American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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Название: American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary
Автор: Scott MacDonald
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Кинематограф, театр
isbn: 9780520954939
isbn:
THE EXPERIENCE OF FILMMAKING AS THOUGHT PROCESS
What can I possibly mean by saying that going to the ends of the world has been a way for me to understand myself better? Hidden in the answer are ideas such as it is presumptuous to try and explain other people without bothering to explain oneself.
ROBERT GARDNER18
During the twenty years that followed the release and reception of Dead Birds, which was widely admired and won the Robert Flaherty Award in 1963, Gardner’s career moved in a variety of directions. His first project was a cinema verite film made for local television: Marathon (1965), co-directed with Joyce Chopra, a still-engaging half-hour film on the Boston Marathon. Stylistically, with its in-close engagement with three individuals (Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, then a Harvard professor; a Harvard student, and an African American pastor) within a public event, its black-and-white cinematography (some of it provided by D.A. Pennebaker), and its conventional narrating voice (Gardner himself), Marathon recalls such breakthroughs as Primary (1960) and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963). Marathon remains an engaging film, though what seems most obvious now is the growth of distance running as a participant and spectator sport over the past fifty years: as depicted in Marathon, the Boston Marathon seems quaint. Gardner has never been enthusiastic about this kind of sync-sound observational cinema, usually preferring to construct his films as extended montages without assuming sync sound as an essential, but Marathon demonstrates his ability to work in what had become, by 1965, an important new direction in nonfiction filmmaking.
Beginning in 1966 Gardner’s attention alternated between films on artists and art making and further filmmaking adventures in far-flung cultures. The Great Sail (1966) documents the installation of a large Alexander Calder sculpture at MIT. Gardner’s fascination with Calder himself and the workers assembling his La Grande Voile is in counterpoint with his wry depiction of the smug complaints about the non-artistry of the piece on the part of (mostly student) onlookers; the film seems a premonition of the Maysles brothers’ films about Christo’s projects, and particularly Christo’s Valley Curtain (1973) and Running Fence (1978). In Gardner’s depiction of the event as a kind of American ritual, in this case around the public presence of modern art, the film recalls Ricky Leacock and Joyce Chopra’s Happy Mother’s Day (1963).
In February 1968, Gardner was in Ethiopia, contributing cinematography to what would become Hillary Harris’s The Nuer (1971), a feature on a group of nomadic cattle herders with, as Gardner would later describe them, “arresting cultural expressiveness,” who were famous in anthropological literature but virtually unknown beyond those confines.19 Approaching this project as part of a larger, Film Study Center–sponsored survey of three forms of indigenous life: hunter-gatherers (The Hunters), warrior farmers (Dead Birds), and pastoralists (The Nuer), Gardner asked Harris to direct the film. Gardner was back in Africa in June 1968 to begin working with the Hamar, another pastoralist group—work that would eventually produce his next feature, Rivers of Sand (1974). In between the shooting for The Nuer and Rivers of Sand and the editing of the latter, Gardner returned to the subject of art, and in particular to Mark Tobey, for Mark Tobey Abroad (1973), a lovely portrait of the painter in his later years (Robert Fulton contributed much of the cinematography) and one of Gardner’s finest films. Mark Tobey Abroad alternates between interviews with Tobey and montage explorations of the painter’s Basel apartment and his walks in town—a structure that predicts the organization of Rivers of Sand, completed the following year.20
Gardner has always been reasonably astute about the cultural currents evolving around him, and the emergence of a powerful feminist transformation in American society in general, and in American academe in particular, during the 1970s is reflected in Rivers of Sand. Indeed, Gardner’s decision to focus on the Hamar seems to have reflected his own developing gender awareness. Rivers of Sand is basically an 85-minute montage, organized according to three general principles, the most basic of which has been described by Gardner himself: “The film was intentionally conceived as a collection of impressions of a frequently fragmentary nature threaded together to comment on the notion of sexual injustice.”21 In this, Rivers of Sand echoes Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa, 1966), a Gardner favorite, without that film’s exhilarating and brilliant terseness; Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1959), which recycles a wide range of moving-image material to create a reflection on modern life; and the Russian Artavazd Peleshian’s Nash Vek (Our Age, 1982, 1990). Gardner works with something like what Peleshian calls “distance montage,” where particular images or sequences and specific sounds and sound sequences are repeated in changing contexts, so that they accumulate meaning as the film develops.22
FIGURE 9. Omali Inda addresses the camera in Rivers of Sand (1974). Courtesy Robert Gardner.
The most obvious organizational principle in Rivers is Gardner’s intercutting between an extended interview with Omali Inda, a mature Hamar woman who speaks candidly and eloquently about gender relations among the Hamar (fig. 9), and a general survey of Hamar life (Gardner’s translators were Ivo Strecker, Jean Lydall (Strecker), who also functioned as anthropologist-advisors, and Eric Berinas). Omali is filmed in close-up (indeed, as she speaks, Gardner often includes a stylistic flourish; he begins in close-up and then zooms in to a closer view of her face). Like N!ai in John Marshall’s N!ai: the Story of a !Kung Woman, Omali is beautiful and charismatic; indeed, Gardner was later to say “that was more than just an interview. She was an actress in the film, in the sense that she took it over in many ways. I wish I’d let her take it over more.”23 A final organizational principle echoes Flaherty’s Moana: after Gardner’s survey of Hamar life during the first hour or so of the film, Rivers of Sand culminates with a major celebration among the Hamar, when young men and young women are initiated into adulthood, and when many of the elements we’ve grown familiar with during the film come together.
Jay Ruby has reviewed the controversy over Rivers of Sand within anthropological literature, reporting that the Streckers were upset with that “the artistic vision of Gardner as auteur dominated the project with little competent ethnographic assistance.”24 The assumption of the film’s critics, however, is that Rivers was meant to be a film primarily in service to the field of anthropology. While it is true that all of Gardner’s early features were originally understood under this rubric, and while Gardner often represented himself as an ethnographic filmmaker, the elements that seem to define Rivers of Sand this way—its look at the cultural practices of a group unfamiliar to most in the industrialized world, Gardner’s narrative commentary about particular elements of the culture—are simply major elements in a film that is quite different in tone and purpose, even from The Hunters or Dead Birds.
I see Rivers as an amalgam of feminism and surrealism. Gardner is less interested in providing an ethnographic analysis of Hamar culture (though it would be foolish to pretend that we don’t learn anything about the Hamar from the way they look and move, from their living spaces, and from the evidence of the cultural practices we do see) than in using what he believed he had seen in two visits to the Hamar as a way of considering, on the one hand, the nature of gender relations between men and women in most of the world, and on the other, the surreality of “normal” life, regardless of where it is lived.
The Hamar women, as portrayed in Rivers of Sand, are second-class citizens: they seem to do a majority of the work (though Gardner does seem to undervalue the labor of men, who tend the herds; we see the men at work from time to time, but there is little emphasis on whatever challenges they must face); they own nothing; they do not choose their marital partners; and they are married for life, even if their husbands die. Most obviously, the women must put up with a variety of forms of physical abuse, some of them ritualized. Gardner focuses in particular on the women’s job of grinding grain, which is both a part of everyday life and symbolic of gender relations: at СКАЧАТЬ