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.
