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.

June 2014 Residency Summary

My critiques in the June 2014 residency mainly focused on the 8-minute scene I cut for my documentary about Iranian Jewish immigration as a result of the Islamic Revolution, a film that focuses on issues of identity, displacement, culture, the Middle East, and family roots. The scene features a new visual technique of hanging photographs and objects on a clothesline and pulling the clothesline as the story progresses. Two additional videos, one an exercise documentary camera, and the other, a fun, self-generated exercise about the process of making hamantaschen, the triangular-filled cookie eaten on the Jewish holiday of Purim, were critiqued to a lesser extent. Brief clips from both of these videos will be used in my Iran documentary. In my group critique with my new advisor Ben Sloat, he 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.”

One of my main goals for the Spring 2014 semester had been to move in the direction of experimentation and find a language of my own that combines elements of experimental and conventional filmmaking. I wanted to break away from the monotony and predictability of the traditional format I’d been wedded to. In the June 2014 residency, faculty and students expressed that I made an important leap in the direction of the experimental. For the most part, critiques focused on deconstructing the Iran doc scene frame by frame to help me move forward on my trajectory of developing creative visualization techniques. This microanalysis sensitized me to the importance of being able to explain different elements in a frame.

In the deconstruction of the 8-minute Iran doc scene in one group critique, faculty member Stuart Steck and students pointed out distracting elements, stimulating questions and interesting aspects that help propel the story. Do you want the pitch back and dog house in the background of the clothesline footage? Regarding the Iranian flags, do you want to use new flags or old flags? If you use new flags, should they show the creases or be ironed? Does the clothesline need to be your backyard or would any backyard suffice? Should it be indoors or in an urban setting? Should the yard become a stage where activities are performed or scenes are acted out? Should the wooden clothespins be old or new and should they all be positioned in the same direction? Stuart found the light that bounced off the new clothespins distracting and suggested that older clips might serve as a device to link the present to the past images in a less jarring way. Can I crop out distracting elements, like flowers, from an interview? When the clothesline is moving, should it pause on each photograph? Stuart commented that the continuous movement and denying him that pleasure of pausing builds an anxiety that’s built into history and its illusiveness. Student Jesse Stansfield asked whether black and white should somehow be used as a device to mediate between the past and the present where color would represent the present and black and white the past. We also discussed how this project is my investigation, so putting up a packaged commercial flag purchased on Ebay might be fine because one of my accesses to Iranian culture is through the internet. While I appreciated the feedback, I did ask myself the question,  “Would viewers actually take the time to analyze the film frame by frame in such detail?”

In my critiques and meetings with Ben Sloat, he helped me understand that reading the components in a frame can be very revealing about the time period. Examples include the patterning in the textiles, like the hounds tooth jacket Edna wears in an interview; the contrast between the imagery on the clothesline and the suburban American backyard; the font used in the Kissinger footage; and Gila’s Farrah Faucet hairdo, reminiscent of the late 70s. Ben suggested experimenting by exporting stills that just focus on details of a frame, like the hounds tooth jacket. He also felt that I should linger on some of the photos that are records of the time and stimulate our imaginations, like the photo of the Mizrahi children on a donkey.

Ben also helped me understand that people’s behaviors help tell a story and embody history and rituals. He felt I should focus on the careful and deliberate methods of food preparation and how the memory of the past is expressed in these behaviors. He suggested I treat each behavior in the production of food as its own scene, which would elevate their significance because these are traditions that have been handed down. For example, when Sharona makes rice, she carefully makes sure every last grain gets in the pan. Thinking about why she does that is important—perhaps she grew up with deprivation. According to Ben, it’s a non-verbal history and the whole performance of food tells a story. In another example, Sharona cuts herbs with a blend of violence and tenderness in the preparation of the Persian omelet Kuku Sabzi. As a way of further understanding this, Ben recommended I look at Francis Alys’s Reel/ Unreel, which portrays the city of Kabul through boys running and pushing two metal film reels along the area’s rough dirt roads, as an example of a less predictable way of telling a story, and Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 showing a Japanese woman carefully packaging boxes where every fold she makes has deep cultural meaning.

