[FREE PDF sample] The sublimity of document: cinema as diorama (avant-doc 2) scott macdonald (editor
The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2) Scott
Macdonald (Editor)
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://ebookmass.com/product/the-sublimity-of-document-cinema-as-diorama-avantdoc-2-scott-macdonald-editor/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Trapped: Brides of the Kindred Book 29 Faith Anderson
Mean Curvature Flow: Proceedings of the John H. Barrett Memorial Lectures held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, May 29–June 1, 2018 Theodora Bourni (Editor)
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: MacDonald, Scott, 1942– author.
Title: The sublimity of document : cinema as diorama : (avant-doc 2) /Scott MacDonald.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references, filmography, and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018051605 (print) | LCCN 2019004385 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190052140 (updf) | ISBN 9780190052157 (epub) | ISBN 9780190052164 (oso) | ISBN 9780190052126 (cloth :alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190052133 (paperback :alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films—History and criticism. | Experimental films—History and criticism. | Motion picture producers and directors—Interviews.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051605
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
(Véréna Paravel, J. P. Sniadecki, Stephanie Spray, Joshua Bonnetta, and Libbie Dina Cohn)
■ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Any extensive project requires many kinds of support. Of course, this interview project was only possible because of the generous support of the filmmakers and others interviewed, who gave of their time and energy, often over and over, to see the interviews to completion. And any extensive film historical project is dependent on a range of organizations, and on curators, scholars, and colleagues, as well as people who can help confront the challenges of our continually changing technological circumstances.
Thanks to Anthology Film Archives (and John Mhiripiri and Jed Rapfogel) for making DVDs of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s films available to me, years ago, and for other kinds of assistance over the years; to Dan Streible and the Orphans Symposium, for drawing my attention to Bill Morrison; to Mark McElhatten and the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde,” for making me aware of Lois Patiño’s work; to “Wavelengths” at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, for making me aware of Ben Russell’s films; to the LEF Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for organizing my interview with Fred Wiseman; to the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College, for organizing my interview with Abbas Kiarostami; and to my Hamilton College colleague Katharine Kuharic, for introducing me to the work of Janet Biggs.
Thanks to Haden Guest at the Harvard Film Archive and Ray Hemenez, for helping me make contact with Ron Fricke; to Gustav Deutsch and Alexander Horwath, for helping me be in touch with Nikolaus Geyrhalter; and to the Flaherty Film Seminars (especially programmers Josetxo Cerdan and Nuno Lisboa), for providing opportunities to reconnect with Lois Patiño, and meet Laura Poitras and Dominic Gagnon.
Closer to home, I’ve had continuing support from Hamilton College. Thanks to the Dean of Faculty Office at Hamilton College (especially Margaret Gentry, and the late and deeply missed Sam Pellman) for several travel grants that facilitated this project, and (especially Nathan Goodale and Onno Oerlemans) for granting me a subvention in 2018 and a course reduction during spring 2019 to allow me to complete this project.
Thanks to Ben Salzman for always having my technological back, and to Bret Olsen and Ben Thomas for coming to my aid when my limited capacities for working digitally have stymied me. Thanks to those who were part of my 2017 and 2018 Cinema and Media Studies Senior Seminars—Annie Berman, Bridget Braley, Samantha Donahue, Nicole Lyons, Paula Ortiz, Melodie Rosen; Ghada Emish, Paige Pendergrast, Brandon Raciti—for helping me think through the
films of Patiño, Poitras, Adriano, Gagnon . . . Thanks to Alina R. van den Berg for help with Portuguese translation.
Thanks to Gregory Rami at the American Museum of Natural History for facilitating my use of several images of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals; to Frank Aveni at Documentary Educational Resources, for supplying imagery of the executive directors and staff of DER; and, again, to Ben Salzman for assistance in preparing the imagery for publication. Finally, thanks to Ernie Gehr and Myrel Glick for making possible the photograph of Gehr and Laura Poitras—that image means a good deal to me.
