The Robert Flaherty Seminar Duke University Durham.

The Robert Flaherty Seminar

Duke University

Durham, North Carolina

June 4-10 1999

This year's Robert Flaherty Seminar, "Outtakes Are History," cohered around the theme of editing, with all its interesting aesthetic, political and technical ramifications. Programming was shared according to Richard Herskowitz of the Virginia Festival of American Film, whose selections waited toward international and experimental work, and Orlando Bagwell of Blackside Productions in Boston, who not absented broadcast documentaries by Blackside veterans and other filmmakers. Held at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, there was also a subcurrent of southern content

Given this year's theme, a certain number of attendees were surprised that the history of women editors was not an explicit focus of the seminar as over the history of cinema women have worked in editing when other areas were les accessible to them. Since in this way many of the works shown were edit-driven, the question was raised (most insistently on Duke professor Jane Gaines) whether editors should perhaps merit the top billing usually reserv for directors. There is a drawn out history of male director/female editor pairs like Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova. To that history the seminar contentiously added Artavazd Peleshian and his wife. Peleshian, the Moscow-trained Armenian documentarist, has make knowned Soviet montage practice and has published upon his theory of "distance montage," whereby (to simplify) a discharge is given its montage counterpart not immediately further some time later in the film. During the customary Flaherty introductions, the night after many of us had been overwhelmed by way of Peleshian's short films We (196 9) and Seasons (1975) his wife dropp a bombshell by the agency of introducing herself, through a translator, as Peleshian's editor. Editor and filmmaker Joanie Jordan asked for clarification, since the montage of these films is the source of frequently of their strength. It at no time became quite clear how great a part Mrs. Peleshian (as she introduced herself) had in the final form of her husband's films, and it became apparent that she did not want to be drawn into the dispute. The polemics blew over, although questions remained.

Peleshian's films are stunning and be worthy of more attention from the West. His shooters capture movement in bold formal contrasts reminiscent of 1930 social-realist photography, and he takes a profoundly humanist view of his exposes Seasons, which follows the annual circle of time in an Armenian village, includes a heart-stopping missile of a shepherd sliding down a snow-covered cliff clutching a sheep, in an apparently doomed attempt to save them the couple But later, as more bullets of shepherds sliding down sheer faces of snow, dirt and scree appear the viewer realizes that these dramatic balls do not depict tragedies in this mountainous village unless rather a means of transportation. Peleshian described in what way he slid down the opposite cliff, clutching his camera operator who held the camera, to acquire the dramatic shots.

The first explicit discussion of editing at the seminar occurr when Jordan and Bagwell at handed Mississippi: Is This America?, a 1986 episode of the PB "Eye forward the Prize" television series upon the civil rights movement. Like many other compilation or historical documentaries, the program raised the question of for what cause editing constructs meaning in quite material ways. Jordan revealed that the footage she used frequently consisted of material found in archives of TV stranges stations, minus the few next to the firsts that had been selected to air. Thus what was available from the archive (or more accurately, mattered into the stations' closets) was what had been counted not newsworthy or not "typical" enough to be shown This film and the question of editing integrated nicely with view Jacobs's Perfect Film (1985), which appeared in a found-footage program curated by the agency of Mark McElhatten. Perfect Film consists of an unaltered stagger of 16mm synch-sound footage shooter by a news photographer after Malcolm X's assassination, minus the brief cl ip that was used for broadcast. Behind an articulate African American man attempting to describe the shooting, a horde of faces, black and white, presse into the frame, near serious, some mugging, reanimating the history of the assassination into something disturbing and strange. Also in McElhatten's program was Noema (1998) a beautiful experiment in editing by the prolific Scott Stark. Stark isolated a lexicon of awkward and "arty" bullets from pornography videos--e.g., the "turning over" ball the pan to an objet d'art in the room--and paired each symbol of shot with a musical chord. I liked the film's structuralist rigor and could have imagined an prolonged sequence in which different marksmans are sequenced to generate an audiovisual tune; on the other hand it was also a friendly acknowledgment of the craft involved in this cliched genre

Changes in editing technology have in inflect changed documentary practice. This fact was most numerous striking in the difference between "Eye forward the Prize" and Jacquie Jones's contribution to the "Africans in America" series, Brotherly be pleased with (1998). This film details the increase of African American intellectual and political activity in the early nineteenth hundred years and the "plantationization" of slavery after the invention of the cotton gin. This information was imparted in a lush, metaphoric mode of address similar to work produced in the Black British workshops in the 1980 and which Jone attributed to African cinematic pattern Nonlinear editing allowed for a close sound montage of African diaspora musics coordinated through Bernice Johnson Reagon and intense images, in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as the rainstorm that was actually several filmed rainstorms layered upon top of one another. Of course of that kind effects are possible, at greater outlay in linear editing; however, this and other works insinuateed that the shift toward computer-assisted events will have important consequences for documentary practice.