit corny by today's standards, I assume they were not to audiences of the late 1920's.  And, viewing the film now, that hokey part of the film is touching and comical and does not overshadow the beauty and information, or the extremely difficult conditions which the filmmakers must have had in getting such wide-ranging (in terms of territory and content) content in such a harsh place. 
This film should either replace, or sit next to Nanook within the ivory walls of ethnographic film studies.

Monsoon Reflection, Stephanie Spray

Sonically and visually rich, Stephanie uses sounds, camera angles, color and lighting, constructing a film in the Lucien-Taylor-Sensory-Ethnographic-school-of-Visual-Anthropology mode.  The practice of daily life, filmed with long takes and vivid, enhanced sound is skillfully done as several women work at agriculture, sharing their meager existence (meager by Western standards) among themselves and with the audience.
Opening the film is a shot of a woman’s hands working a grinding stone on a metate (to use the Spanish word).  The low, frontal angle of the camera gives the sense that if the hands push the grinding stone too much further it will actually hit the lens of the camera.  It’s as if from a child’s point-of-view, their head on the ground directly in front of the metate.  The lighting is beautiful, with an almost reverence shown to the hands.  Sonically, we hear the crunch and grind as if our own ear were in the stone itself.
Following this is another arresting shot of a landscape.  Overlooking green fields–rice paddy–we see nothing but the field, and the green beyond.  However, we are not alone.  We hear the obvious sound of someone working.  It’s loud, and working just below the frame of the camera.  The camera slowly tilts downward to appease our curiosity revealing an elderly woman as she thins the field.
As a student of modern anthropological film, these techniques are a wonderful use of sync sound, and a welcome addition in ethnographic video/film.  That we can determine where the sound is coming from–it’s coming from below the frame–brings us into what is happening on screen.  Were I not learning film making myself, I would not ask:  Where are the mics?  How many?  How are they deployed?  What mic’s is she using?  Were I not concerned with these questions at this stage of my career I would not at all be concerned.  Which is sort of the point.  The enhanced sound is not distracting.  Contrarily it’s enhancing to the experience of the business of watching the film. 
There are many other scenes, which can be talked about, such as the long takes of one woman smoking, enhanced by the loud sound of her struggling lungs.  I won’t go into all of it for this blog, and suffice to say that the lighting and sound is great in this film, and in this style of ethnographic film making. 

Forest of Bliss, Robert Gardner

It’s unknown (on purpose?) what Gardner’s film, Forest of Bliss is meant to convey. Echoing this, Jonathan P. Parry, an Anthropologist at the London School of Economics writes that he has “an uneasy suspicion” that this film is likely to convey to Western audiences that, “India is an ineffable world apart which must elude our comprehension. No explanation is possible; and all we can do is stand and stare.”

My thought on reading this final paragraph in his Comment on Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (SVA newsletter, Fall 1988) is “Exactly right!”

“Let the camera Roll,” says Parry. And roll it does: through shit, dead bodies, polluted water, up and down stairs, through smoky pyres of burning flesh and in and out of the fog and heavy air along the coast of Benares on the Ganges river in India.

Navigating the film, like navigating the process of death – which is essentially life, isn’t it?–is confusing, and unclear. Meanings change and changes bring new meanings. And, in the end, does it all matter? No one can definitively answer questions such as these. Death is silent, still, personal, unexplainable. Gardner creates beauty in a disgusting–and I’m sure foul smelling–place. He doesn’t lead us with narration, or subtitles, or any text whatsoever. There are no verbal explanations, nor translations. Like death, he remains silent. The film speaks on a sensory level, on a level of feeling and intuition. There are no answers, and metaphorically Gardner represents this with a beautiful film. There are some rituals being played out, but with no explanation. Just death. His camera’s movement in the streets amongst filth, and shit (human and animal) is a metaphor for life amongst death, I believe. The camera climbs and descends stairs, it observers strange rituals, and jumps back and forth with time revealing something yet offering no explanation. Often these visual clues show up again later in some context offering just a modicum of understanding. I see this camera work, and play with time as just like life. In life we have ups and downs. Things don’t make sense, then somehow they do. We step in shit, and it stinks, it thwarts our path, but we keep going. Life is always amongst death.