Several interviews were published in advance of this volume—and re-edited and in most cases expanded for publication here. The interview with Carlos Adriano was published in Found Footage Magazine (Spain): 5 (Spring 2019). The interview with James Benning was published as “Benning Goes Digital” in Found Footage Magazine 3 (March 2017). The Sue Cabezas and Cynthia Close sections of the interview with the executive directors of Documentary Educational Resources were published in Film History 25, no. 4 (2013). One section of the Gustav Deutsch interview has been excerpted (and re-edited) from Wilberg Brainin-Donnenberg and Michael Loebenstein, eds., Gustav Deutsch (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, 2009); the section on Deutsch’s Shirley—Visions of Reality, from Found Footage Magazine 2 (May 2016).
The interview with Yance Ford on Strong Island (“In His Face: An Interview with Yance Ford on Strong Island”) was published as an online “web exclusive” by Cineaste in fall 2017. Portions of the interview with Bill Morrison were published in three parts: the first section, as “The Orpheus of Nitrate: The Emergence of Bill Morrison,” in Framework 57, no. 2 (Fall 2016); the second, as “Interview with Bill Morrison: 6 Recent Films,” in Millennium Film Journal 64 (Fall 2016); the third, as “The Filmmaker as Miner: An Interview with Bill Morrison,” Cineaste 43, no. 1 (Winter 2016). Four parts of “Sensory Ethnography Lab, Part 2” were published in Framework 54, no. 2 (Fall 2013). The interview with Brett Story was published in Film Quarterly 72, no. 1 (Fall 2018).
And, as always, special thanks to Patricia Reichgott O’Connor for her patience, support, and enthusiasm—and for her invaluable coaching—all these years.
Color Figure 1 The Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American
160120_ 6387edit.jpg.
Museum of Natural History. American Museum of Natural History Library.
Color Figure 2 The “Hunting Dogs” diorama at the American Museum of Natural History.
Color Figure 3 Inside St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican in Rome, from Ron Fricke’s Samsara (2011).
Courtesy Ron Fricke.
Color Figure 4 The hajj at the Masjid AlHaram Mosque, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, filmed from the top of the Makkah Royal Clock Tower hotel (built by the Saudi Binladen Group), in Ron Fricke’s Samsara (2011). Courtesy Ron Fricke.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Color Figures 5a,b,c Cinematic versions of three Edward Hopper paintings, in Gustav Deutsch’s Shirley—Visions of Reality (2013). Courtesy Gustav Deutsch.
Color Figures 6a,b (above) Dr. Riyadh making tea on the morning of the Iraqi election, in Laura Poitras’s My Country, My Country (2006); (below) Lindsay Mills and Ed Snowden in their Moscow apartment, at the end of CITIZENFOUR (2014). Courtesy Laura Poitras.
Color Figure 7 From Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens (2016). Courtesy Nikolaus Geyrhalter.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Color Figures 8a,b,c Time-damaged frames in Bill Morrison’s The Mesmerist (2003), Light Is Calling (2004), and Tributes—Pulse (2011). Courtesy Bill Morrison.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Color Figure 9a,b,c Changing Galician landscape, an homage to Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide (2009), in Lois Patiño’s Costa da muerte (2013). Courtesy Lois Patiño.
Color Figures 10a,b Images filmed by Erin Espelie, using her iPad as a reflecting mirror, in The Lanthanide Series (2014). Courtesy Erin Espelie.
(a)
(b)
Color Figure 11 Installation of Janet Biggs’s Afar (2016), produced for the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy Janet Biggs.
Color Figure 12 Successive images from Carlos Adriano’s Sem Título #4: Apesar dos Pesares, na Chuva há de Cantares (2018, Despite the Sorrows, Sing in the Rain): (above) a photograph by Kiarostami; (below) a frame from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962). Courtesy Carlos Adriano.
