Announcement

HBI Artist-in-Residence | Wendy Wolfe Fine February 24 - April 5  The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and Kniznick Gallery are proud to announce the 2016 HBI Artist-in-Residence, Wendy Wolfe Fine. Fine will be in residence February 24 - April 5, 2016 and will be available to engage with the public to discuss her project, ideas, and forthcoming exhibition The Pearl that Slipped Its Shell. During her residency, Fine will continue work on an on-going project that relays the experiences of Jewish women in Iran as a result of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, specifically those of the Mizrahi family, who immigrated to the United States and carry on Iranian Jewish traditions. Fine’s installation will incorporate video, photography and cultural objects to re-envision transformation and loss in the personal freedoms and cultural lives of Iranian Jewish women after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when their country shifted from a secular state to a theocracy of Islamic fundamentalism.   Wendy Wolfe Fine is a time-based artist and documentary filmmaker living in Newton, Massachusetts. Her work aligns with hybrid documentary filmmakers and visual artists—practitioners who use avant-garde and documentary techniques to develop complex visualizations that depict the cultural, the historic and the personal. In June 2015, Wendy completed her MFA in Visual Arts at Lesley University College of Art and Design.  April 6 - June 24 Wendy Wolfe Fine: The Pearl that Slipped Its Shell Kniznick Gallery Images (clockwise from top left): Summer Diary 2014, film still, 2015; Making Kuku Sabzi, A Persian Herb Omelet, film still, 2015; Celebrating Nourouz, The Persian New Year, film still, 2014; Uprooted: Memoirs of Jewish Iran, film still 2014.  The 2016 Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI) Artist-in-Residence program is made possible thanks to the generous support of Arnee and Walter Winshall and Carol Spinner at Avoda Arts. Learn more about HBI Artist-in-Residence opportunities.

Kniznick Gallery Brandeis University 515 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453 781.736.8102

Final Images from Thesis Project

After many hours of sound construction, color correction and text editing, Summer Diary 2014 will be shown at the LUCAD Graduate Exhibition from Monday, June 22 through Saturday, June 27, at the Roberts Gallery in the Lunder Arts Center. Heddi and I tested it at the gallery last week. It looked beautiful projected on the wall, however, in the context of a group exhibition, I would not be able to use sound with the projector in the main gallery. There is only one speaker system connected to the projectors, and the sound would be heard throughout the entire space, interfering with other students' work. I could project it with sound in the smaller gallery, but then I would be isolated from the main exhibition. So I opted for a 55-inch monitor mounted to the wall and a conical sound device suspended from the ceiling in the main gallery. According to Ben, "It's good to be included in the larger show, especially during the opening. Your video piece also has the advantage of having subtitles, which are eye catching, so viewers can follow it within a social setting." 

Here is a selection of film stills from the final version:

Thesis Project: "Summer Diary 2014"

During the last few months I've been experimenting with different visualization techniques and devices for my thesis project Summer Diary 2014, about my experience living in Israel last summer during the war with Gaza. Heddi Siebel, my mentor, has suggested different options:

1. Include dates in the news crawl to reflect that it's a personal journal;
2. Be more revealing about how I feel; 
3. Float big blocks of text over the landscape;
4. Find and use news cast sound and footage;
5. Try voiceover instead of the news crawl;
6. Put a translucent band under news crawl;
7. Include a hook or a thesis in the beginning;
8. Play with rhythms of images and text. The text is sometimes spot on, which makes it interesting. At other times, there's dissonance between image and text. Does the length of the image work?
9. Take out the names of places. 

 

Fall 2014 Semester Summary

MFA Semester 3

December 1, 2014

In my studio work and research this semester I advanced further in developing creative visualization techniques in documentary storytelling. As I’ve progressed, my research and studio work have become more enmeshed and intertwined. Artists and filmmakers, like Chantal Akerman, Su Friedrich, Alan Berliner, and Abraham Ravett, have influenced my practice. During my third residency, Ben Sloat, my advisor said,  “I know being a filmmaker is just always juggling the problems but I think you've taken a really nice step towards the poetic and open-ended and not literal. The showing and not the telling.” I have moved further along this trajectory in my third semester.

