Flaherty the 3rd night

Jill Godmillow rules.  They showed her "What Farocki Taught" projected on 16mm.  So beautiful to see it like that.  Jill really knows about simplicity.  She shows us what it is to be political.  Local, detailed, specific like a dead rat.  All hail resistance to the pornography of violence (that oh so indulged tendency here at the Flaherty this year).  Hers is a lesson in how to pay homage, how to participate in the conversation, how to keep the conversation going.  Hers is a lesson in how to be pedagogical while resisting the temptations toward polemicism and pedantism.

The Flaherty audience actually cheered when the opening title came up.

Also, I love the coda of the film, where she presents a tiny landscape film of landscape with chemical factory.

Then there was Johan Grimonprez's work in progress, which should be titled, as Jill so eloquently suggested, "Love," but is actually called something to do with shadows and a book. Many very good things were said tonight, some phrased as questions.  Such as, does there have to be a dialectical relationship between love and violence?  Can the women who speak for empathy get to speak more?  Can the talking heads somehow be tempered?  What is the role of self-consciousness?  Also, I really wondered, why do you think love is "cheesy?"  And if you do think it's cheesy, then why do you say you think love is the answer.  If so, do you actually not believe there is "an answer."  It feels like a film grappling with wanting desperately to believe in some sort of meaning, but rather just revels in the rambling insights of a sociopathic South African mercenary CIA arms dealer maniac.  Grimonprez's excuse is that the project is a commission.  Of course, all of the artists were particularly generous on the point that the work is a work in progress.  And so, as together a front as he presents, the film seems at loose ends with itself.  One of the most beautiful things about this work is the way that it wants to assert the lie of the myth of human evolution as innately a killing species and that war is somehow human.  Though of course, to be real, humans are the only animals that we know of who have war.  Except for ants... right?  But I digress.

The audience was incredibly kind and generous.  I, however, was seething inside, not able to access my inner charity.  Rather, I wanted to ask: Is this film part of the problem or part of the solution, and if you think of it as a solution, can you please explain to me how?  Michael Moore already covered a lot of that material about Prince Bandar and such.  I know I'm not supposed to talk about the film, cuz it's top secret and all, so, let me just say that, I really think Johan should take Jill's advice and study what Farocki taught.  Labor.  It's about labor.  And complicity.  And simplicity.  And keeping it real.

Flaherty Seminar - Opening Night

This is my first time at the Flaherty Film Seminar, a 5-day + 1 night epic , all-out documentary screening and discussion extravaganza.  Flaherty calls it a "film event" and claims it is the longest continuously running "film event," pre-dating all film festivals, in North America.  This year is the 60th anniversary of the Seminar, which was started by Robert Flaherty's widow Frances, convenes filmmakers, critics, curators, academics and other film enthusiasts.  This year's program is curated by Gabriela Monroy & Caspar Stracke.

The opening night screening featured a kind of rhyming scheme of video works, meditations on airplane hijackings, air travel and media representations of violence.  The opening film by Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez was Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a work from 1997, a mesmerizing cacophonous video montage of airplane hijackings, mainly from the 1970s which seeks to chart the origins and development of airline hijacking as political resistance from Cuba and the Soviet era to Palestinian terrorism through the Regan era, with a crucial turning point of the Entebbe PLO hijacking.  The work seems to me to want to carve a radical political tact which humanizes infamous PLO terrorists, including female PLO hijacker Leila Khaled and suggests a meditation on the ways in which strategies of political resistance and strategies of political control feed each other into ever more dehumanizing spirals of technology and the violence that technology enables.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y was followed by German video artist Hito Steyerl's 2010 digital video work In Free Fall.  Steyerl's work is directly in conversation with the earlier work by Grimonprez and the two pieces made for an interesting dialogue, in some ways easily classified as pre and post 9/11.  Steyerl's brings the video appropriation to another level of meta consciousness, using the framing device of watching a video within a video and contemplating the recycling of decommissioned airplanes which are also used for staging Hollywood film airline crashes and Hollywood scenes of airline hijackings.  An Israeli actor also acts as a kind of questioning and self-conscious narrator, as well as a Hollywood cinematographer who meditates on not just airline crashes but also economic crashes. The film ultimately asks us to consider if representations of (and cultural obsessions with)  crashes cause real world (economic) crashes.

In a way, both videos are also meditations on outdated technologies, Steyerl's work specifically focuses on the DVD and the repurposing of aluminum from old planes to new DVD manufacturing processes.  Grimonprez's work focuses on archival television news, pre-CNN, when terrorists appeared on television, gave press conferences and answered questions by the media and then post Regan when CNN and other news outlets forbid terrorists from appearing on the news and speaking directly to cameras.  Grimonprez brought up the idea of the recycling of ideologies and the junkyard of ideologies that both works suggest as well as a neurosis of repetition which the television news creates.  Also discussed, the piracy of meaning which both hijacking and the news media and political power enact.