I also see his film as a metaphor for doing anthropology and specifically fieldwork. What is knowledge? We can ask questions, get answers, translate, and nod up and down, ‘yes.’ But, do we always really understand? In effect, I believe Gardner is saying, no we don’t. We don’t always understand, and sometimes a feeling, that which we have no words for, is somehow more true for one. Maybe the ‘I get it’ feeling is just that–a feeling, but not truth, not knowledge. Some questions and some answers are not to be understood. Meaningless. People don’t go to Benares to ask questions and ponder life. The go to die. Benares is death. No words will make that more palpable. The visuals do.

In Benares the representations of Life cannot be separated from the inevitability of Death. Horror and Bliss are not separate. Just as anywhere, Life and Death are one.

Jean Rouch, The Human Pyramid

Set in the capital Abidjan, 1959, Jean Rouch, in The Human Pyramid, uses no script and only social actors to tell a story of race and friendship among High School seniors.  His goal to understand "what friendship could be with “no racial complexes" between Blacks (Africans) and Whites (French) is brilliantly rendered as we look at the discourse surrounding race from the perspective of innocence. 

In the opening scenes Rouch is present (on the screen) explaining to the students his goal for his ‘experiment.’  He admits to the students that whomever gets ‘picked’ to be the racists, he wants "the racists to talk like racists."  In his psychodrama style of filmmaking, Rouch assembles the cast of characters, all real people (non-professional actors), creates a situation and lets the script be written as it unfolds in front of the camera.  The personalities of the students are not foreshadowed by their “acting.”  Instead, it’s my opinion that Rouch encourages–by his participation and the presence of the camera–emblishment of who they are as people.   He once said words to the effect, that people are more themselves when the camera is rolling than they are when it’s not.

Early on in the film, he tells us, “It is not a true story, it was written as we shot it."  This brings up questions of truth.  If we take that people are being more themselves when the camera is rolling, and the fact that what we are watching is in fact true–we see it, he filmed it, he was there, the students are present, real events are happening in front of the camera–then how ‘not true’ of a story is it?  In fact, I think what is discovered by the characters, and hence the audience, is pure truth.  The most telling proof is in the beginning when he is telling the students that they will not get into trouble for saying things; in essence “being” who it is they are in the film.  The camera rolls.  Rouch has given the green light to be the racist that you are (for example).  I imagine that this outlet was somewhat enlightening for the students.  Along the lines of being open and honest with each other and about each other, it stands to reason a cartharsis might have happened to the students just as one happens to the audience who see their own racist thoughts and fears presented onscreen.

Rouch is my new favorite filmmaker.  He seems to be genuinely compassionate and concerned with the human experiment as it is played out in all its forms here on earth.  His cinéma vérité, psychodrama style of presenting the world, his world (and hence, ours), cannot be considered anything other than genius.

Them and Me, Stéphane Breton

    Blending reflexive, observational, and participatory styles of documentary, Stéphane Breton questions the role of the observer supplanting the audience for himself.   Although the main characters appear to be the visible subjects of the film, the true subject is never seen – except for a glimpse of his hand during a monetary exchange.  Always present, in documentary – and in fiction as well, either tacitly or implicitly – the filmmaker represents his/her self by the subject matter chosen, the direction of the narrative, the statement being made, as well as by creative choices such as the use of black & white, or color, or a host of other options.  Breton questions representation itself in this film. 
   
    Breton lived and worked as an anthropologist among the Wodoni of Papua New Guinea, for many years (undisclosed how many years in this film) learning their language, becoming friends and essentially being accepted as 'family' member.  Although, not all of his trials and exploits are on display here.  Here he seems to be questioning the true nature of his relationship within their society.  What am I to them?  Why have they let me follow them around? What does it mean to be here?  Breton is either ingeniously asking us to question the title, and therefore the notion of documentary as always being a misrepresentation, or he has set out to make a film about 'Them,' and instead, made a film about himself.  The title should be Me and Them.  Or, possibly even Me through Them.  It's unquestionably more about the filmmaker than them. 

    Always handheld, and always narrating – it's his voice we hear the most – the audience becomes him, as he engages in dialogue making such revelatory statements such as:
"This camera is my bow."  (The bow and arrow of the Wodoni is part and parcel to their culture and existence.)
"What I don't like, wheat shames me is what brings us together."  A prejudice remark found only through principle.
"I'll wear them down in the end."  A comment on his tiresome intrusion.
   