This summer, I diverged from focusing on my Iran documentary to create “Summer Diary 2014.” In my residency, Ben had suggested that I hone my camera skills during the coming semester. In Israel, I filmed 30-second to 1-minute landscapes all over the country over a six-week period, and then strung them together after I returned, as a form of visual diary of my experience of living there during the war with Gaza. I experienced a happy coincidence when just after I filmed a landscape in the Galilee from the back seat of my friend’s car, I saw a Chantal Akerman exhibit at the Mamuta Art and Media Center in Jerusalem, where she portrays an Israeli desert landscape in a similar way. While the quality and length of Akerman’s piece was more impressive than mine, her work affirmed the validity of my approach. Much of my time in Israel was spent flipping to different Israeli online news sites for up-to-the-minute briefings on the situation. This inspired me to scroll crawling titles as pseudo “news updates” to describe emotions, questions, and realities brought on by the war. The film evolved into a tense combination of peaceful scenes, my perspective, and the larger political context.

Once I returned to North America, however, I filmed two interviews of my father about our family history to include in the opening chapter of my Iran documentary. Ben had suggested I explore my father’s role as a storyteller throughout my life to offer a rigorously subjective point of view to the documentary. He said many people could make a film about the Jewish experience in Iran, but this would become a film that only I could make. For the first interview, my father rowed a boat on Lac Bouchette in the Quebec Laurentians, while I asked him questions about our family history. I tried to elicit information about our Turkish heritage, about which he knows very little, as a segue into my curiosity about my friend Sharona’s Iranian heritage. In the editing room, I inserted intertitles with my questions and reactions. The structure of this chapter is strongly influenced by Ross McElwee’s interview of his sister on a rowboat in Sherman’s March and the intertitles Su Friedrich uses in The Ties that Bind (1985) with the questions she asks her mother and her reactions to her mother’s answers. My mentor, Paul Turano, liked the way I interrupted the flow with intertitles and said the device allows me to control where the film goes. In the second interview, I filmed my father looking through old family photographs from Turkey of relatives he never new and doesn’t recognize. In her book, American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust, Laura Levitt says, “ . . .  my sense is that we are drawn to stuff whose tales cry out to us because they touch cords in our own lives (76).” This in a nutshell explains my interest in telling Sharona and her family’s story: I’m looking for answers to my own questions about my heritage.

In addition, I’ve been assessing footage that I’ve collected to date for my Iran documentary as I begin to think about the two final chapters of the story. Also in Israel, I filmed a series of trees (pomegranate, date and olive), native to both Israel and Iran, in various stages of growth as a metaphor for a people uprooted and then transplanted. I don’t yet know how I’ll integrate this into the film. As a result of the critiques I received in the June residency, I revisited the clothesline footage from last semester and experimented with integrating some of the suggestions, like filming the clothesline with a shallow depth of field to obscure the backyard and introducing another device into the footage to make it more interesting. I haven’t yet resolved the issues with this chapter, and intend to revisit them in depth in my final semester. 

In the coming month, I’d still like to film and edit two short scenes for my Iran documentary. In one of my meetings with Paul, he suggested filming and interviewing my son Josh and Sharona’s daughter Ariella (who are friends) --the subsequent generations—to find out what they know of their family heritage. To create a more relaxed setting, I plan to film them playing Monopoly, a symbol of the country in which these children and their parents now live. Paul commented that it’s appropriate that the kids are the endpoint of my exploration because I’m storing history for them. The next scene I’m conceiving of involves refurbishing the treadle Singer sewing machine I inherited from my grandmother. (I’ve bought a slew of parts and have enlisted my brother-in-law to help me.) Paul suggested that I insert clips of me sewing fabric together as a metaphor to connect the various chapters of my documentary.

My research this semester has involved investigating contemporary visual artists and experimental filmmakers and applying what I’ve learned from them to my own work. For my first paper, I compared and analyzed the work of Vik Muniz and Fred Wilson. Although my medium differs from both Muniz’s and Wilson’s, like them I reinterpret and juxtapose materials to tell stories. My documentary work is a combination of montage--juxtaposing images to create ideas not present in either shot by itself (Bordwell 480) and collage--juxtaposing different materials to create meaning. My goal is to develop a signature visual style, like Muniz and Wilson, that encompasses multi-layers of meaning and provokes viewers to think as they watch stories unfold.

For my second paper, I researched video artists Yael Bartana, Ragnar Kjartansson, Nathalie Djerberg and Hans Berg, and expanded my thinking beyond representation to include presentation. Ben suggested that I conceive of “Summer Diary 2014” as a multi-channel installation in addition to a traditional film format. An installation would make greater physical, psychological and intellectual demands on the viewers as they walk around, make connections, and absorb ideas, compared with a cinema experience of sitting, getting lost in a film, and perhaps experiencing a suspension of disbelief. Seeing the shocking and disquieting work of Djerberg and Berg in particular reaffirmed my preference for a subdued, subtle approach to rendering my message.

