American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ his family’s involvement with these people had hastened this transformation—caused Marshall to become personally involved in the !Kung struggle to retain something of their culture and their dignity as a people. Conversely, while Ross McElwee’s films about the American South seem to focus on his own family and his filmmaking, the resulting films provide viewers with a considerable panorama of southern life during a particular era—not a formal ethnography, of course, but a fascinating and engaging set of cultural insights.

      

      The extent of my commentary on individual filmmakers and films has depended both on my sense of the longevity of particular careers and contributions and on the complexity of specific films. Early chapters of The Cambridge Turn are focused on careers that have evolved over a period of sometimes more than half a century. Later chapters focus on selected contributions by often-younger makers. In some instances, important but limited accomplishments—limited meaning either that a filmmaker made one specific contribution to Cambridge filmmaking, or that a particular contribution is historically important but less than remarkable aesthetically—by individual filmmakers are included within overviews of longer careers. Of course, I have tended to write in more detail about films that I have found especially complex, enlightening, and useful.

      A note on terminology: throughout this project I have used film to refer to moving-image art and document, whether the individual “films” were shot or are available on 35mm, 16mm, or 8mm celluloid, or as video in the ever-proliferating digital forms. When a “film” was produced or is available in a digital format, I make that clear—but since the filmmakers discussed generally call themselves “filmmakers” and their films and videos “films,” I have not attempted to maintain a distinction between film and video except when the difference is germane to a particular discussion. Also, I use the terms personal documentary and autobiographical filmmaking interchangeably.

      SUBJECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

      My focus on ethnographic film and personal documentary precludes my dealing in depth with a good many facets of Boston-area and even Cambridge filmmaking. In a few instances, I was unable to access films that I know are relevant to my discussions of personal documentary. I could not find a way to see either Jeff Kreines’s The Plaint of Steve Kreines as Recorded by His Younger Brother Jeff (1974) or Mark Rance’s Death and the Singing Telegram (1983), as well as other early work by Kreines, Rance, and Joel DeMott—all three of whom were students at the MIT Film Section.²¹ This counts as a considerable limitation to American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn , one that I am embarrassed by. Filmmaker-teacher John Terry should also have been part of these discussions, but by the time I was aware of his connection with the MIT Film Section and began to learn about his films, this volume was already too extensive and too far along in the publishing process: I must be satisfied to come to grips with Terry’s work and influence at a later time.

      The two most famous documentary filmmakers living in Cambridge as this is written—Fred Wiseman and Errol Morris—receive no attention here. Wiseman’s films do provide a kind of ethnography of institutional life in modern America. Nevertheless, his films are not ethnographic in the usual sense of the term, and, beyond the implications of Wiseman’s choices of subject, they are some of the least personally revealing films in the documentary canon. And while Wiseman’s home base has been Cambridge since the beginning of his career, he does not seem to see himself as part of the community of filmmakers that has developed in Cambridge over the decades and has functioned in a wide range of ways as a mutual support system for independent work:

MACDONALD:		Fred, was there something in the Boston area, or in Cambridge in particular, that helped you move in the direction of documentary filmmaking or that helped you become the kind of filmmaker that you’ve become?
WISEMAN:		Nothing that I can think of.22

      Errol Morris’s expressionist approach to often bizarre, nearly surreal subject matter is distinct from the development of ethnographic documentary (though clearly there are ethnographic dimensions to a number of his early films: Gates of Heaven [1981], for example, and Vernon, Florida [1978]) and from the evolution of personal documentary (though Morris’s voice in some films—The Fog of War [2003], for example—reveals a good bit about his personal passions). My commitment in American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn is to bring attention to underrecognized and/or less understood filmmakers and films. Like Wiseman, Morris does not lack for attention from reviewers, critics, and even scholar-filmmakers: Charles Musser and Carina Tautu’s Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch [2011] is an engaging feature-length interview with the filmmaker.

      The many accomplishments of documentary filmmakers who have worked under the auspices of WGBH must also be the subject of another scholar’s investigation. The same is true of the contributions of a variety of individuals, including John Terry, who worked with Pincus and Leacock at MIT (Made in Milwaukee, 1979, and many other films); Richard Broadman (Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston, 1978; The Collective Fifteen Years Later, 1985; Brownsville Black and White, 2002), Abraham Ravett (The North End, 1977; Haverhill High, 1979), Jane Gillooly (Leona’s Sister Gerri, 1994; Today the Hawk Takes One Chick, 2008; Suitcase of Love and Shame, 2012), Juan Mandelbaum (Our Disappeared/Nuestros desaparecidos, 2008), and Alla Kovgan (Nora, 2008).

      This study also largely ignores many forms of filmmaking and electronic media arts that have been produced at MIT and Harvard. I know nothing about the MIT Media Laboratory, which came into being in 1980 after the demise of the Film Section. Nor do I discuss the many accomplished animators who have been connected with the Carpenter Center (Robert Gardner claims that “almost every animator of moment in American and European animation has taught at Harvard”).²³ And the Visual and Environmental Studies filmmaking program at Harvard has produced many accomplished filmmakers who are not discussed here—instances include Darren Aronofsky, Andrew Bujalski, Mira Nair, and Jehane Noujaim—despite my having considerable interest in some of them.

      Finally, with one important exception, I say almost nothing about avant-garde cinema, a dimension of film history that much of my earlier writing has explored, even when filmmakers have had some connection with Cambridge, including, for example, Radcliffe graduate Abigail Child, who began her career as a documentary filmmaker and has become a prolific avant-garde filmmaker and video artist and a member of the senior faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There is also Cambridge resident Rebecca Meyers, who has worked at the Harvard Film Archive and more recently for Robert Gardner’s Studio7Arts—Meyers’s exquisite depictions of the subtleties of daily experience have obvious documentary elements. Of course, my not writing about these (and other) Cambridge- and Boston-area filmmakers (prolific diarist, Anne Charlotte Robertson; Robert Todd, Luther Price, teacher-filmmaker Saul Levine) means no disrespect for their work. I have written about some of their accomplishments elsewhere and hope to explore others in the future.²⁴

      The exception is Alfred Guzzetti. In addition to Family Portrait Sittings, his pioneering contribution to the personal documentary, Guzzetti has collaborated on ethnographic films, on films about the Nicaraguan revolution; and his Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard was published in 1981 by Harvard University Press. During all this time, however, Guzzetti has been making contributions to avant-garde film and video, beginning with Air (1971) and continuing into the 1990s, when he began producing a remarkable series of video works that combine documentary elements with personal revelation in a manner more in tune with the avant-garde traditions of personal film than with personal documentary. I have included a full chapter on this dimension of Guzzetti’s work because attention to it is long overdue and because the unusual breadth of his career has allowed him to have considerable impact on his filmmaker colleagues and on filmmaking students at Harvard for forty years.

      Perhaps it goes without saying that the following chapters are a function of my personal admiration of the filmmakers and films I do discuss. While I try to be an honest and painstaking and reasonably СКАЧАТЬ