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.
5th 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.