(b)
Color Figures 13a,b (above) Workers on an elevator in the underground RTB Bor copper mine in Serbia; (below) worker arriving at the Kiiki Negi surface gold mine in Suriname, in Ben Russell’s Good Luck (2018). Courtesy Ben Russell.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Color Figures 14a,b,c From Betzy Bromberg’s Glide of Transparency (2017). Courtesy Betzy Bromberg.
Color Figure 15 The California desert landscape in James Benning’s BNFS (2012). Courtesy James Benning.
Color Figures 16a,b (above) Nepalese women talking about dildos in Stephanie Spray’s As Long as There’s Breath (2009). Courtesy Stephanie Spray. (below) Final image in J. P. Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn’s People’s Park (2012). Courtesy J. P. Sniadecki, Libbie Dina Cohn.
(a)
(b)
Introduction
Perhaps the term is unsatisfactory, but for me the distinction between the words document and documentary is quite clear.
Joris Ivens , The Camera and I1
Rather than limit consideration to the obvious contemporary examples of immersive and interactive spectating, it’s more important I believe to search for historical precursors and architectural spaces that have informed current screen practices and technological attractions.
Alison Griffiths , Shivers Down Your Spine2
It’s not a highway we’re traveling in my films; it’s often a very small, narrow road. But at the same time, we’re also aware of the highway. We don't ignore the highway. It’s very hard to be independent and experimental and totally forget about the highway. The highway gives us the opportunity to know where we are: we look at the highway so that we don't get lost.
Abbas Kiarostami
Those of us who are veterans of the arrival of cinema studies in American academe during the late sixties and early seventies brought with us not just a fascination with film and a hunger to know more about film history, but a demand that cinema and cinema studies be useful, a force for social and political progress. We felt we were in the midst of a cultural revolution, and cinema seemed a part of this. The half-century of dominance of Hollywood entertainment that preceded this moment made our excitement about cinema feel like a guilty pleasure. Conventional entertainment, we’d realized, was propaganda for the status quo. Not surprisingly, we admired European (and Indian, Japanese . . .) art cinema and what was coming to be called American art cinema, because these films seemed more than just entertainment: they were forms of cine-narrative that built on the centuries-old traditions of literary narrative that had contributed to our awareness of human psychology, dramatized social issues, and often modeled progressive human development and action. Many of us were also becoming fascinated with what was variously called “experimental film,” “underground film,” “avant-garde film” because these films offered in-theater critiques of conventional film and television entertainment. My coining of “critical cinema” for a series of interviews with these
1. Joris Ivens, The Camera and I (New York: International Publishers, 1974): 137.
2. Alison Griffiths, introduction to Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008): 2.
filmmakers reflected a need to see their films as both aesthetically important and politically progressive.
The flowering of new forms of documentary filmmaking—sync-sound shooting in either the provocational mode instigated by Jean Rouch or in the “direct cinema” observational mode epitomized by Fred Wiseman—during this same moment also seemed a break from cinematic tradition, both from Hollywood’s sense of “reality” and from what had become, from the early 1930s through the 1950s, documentary tradition, where “documentary” had come to represent an illustrated lecture by a voice-of-God narrator.3 The new modes of shooting moved documentary back toward an enlarged sense of “document.”