There are three issues with the Iran documentary interview footage that I continue to struggle with and were commented on during my critiques: first, the “talking heads” style that is often frowned upon as a documentary practice because it takes away from the immersive experience; second, the information offered by the characters that is often banal, predictable and positivistic; and third, the framing of the interviews, conducted for my final project at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University in 2008, which is sometimes distracting and lacks a consistent style. My mentor for the Spring 2014 semester, Dana Levy, felt I could still make a visually beautiful documentary using the interview material as voiceover. Ben felt the interview strategy isn’t working as much as people’s behaviors. He suggested I work towards minimizing the dialogue and play with elements of the interview frames that help tell the story. I hope to further flesh out these concerns in my work with my mentor Paul Turano this coming semester.

While most faculty and students felt I took an important step forward in developing the visual concept of the clothesline as a device, some disliked it. Judith Barry expressed that it goes on for too long, is repetitive and makes you want to tune out. She liked the moments when an image came alive by being followed by the video because it created an element of surprise. She suggested I invent other video moments or strategies moving from 2D to 3D space, to make scene more lively and less predictable. Graduating student Andrew Yang felt that the clothesline at times seemed to overtake the content of the story. He felt confused when the clothespins were visually dominant in the frame and part of the photograph was cut off, because he couldn’t fully pay attention to the document illustrating the narrative. In contrast, graduating student Alison Beste felt the clothesline was about time moving, home, ritual and domesticity, and wasn’t bothered if a photo was cut off. Andrew gave the example of Errol Morris’s work that employs a lot of different devices but never distracts the viewer from the content. He also would have liked to see the interviews for longer before moving to the clothesline. Ben’s comments sharply contrasted with Andrew’s. Ben said when you look at prescribed documentary syntax of voiceover, historical imagery, interviews, and images you’re not really absorbed in someone’s actual story, but it’s the in between moments that take you to a place you don’t expect.

The 8-minute cut will be part of a longer documentary that will be comprised of at least four chapters. Showing a segment of a film that will ultimately be part of a larger whole brought up questions that might one day be answered when the full story is fleshed out. Judith said you have to ask yourself, “Why would anybody care about the story?” Student Anna Spence wondered if I thought about inserting myself into the story to tell it from my perspective. Ben suggested I focus on my experience because what we care about most and what is most central to our imaginations are our own stories. He gave the example of Rob McElwee’s film Sherman’s March as a solution that is more subjective and personalized. My intention for the first chapter has always been to explain why I’m doing this film. The critiques made it apparent that this is crucial. Ben 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.

I continue to wrestle with striking the appropriate balance between conventional documentary storytelling and more artistic approaches that allow the viewer to make the connections. In the Fall 2014 semester, I would like to continue to watch and study video art, documentaries, and experimental films to help me expand my visual vocabulary, develop new creative strategies and move more into the poetic. My ultimate goal is to make a film that is immersive for the viewers. I have often watched documentaries because I’m interested in the subject matter, but have not been deeply engaged. This month, I watched the documentary The Unwelcoming at the Jerusalem Film Festival—a beautiful story about the Uzan family who immigrated to Israel from Djerba, Tunisia, in 2006. Not only did the film tug at my emotions, but it beautifully depicted the rituals and practices that this family carried with them from Djerba. I had the sudden insight that this is the kind of immersive experience I’m striving for.

Addendum

Resources for Fall 2014

Artists/Filmmakers

9 Artists show at the List Visual Arts Center

Francis Alys, Reel/Unreel

Revisit Alan Berliner (uses his own personal archive to create his films)

Craig Baldwin’s documentaries (uses his own personal archive to create his films)

Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9

Skip Blumberg

Christian Boltanski, Susan Hiller and Abby Warburg

Anthony Bordaine (his approach to looking at food as the history of a place)

Karen Cytter (her work has this performance doc sensibility)

Ori Gersht

Susan Hiller

Ross McElwee, Sherman’s March

Alfredo Jaar

Chris Marker, Letters from Siberia (his film about the former Soviet Union, late 70s)

Revisit Errol Morris’s Fog of War

Shirin Neshat’s interview in Art 21

Matthew Gambers (black and white photography)

Robert Gardner

Walid Raad (who offers a response to trauma)

Mika Rottenberg (as an example of an immersive exhibition experience)

Shahzia Sikander

Elia Suleiman (his work has a documentary quality to it even though it’s fiction)

Leslie Thornton

Archives

Anthology Film Archive (New York)

Archive.org—royalty free footage

Electronic Arts Intermix (New York)

Harvard Film Archive

Prelinger Archives—royalty free footage

Women Make Movies (New York)

Uprooted Tree

 

The image of an uprooted ancient tree always comes to mind when I think about the themes in my documentary on Iranian Jewish emigration as a result of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Over the years, I've searched online for images and videos of uprooted trees native to Iran, but haven’t come across anything suitable. The other day when I was walking with my friend Betsy on a path in the Lower Galilee, she pointed out an uprooted olive tree. I decided to go back and film it. One technical difficulty I had was focusing in the bright sunlight. Here are 5 short clips. I may weave brief segments from them into the film.