    'The Self is only possible through the recognition of The 'Other,''  paraphrased the late Ryszard Kapuscinski of the late Emmanual Lévinas (d. 1995).  This film is an attempt to recognize the filmmakers' self through his subjects.  He has for years invaded their privacy and commanded their attention (although presumably not wanting them to pay him any attention) in attempt to discover what is 'Other' in them – and presumably some other specific anthropological work.  I believe he is questioning an anthropologists' attempts at epistemology, particularly as is gained by his participant-observer status.  By trying to be like them – his camera is his bow, his shame is their shame, his intrusions a need for understanding (Understanding whom? we might ask) – he inadvertently doesn't allow them to be themselves.  How can they?  Who is he, and who are they?  In the end, we don't know who 'they' are, and we quesion who 'he' (read: we) is/are in relation to them.

Belle Eulogy

I had to put Belle to sleep today.  Aka "Little Chickens" she was a great addition to my life, and I will miss her greatly.  RIP Little Chicken.

 

Song of Ceylon Basil Wright, 1934

 A lyrical ethnographic documentary film depicting the cultural and religious customs of the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka.  Originally sent to shoot footage for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, Basil Wright later edited the footage into a poetic film sewn together with beautiful images and sequences exploring the deep spirituality of Ceylonese people.  Wright contrasts a simplicity and complacency with life,  with the imposition of the West and it's ways of commerce.  In essence contrasting the a simple way of life with the lifelessness of western commerce.    The film is divided into four parts, separated with title card as if introducing the movements of a symphony:  "The Buddha," "The Virgin Island," "Voices of Commerce," and the "Apparel of the Gods,"  As a point well made, Wright returns us to the way of life of the Ceylonese without the West in the last 1/4 of the film.
    
In the first "movement" I'm particularly drawn to the scene of the bells ringing.  Normally I don't like bells ringing in movies (just a personal thing).  That sound, high-pitched, tinny and pervasive I'd rather do without.  However, Wright juxtaposes this sound with beauty and as the camera leaves the bells and takes us on a journey suggesting we are riding the sound waves, over the mountain tops, and floating with the clouds, and the birds.  A metaphor for the beauty of a life lived long before the British came. 
    
The criticism of a poetic mode of documentary is it's lack of specificity and it's overly abstractness.  For me, this is precisely what makes this film work.  Poetic documentary of the 1920's reassembled fragments of the world poetically.  Wright, along with John Grierson, recognizes this and assembles his film into a symphony of beauty, and pointedness.