In the standard distinction between “document” and “documentary,” “document” refers to the camera’s mechanical/electronic ability to automatically record what is in front of it. “Documentary” has usually been understood as something more: as an articulation of recorded image and sound into an “argument” that provides a thoughtful vision of the world and, in one way or another, declares its support for what the filmmaker understands as progressive social and/or political change. Bill Nichols: “Documentaries seek to persuade or convince us: by the strength of their argument or point of view and the appeal, or power, of their voice. The voice of documentary is the specific way in which an argument or perspective is expressed.”4 For Nichols, documentary’s ability to forge an ideological point of view was what made it distinct from both scientific evidence-gathering and what Tom Gunning named the “cinema of attractions”—films that “took delight in the sensationalism of the exotic and bizarre.” In scientific film and the cinema of attractions, “the voice of the filmmaker was . . . noticeably silent.”5
The distinction between documentary and document, where documentary is understood to be more valuable than document, more committed to ideas, is specific to the history of nonfiction. In fiction films the value of document is undeniable. When John Waters was preparing to shoot what became Pink Flamingos (1972), he knew that for the film to be successful he would need something more than the outrageous contest between Babs Johnson (Divine, aka Harris Glenn Milstead) and her family and Connie and Raymond Marble to see who deserved to be called “The Filthiest People Alive.” And he knew precisely what it would be. Waters and Divine agreed on what was to become a legendary final shot: Divine agreed to pick up poodle shit and eat it (literalizing the then-popular taunt,
3. I’m thinking here of those informational and/or propagandistic documentaries produced by governments, with the virtually inevitable voice-of-God (male) narrator. Obviously some remarkable documentary films were produced within this era: The River (1937) by Pare Lorenz; the Why We Fight series; and especially Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949) by Georges Franju and Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) by Alain Resnais. Nevertheless, by the late 1960s this documentary mode no longer seemed progressive.
4. See Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001): 43.
5. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary: 86.
“Eat shit!”).6 The power of this final gesture was and remains entirely due to its status as document. In a single, continuous take we see the poodle defecate; then Divine/Milstead picks up the poop and puts it in her/his mouth, pretends to eat it, spits some out, then opens her/his mouth to be clear that some of the poop is still there. Had Waters decided to fake the poop-eating, to create the idea of eating poodle shit, the sequence wouldn’t have had anything like the impact it had—and Waters might not have become a household name. A similar deployment of document was and remains crucial for many of Buster Keaton’s films, where Keaton’s tendency to put himself in what was clearly real danger—throughout The General (1926), for example—is made obvious by his decision to shoot the most dangerous stunts in continuous long or medium shot: that is, to document the danger, rather than suggest it.
As useful as the distinction between document and documentary has seemed (and as slippery as it can be),7 the attitude that document is little more than mindless spectacle has allowed us to undervalue modern forms of cinematic accomplishment that can be understood as mature and thoughtful inheritors of those forms of cinema and related forms of visual representation that predate the maturation of commercial narrative and the films considered crucial works in the history of documentary. One early model for these modern works of cine-document is the habitat diorama.
In her Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture Alison Griffiths explores the evolution of one of the two general kinds of habitat diorama, the “life group”: basically, a habitat diorama that attempts to create a simulacrum of an indigenous people. Griffiths demonstrates the many ways in which museum life groups incorporated conflicted, often problematic assumptions about other cultures: “Merely by traversing the ethnographic exhibition halls of such grandiose public buildings [e.g., the American Museum of Natural History in New York], museum spectators entered into an ideologically loaded space that elaborated the metanarratives of Western cultural superiority via multisensory accounts of the primitivism of other cultures.”8
Even if those who conceptualized and constructed life groups were, in general, striving for ethnographic accuracy, it seems obvious to us now that Griffiths is correct: the life groups themselves and their arrangement within museum spaces implicitly demonstrate that the museum spectator is culturally superior—more fully evolved—than the cultures represented in the life groups. Indeed, this seems so clear to us that the very idea of a life group tends to cancel whatever informational or aesthetic value any particular life group might have. The life group has become
6. “It was first idea I had for the whole movie”—Waters, in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): 236.
7. Are the early Lumière films really so different from Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929)? Don’t they both share a comparable excitement about modern, industrial, urban life?
8. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 11.
an exhibit not so much of indigenous lives, but of problematic ideas about culture and race within the cultures that have produced the life groups.
The effect of the other form of habitat diorama, the diorama of animal life within a museum space, seems different from the implicit cultural imperialism of the life group. We do not bring to a habitat diorama of animal life the same level of cultural baggage about animal ways of life versus our own. The “argument” of the habitat diorama of animal life is simply that, as human beings living in a modern society, we should know that these other creatures also live in our world. Of course, every diorama of animal life I’ve seen has confirmed the fiction that animals can exist entirely apart from human life, an irony that was already evident when the earliest dioramas of animal life were constructed. Carl Akeley’s breakthrough white-tailed deer diorama at Chicago’s Field Museum was built because Akeley believed the white-tailed deer was becoming endangered by human encroachment.
