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.