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Documentary Visualization

As a visualization strategy for my Iran Documentary--in an attempt to move away from a traditional documentary format--I organized photographs, newspapers and other items on a clothesline and filmed it. This will likely serve as a thread going through the film to give it a unique style.

Iranian Doc Semester Summary: Influences and Process

June 1, 2014

                                          

My work is focused on my documentary about Jewish women’s experiences emigrating from Iran as a result of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Video artist Dana Levy suggested I shift from writing out the story to constructing it using interview material. This involved sifting through hours of interview footage that I’ve collected to date, conducting and filming additional interviews, and thinking through, researching and filming visuals to effectively tell the story. This will ultimately be expanded into a feature length documentary. Starting small, I built a 5-minute segment, which Dana called the spine of my film. Constructing this simplified segment helped me understand the cutting process, but this was no easy task as it involved recutting several times to evoke tension and emotion. My interest in investigating the experiences of these Iranian Jewish women stems from my curiosity and unanswered questions about my Turkish paternal grandmother’s experience living in and emigrating from Smyrna in 1920, moving to Paris for one year, and finally settling in Montreal.

Women’s voices tell this story, which includes themes of domesticity, displacement, and cultural preservation. Through my readings, film screenings, and work with Dana this semester, I have begun to appreciate visual art that involves thoughtful conceptualization and presents multi-layered ideas in intelligent ways. In their catalogue Global Feminisms, Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin present broad, inclusive re-definitions of “feminism” and examples of feminist work with themes of domesticity, displacement, and political activism that resonate for my work and personal life. For example, Polish artist Elzbieta Jablonska, featured in the catalogue, bases her work on the rituals of everyday life like preparing a family meal, the nurturing experiences of motherhood, and her acceptance of the expectation that women should uphold traditional domestic ways. One layer of my film will be about women today who perpetuate culture and tradition through the preparation of food and other domestic arts. Another will show how women often wear more than one hat as both professionals and nurturing mothers or caretakers.

            The exhibition and catalogue She Who Tells a Story also stimulated my thought processes. Juxtapositions by several artists in their mise-en-scenes catalyzed my thinking about how to better deliver my messages and use this tool in my filmmaking. For example, in her Qajar series (1998), Iranian Shadi Ghadirian poses veiled women against a painted backdrop from the Qajar era (1786-1925) with a modern object, like a boom box or Pepsi can, which were either forbidden or restricted in 1998. These juxtapositions suggest the tensions between tradition and modernity, restriction and freedom, and public and private in Iranian society-- all of which are themes in my documentary. Further, Shirin Neshat’s dual format—video art and narrative film—in her work Women Without Men (2009), can be applied to my work. Following her lead, I may choose to also do a video installation that would focus on several of the characters. Rather than have all the information unfold as in a documentary format, viewers would have to make their own connections and draw their own conclusions by moving in and out of the installation space.

I’ve also been wrestling with what it means to craft truth in documentary storytelling and the ethical and moral implications of accurately or inaccurately depicting truth. In their book Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning, Louse Spence and Vinicius Navarro discuss Ruth Ozeki’s 1995 film Halving the Bones, where she resorted to falsifications and fabrications to tell her story about three generations of women in her family. I question whether I should I fill in the major gaps in my grandmother’s story by creatively imagining what she went through. What are the implications of fabricating in art and filmmaking? The Canadian documentary filmmaker Allan King once said about what’s “really real” in his films: “What the hell does that mean? Either the film means something to you, or it doesn’t.”

Crafting Truth also stimulated my thinking on how to creatively present the information and visuals in my documentary work. For example, Chantal Akerman’s film News from Home (1976) includes shots of locations in New York City to depict overarching themes of displacement and being away from home. In Nobody’s Business (1996), documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner uses symbolic displacement by showing the image of a house falling off its foundation when his father discusses his divorce from his mother.

Through research and video experimentation, I am building on interview material and visuals, which I began collecting in 2008 as a novice student filmmaker, to tell a creative and engaging story about Iranian Jewish women’s resilience, endurance, and strength in the face of great challenges and adversity.