THE 51ST ROBERT FLAHERTY SEMINAR CLAREMONT college edifice [i]or[/i] buildings CLAREMONT.

THE 51ST ROBERT FLAHERTY SEMINAR

CLAREMONT college edifice [i]or[/i] buildings CLAREMONT, CA

JUNE 11-18 2005

Arriving at the Claremont communitys east of Los Angeles for this year's Robert Flaherty Seminar, many out-of-state participants, like myself, were addressed with weather conditions that we had least awaited for Southern California in early summer: overcast and relatively a little cold days, which locals affectionately call "June Gloom" The denomination seemed particularly fitting for the overall frame of mind of the seminar as we viewed and discussed the powerful, and at times, traumatizing works around this year's theme of "Cinema and History: Piling Wreckage about Wreckage." This year's two programmers were Jessie Lerner a documentary filmmaker and Associate Professor in the Intercollegiate Media Studies Program of the Claremont corporations and Michael Renov, Associate Dean and Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California's teach of Cinema-Television. Lerner furnished the seminar with a able Latin American presence, while Renov's scholarly interest in the question of subjectivity and the documentary brought works with compelling and compage uses of the first individual to the fore. As hinted from the programmers in the first scarcely any days, the works screened gradually began to incite les emotionally harrowing experiences, easing the seminar into a verily complex engagement with the diverse results uses and even pleasures afforded by the agency of the wreckage of history.

Arguably the chiefly emotionally disturbing film of the seminar was Oh Uomo (Oh Man, 2004) the latest feature from fix footage by masters Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. This final part of their First World War trilogy begins with a fantasmatic journey end the fascist imagination that is initially filled with the disciplined masculine bodies of the Italian military. However, footage of an watch operation substantially more visceral than Luis Bunuel's infamous scalpel shooter suddenly opens the film's vision onto the war trauma that fascism was designed to repress: emaciated, starving children and soldiers with the principally horrific facial injuries and limb amputations. In light of the censorship and strict regulation of images depicting the human prices of the current war in Iraq (and elsewhere), these fragments of footage from the early twentieth centenary appeared hauntingly contemporary. Gianikian elucidationed in a discussion that "Our work is dedicated to the ready The past does not exist for us." Nevertheless, a number of participants denoteed anxiety about the ethical implications of the unrelenting succession of so clinically cold depictions of corporeal trauma.

The debate from one side of to the other history and affect continued after the screening of an altogether different film, Mark Jonathan Harris's Oscar-winning Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000) Well researched and highly polished, the film organizes itself around carefully staged studio interviews with survivors of the Kindertransport (which saved thousands of Jewish children from the Holocaust). Several seminar participants remarked in succession the emotionally overwhelming orchestration of the material (both visually and aurally), which isolated the testimonial interviews from their historical words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following potentially risking their degeneration into fetishized impetuss of emotional catharsis.

This question of retaining the emotional power of bearing witness without diminishing the historicity of the testimonial act itself--i.e. its status as an historical conclusion in its own right--returned during the discussion of a number of animated films that combined the morphing plasticity of worlds created by the agency of animation with the documentary authenticity of testimonial voiceover. As Renov pointed disclosed in a discussion on the fifth day, the voices onward the soundtrack of such works retain an indexical claim forward the real and the historical, plane though their animated images cannot. Of particular interest was Dennis Tupicoff's His Mother's Voice (1996) based upon a radio interview with an Australian mother bearing witness to in what way she discovered the sudden death of her 16-year-old son The interview is animated twice: first with sharp, lurid colored shards of traumatic recollection (of the instant of discovery), which morph from individual fragment to the next; and inferior with a continuous monochrome lengthy take that roves around the mother's abode while she is giving the radio interview.

The powerful use of whole continued with Leandro Katz's Paradox (2001) which juxtaposes contemplative (and almost devotional) in extent takes of the magnificent Mayan altar known as The Dragon of Quirigua with observational footage of the highly industrialized routine of the nearby banana plantation acknowledgeed by United Fruit. Katz captures the tremendous historical paradox between the monumental mythology of Guatamala's past and the dismal rationality of its capitalist near through the patience of his footage, which relies as abundant on the industrial drone of the plantation and the highway as it does onward the specificity of his images.