Bontoc Eulogy, week 3

Bontoc Eulogy
    The Fake Documentary.  Immediately it sounds like an oxymoron.  Documentary.  Allegedly, it's defined as "documenting" reality.  In fact the documentary.org website is billed as "[s]upporting documentary filmmakers and promoting non-fiction film and video."  Non-fiction.  Not false.  I.e., True.  Or, at least truthful.  Fake.  Well, it's fake.  It's a replication of, not the original, an approximation.  It doesn't seem like Fake, and Documentary can be one term.  However, what is true, and what is real?  The fake documentary is a surrealist way of asking this question, presenting notions about identity and authenticity and challenging the view to examine the paradigm of documentary.  What do we expect from documentary?  The format of documentary is thrown into question.  What promise to the real is the documentary trying to provide? Just because it looks like a documentary, and "acts" like a documentary doesn't mean it's all real.  Does it?  No.  Notions of memory are brought to the fore.  How well do you remember a given event, or time?  Isn't it true that you and I may differ in our memories of a real event?  And, were we do differ, who becomes the authority?  Surrealism.  Throwing what we know into disarray, dislocation, upsetting the balance.  What we are familiar with now is parody, and satire.  Think The Colbert Report, The Daily Show.  The idea of a Fake Documentary then is almost a play on the words.  Or, in this case word.  Fake.  Is it a fake of a fake? Therefore, possibly a truth?  Or is is a document about fake(s)?  A documentary about a boat could be, The Boat Documentary.  Therefore, The Fake Documentary could be about fakes.  I think this is precisely what is surreal, and makes the Fake Documentary (a sub-discipline of Documentary) intelligent and valid as a form of storytelling. 
    In Bontoc Eulogy, grief and memory are our guides on a search for the truth about a man's grandfather, and ultimately a search for identity.  Through an assemblage of found footage and of memory, the narrator, Marlon Fuentes, asks the broader question of how we form our identity from memory.  Using the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Mo. (yuck!), as the place where his grandfather disappeared (he never returned), Fuentes imagines – through the real filmic footage taken at the fair –  evolving Philippine identity as a whole in the postcolonial world.  Postcolonial was a new concept at the turn of the 19th century.  Through the Fake Documentary, Fuentes forces the questions of What is meaningful, and what's usable in history?  How do we situate ourselves in the narrative of our history?
    But what about the term fake, in Fake Documentary?  Why does the word fake in this name work?  Today it was announced that J.D. Salinger died.  May he R.I.P.  He was notoriously private, and it's hard to imagine a biography about his life.  We don't know details about his life in the same way that we don't really know the details of Fuentes's grandfather.  We get a sense of his (Salinger's) life from his novels, and we assume from historical stories that the mental breakdown of Holden Caulfield, in the vernacular he wrote, and the place he came from, is really, him.   This is not much different from wondering – actually, assuming –  which parts of the life of Fuentes's grandfather are true and which are false, or embellished in Bontoc Eulogy.  Could we call a biography a Fake Biography?  Would anyone believe it?  Would anyone buy it?  Somehow, I don't think so.  The application of the work fake is different, and doesn't apply here.  Why not?   The term Fake Documentary is, in fact then, a work of fiction and can only be referred to as such.  Yes, there are parts which are true.  Yes, there is real footage of real people at real events doing real things.  Yes, Fuentes had a grandfather, but is this film actually about a real person?   Or, is it's purpose to inform about something else?  The Fake Documentary is more of a meta-text, presented as the main text, yet about some other (presumably) real text.  Fake Documentary is using the language and form of documentary (which we assume is real since, by definition it is documentary) in the same way that a novelist uses the voice of a character and the vernacular of a time period to tell a story, and ultimately inform.  Fake Documentary is not documentary.

Man of Aran, Robert Flaherty, 1934

    A recreation of a culture on the Edge.  Literally.  The edge of a 700-foot cliff.  The edge of the sea, and the edge of land.  The edge of an era.  Through recreation, Man of Aran depicts the drama of pre-commercial fishermen as men in small wooden boats go out to hunt for Basking Sharks.  Basking sharks are easily as big as the boat the 4-5 men captain, and using hand-thrown, hand-made harpoons it's easy to imagine the difficulty, and danger involved in wrangling one of these enormous beasts.  Add to this the fact that they are rowing off the North Western coast of Ireland–not exactly a place with calm waters and warm sunshine.  Prone to North Atlantic storms and unpredictable weather, the men are facing a daunting task bringing in the bask.  (Terrible rhyme. I couldn't help it.) 

    On land, or maybe more appropriately, on Rock, the people of the Isle of Aran scrape (literally) a living from the rocky terrain.  Life is hard, very hard for the people of Aran. 

    Or, at least it was. 

    Flaherty, in his second film has made a dramatic film documenting a way of life no longer entirely lived.  The days of fishing like this have been over for a short amount of time.  This is not told to us in the film, nor is it told to us how they make living and fish in the present.  In a romantic rendition, Flaherty, with breathtaking landscapes and a cast of characters depicting a family, recreates a very rough way of life.  Men out to sea for hours, a day, days.  The woman (there's only one, but we assume there must be others) at home with her young eek out a living amonst the rocky coast, and pine away at sunset wondering if she will spot the men's boat coming back.  It may never come back. This is dangerous business.

    The influence of Flaherty is as breathtaking as his beautiful photography.  He builds tension through the use of music, voice over (not narration, but seemingly the actors' voices) and tight editing.  Waves crashing against the formidable rocky coast, men and women struggling to find dirt among the deep cracks of the rocky terrain (which they use to create a garden), and storms brewing on the horizon, combine with heroic shots of hearty people looking out to sea, caressed by beautiful light.  The happy-go-lucky-life-is-beautiful-here-as-primitive-man has influenced all the Disney films I remember as a child. I'm reminded of the hearty Paul Bunyon type at peace, and in harmony with the animals, big and small of the forest.  His wife and children happy and singing with the birds and admiring the spider's web, and cracking nuts with the squirrels.  It's all there in 1934 in Flaherty's romantic vision of a way of life now passed.  It seems to say: It's backbreaking, dangerous work, yet, we're all happy.  Another film I'm assuming is heavily influenced is, 2001: A Space Odessey, by Stanley Kubrick.  The opening scene of the monkey smashing bones set to symphonic music (I think it's Beethoven), and is straight out of the scene of the Irish family breaking rocks to make garden walls.

