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)