In her wide-ranging essay “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Donna Haraway sees a problematic gender issue within the habitat diorama of animal life. She argues that Akeley’s pursuit of perfection in his African dioramas resulted in a gender hierarchy within individual species: “The typical animal in its perfect expression . . . must be an adult male.”9 Building on Haraway, Ronald B. Tobias argues that the animals in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History are a reflection of the eugenics discourse of Akeley’s era: “Akeley’s animals had to be gods and goddesses of their breed, so they would inspire awe in anyone who looked upon them.”10 Tobias concludes that the American Museum of Natural History “is, in many ways, America’s hunting lodge, similar to the trophy rooms of kings and magnates who mounted their keepsakes in displays of overwhelming dominion, and the educational lessons created within its rooms are as social and political as they are biological.”11
While it is true that dioramas of animal life, like most everything in modern culture, can be understood as an emblem or an inheritor of the histories of imperialism and colonialism, they are also works of scientific art that continue to have considerable value as documents—of imperialism/colonialism, yes, but also of forms of life on our planet that are worthy of respect and admiration and that have much to teach us. Of course, the fact that the human population explosion increasingly threatens animal habitat and the diversity of species makes a consciousness of the variety of animal life valuable in an environmentally political sense. Nevertheless, at least in the work of Carl Akeley, the most prominent American contributor to the development of the habitat diorama, no overt
9. Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (Routledge: New York, 2004): 169.
10. Ronald B. Tobias, Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature: Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 144.
11. Tobias, American Moral Vision: 144.
polemical statement frames what we see. And this suppression of polemic allows for serious consideration of the facts and the significance of animal life and our relationship to it.
For our purposes here, the documentation of animal life in the classic habitat diorama can be seen as a premonition of accomplished motion pictures that work at suppressing ideology in favor of showing us elements of the animal and human worlds that the filmmakers believe we need to see, whatever ideological ramifications these sights might ultimately have for us. Further, just as the location of habitat dioramas within museums of natural history has tended to obscure the aesthetic accomplishments of particular habitat dioramas, our undervaluing of the cinema of document, especially in recent years, has obscured the accomplishments of many remarkable films and types of film. The Sublimity of Document is an attempt to bring attention to films and filmmakers who have seen the cinematic document to a new level of cultural achievement and to foreground the nature of some of the significant accomplishments of cinema that forgo polemic in the interest of clearer understanding.
As I was beginning the general research that led to this collection, I imagined that during the latter part of the nineteenth century, the motion picture and taxidermy were in a competition to see which of the two technologies would become more successful in freezing time so that we could visually study the world—and I thought to myself, “Well, clearly cinema won that competition!” However, as I began, for the first time since childhood, to frequent the American Museum of Natural History (usually to see whatever new film was showing in the museum’s IMAX theater—at first it was Ron Fricke’s Chronos [1985])—I realized the obvious: that both cinema and the habitat diorama had “won”; both became, and have remained, immensely popular. In 2017 the AMNH was the second most visited museum in New York City, with nearly five million visitors.12
In the end I decided that, for our purposes here, some discussion of the particulars of the habitat diorama of animal life, as developed by one of the form’s prime movers during the years when cinema was evolving into its modern form, might be an appropriate preface to the interviews included in this collection. Too often, the aesthetic dimensions of the cinema of document have been ignored or patronized, when in fact these films are perfectly capable of providing enlightenment and of sustaining thoughtful analysis—just as the location of Akeley’s dioramas of animal life in museums of natural history, rather than in art museums, seems to have negated a sense of their aesthetic accomplishments.
12. According to the Wikipedia site, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had more than six million visitors in 2017; MoMA, around three million. The AMNH is the eleventh most visited museum in the world; the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, is the eighth, with six million. The Louvre and the National Museum of China lead all museums with more than eight million visitors each year.