    Flaherty's use of what seems like multiple cameras, but our professors tell us is only one, is cutting edge. Scenes from the boat of the fishing for the shark with multiple angles makes us feel that we are right on top of the shark itself.  Flaherty must have risked a lot to get these scenes.  Oddly, nowadays, when animals are involved in "documentary" films, there is usually a disclaimer saying something like, "No animals were harmed during the making of this film."  Not in Flaherty's films.  Not back then.

    None of the characters are developed, and we feel no real connection to them, unlike with Nanook and his family in his 1922 film, Nanook of the North. However, I think Flaherty is not going for that, and the characters are only important insofar as they help him achieve his vision of the romance of a lifestyle of a vanishing way of live. A culture unknown to most of his viewers.  Not only is the depiction of that of a culture on the edge, we are also watching film making on the cutting edge. 

     

  

Film: Mother Dao the Turtlelike (Vincent Monnikendam, 1995), 86 min.

"Fascination of the abomination" is how this was described to us today. However, as fascinating as parts of it may have been, and however fascinated with that which is abominable we may be, this film is, well, terrible.  
Explosions: we don't know the cause of; A desolate landscape: we don't know where; Spacey music, a narration of a subtitled poem…What's going on? 
Mother (Earth) is being destroyed. A love affair which began with a Virgin twin birth quickly descends into a depressing view of colonial Dutch, as they pillage the indigenous landscape and the souls of the indigenous peoples of the Dutch West Indies. 
The message: Evil western colonialists want what's under the ground, and will do anything to justify taking it, and in the process destroy what indigenous life, and lifestyle may stand in the way.  As a parallel, the recent movie Avatar has the exact same message, and is certainly much more entertaining.  

Constructed of what seems like home video footage, and propaganda films made from that time, the film has a loose narrative structure which breaks apart, looses us, and ultimately disappoints when it doesn't end once, twice, three times, etc.  It's too long and has made it's point in about 25 minutes, leaving us to suffer the remaining 61 minutes.  
The use of Sound, which is the only thing that holds the film together, is interesting, but hardly novel in it's use. It knocks on our eardrums with trippey, distorted sounds over incongruous images of suffering lepers, the senseless (seemingly) slaughter of beasts, rituals, work and play.  The poems are beautiful, and seeing as the filmmaker made the film in 1995 it would be nice if we could read the subtitles! 
A few images stand out such as a "leader" colonist standing elevated on a platform as he instructs the natives in god-knows-what lesson, he looks like a Christ figure, draped in white and crucified as he waves his arms about and is vertically bisected by a huge wooden pole.  We assume he's buying their destruction. 
A baby takes turns suckling on his mother's milk and puffing from a cigarette!  This is an early visual clue to the destruction of the culture.  But how are we supposed to read this?  Where did he get that cigarette? Is it his mom who is just stupid?  If she's stupid then does that make the vile destruction and forced labor of the "natives" acceptable?  Or, should we be sympathetic towards the unknowing child and mother, since it's the work of the colonists who brought them cigarettes?  Who knows? Is this the face of indoctrination?

I guess it's an attempt at a different direction in film making, but doesn't play up it's strengths and looses itself to the attempt at something different.  However, it's not different at all, and must certainly be influenced by far better films such as Baraka, and the various a;sdjf;asdjf;sdj series.  The scene of James Nachtwey in War Photographer photographing inside a sulfur mine is far more evocative, telling, and daring! 
The lack of story, narrative (voice over), and context throughout the film makes the film feel like a propaganda film itself, and I wish the filmmakers would have cut it down, provided context, and used the sounds as more than just something there which helps us stomach the film. 
Evocative use of sound and imagery and good story telling are better off viewed in a film like Lucien Taylor's Sweetgrass.