The work of experimental filmmaker Abraham Ravett was the subject of my final research paper. The questions he asks in his films resonated for my work: How can the medium of film be used to come to terms with unreconciled feelings, loss, and trauma? How can film be used to create portraits of lost relatives? How can memory be reconstructed? How can film be used to rupture the silence of that which was unspoken in a family? How can film be used to unravel the mysteries of someone’s past? To answer these questions he employs creative, unconventional strategies, like shots of his mother’s possessions, epigraphic breaks between interviews to draw the viewer’s attention, and silences. Unlike other documentary filmmakers, he does not fabricate and falsify to fill in missing information. Rather he never tells complete stories. His work provoked many questions for me about my own work: Could I ever achieve the same level of complexity and meaning? Do I want to completely move away from conventional filmmaking? Who is my audience? What kind of process must I engage in to make such a layered work? Is it a calculated process or a more subconscious force? Is it acceptable to borrow strategies from other filmmakers?

In addition to my research and studio work, I learned about the festival circuit and the process of submitting a film. Paul felt that given the timeliness of “Summer Diary 2014,” it would be worthwhile to submit it to festivals. This involved researching appropriate festivals, cutting together an acceptable screener as well as writing about the film. Most festivals are open to screening works-in-progress, which gives me the opportunity to integrate feedback from the January residency into the film before I have to submit a final cut. I have struggled with finding my place as a documentary filmmaker in an MFA program for visual artists. Where most students and alumni aspire to show their work in galleries and museums, cinemas and festivals seem to be the best fit for my work. My research into video art this semester, as well as Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2010) last semester, made me realize that I may one day carve a place for myself in both worlds.

In my last meeting with Paul, we discussed the next steps for my Iran documentary. I have often felt overwhelmed by the project and concerned by its seemingly endless production process. Will I ever finish? Will I ever be satisfied with the quality? How does one know when a project is complete? Paul suggested I ask myself, “What kind of work would I make with what I have?” He recommended the following schedule:

           

December 2014: finish gathering materials and shooting footage;

            January to February: edit a rough cut;

            March to April: edit a fine cut.

I want to finish this project and move on to other things. Paul’s suggestions provide me with a structure to accomplish this and live with the project’s imperfections. 

I strive to locate myself somewhere between the layered, creative approach of experimental filmmakers, video artists, and visual artists on the one hand, and the prescribed documentary syntax of voiceover, historical imagery, interviews, and images on the other. As I stated in my residency summary, my ultimate goal is to make a film that is immersive for the viewers by developing creative strategies to achieve this.

Works Cited

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 5^th Ed. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997, Print.

Levitt, Laura. American Jewish Loss After The Holocaust. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Print.

Nourouz--The Persian New Year

Paul Turano suggested I assess the footage I've collected to date for my Iran doc. As a first step, I edited a cut of a scene I produced in the Spring of 2009 about Nourouz, the Persian New Year.  A few days prior to the New Year, a special cover is spread on a Persian carpet or table. The ceremonial table, called cloth of seven dishes (each one beginning with the Persian letter cinn), is set with symbolic foods and objects. The seven dishes stand for rebirth, health, happiness, prosperity, joy, patience, and beauty. 

Seeb means apple and represents health and beauty; an orange floating in a bowl of water represents the earth floating in space.

Sabzi Polo, Persian rice with herbs, is eaten on Nourouz.

Coins represent prosperity and wealth. 

Candles represent enlightenment and happiness;  eggs represents fertility.

Family History

In the last several months, I conducted two interviews of my father to learn more about my grandparents who immigrated to Canada from Turkey and Lithuania. As time passes and first generation children assimilate, family history becomes diluted, changed and lost.

My father looks through old family photographs from Turkey. He has no idea who most of these relatives are. 

 

This is a photograph of my great grandparents, great uncle, great aunts and grandmother in Turkey.


                                                                                                          
These are photographs of a Torah dedication and celebration in Lithuania. My Great Grandmother raised money in Canada for this Torah.                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                           

Summer Diary 2014

This summer in Israel, I was drawn to film 30-second to 1-minute landscapes from all over the country. I've strung them together as a form of diary of my experience living there during a time of war. Interestingly, just after I filmed a landscape in the Galilee from the back seat of a moving vehicle, I saw a Chantal Akerman exhibit at the Mamuta Visual Arts Center in Jerusalem, where she portrays an Israeli desert landscape in a similar way. Much of my time there was spent flipping to different Israeli online news sites for up-to-the-minute briefings on the situation. This inspired me to scroll "news updates" at the bottom of the landscapes reflecting my personal thoughts and experiences. Here are a few film stills.