Four Minute Cuts

I’m narrowing the subject matter of my documentary on Iranian emigration as a result of the Islamic Revolution. It will now be focused on the women’s experiences, and will include many different women’s voices telling the story of before, during and after the Revolution. I’ve been challenged to tell a good story by sifting through my interview footage. My task for the month of April was to lay down interview clips on a timeline to start shaping the storyline. The visuals will come later. To simplify this task, I broke down the material into many different themes.

This task helped reacquaint me with my footage, but by the end of the month, I felt overwhelmed by all the material! So when I met with Dana in May, we spent the time editing and used several useful clips from the first iteration of my documentary that I did in 2008 for my final project at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. Since our meeting, I’ve cut a sequence with a story arc from 10 minutes down to 7 minutes and finally down to 4 minutes. According to Dana this will be the spine of my film. Dana has given me suggestions along the way of how to better shape the story. Here some examples:

·      If one person mentions something it’s enough--it doesn't need to be repeated. 

·      Think about this as trying to tell a story with as little words as possible.

·      Let characters begin and end their sentences and breathe a bit before cutting to the next shot. It makes it look more natural and less like you’re forcing them to construct your story.

·      Let the tension build up, starting with the good life in Iran. It’s important to emphasize the good life so that the change will seem drastic. 

·      It’s better not to jump back and forth between characters when talking about the same time period. 

Here are a few production stills of the characters I’m including:

Before the Revolution, Movie Review

At a time when Israel experiences a persistent threat from Iran’s nuclear capabilities and its subversive presence in the bordering countries of Syria and Lebanon, Director Dan Shadur, in his documentary Before the Revolution, tells the story about Israel's economic and political presence in Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This ex-patriot community enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle and close relations with the Shah’s regime, built on weapon sales in exchange for oil and construction contracts, among other things. Through the film’s unique angle, the viewer not only learns about the utopian-like lifestyle of Israeli families living in Iran in the ‘60s and 70s, but the ever increasing discontent among the Iranian people which led to the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic Revolution.

Dan Shadur tells the story through the use of a rich collection of home movies, archival footage and interviews, with diplomats, Mossad agents, businessmen and their families. The Islamic Revolution encroaches on them unexpectedly turning their paradise into horror and shattering their dreams of continued wealth and opulent lifestyle. The director is personally invested in this story because his family was a part of this experience and he uses excerpts from family letters and his home movies in the film.

I took Sharona and Cyrus, two individuals in my Iran documentary, to the film. For them it was a nostalgic experience; they liked seeing the sights of Teheran, like the Shahyad Monument, close to where their aunt lived, and hearing David Menashri, a professor at Tel Aviv University, discuss Persian poetry that explains how Persians are different from Arabs. Shadur’s film did not weave in the experience of Iranian Jews at the time, and I wondered if there was any intersection between the two communities. I was disappointed that the National Center for Jewish Film did not reach out to the Iranian Jewish community in the Greater Boston area; we realized that Sharona and Cyrus were the only representatives in the audience.

I hope to have the opportunity to see the film again, so I can learn from and gain a deeper understanding of the filmmaking apparatuses Dan Shadur used to tell this story. He used 4 by 3 home movies and archival footage and seamlessly blended these with the 16 by 9 interview footage. At times he did use jump cuts in the interviews, but this didn’t affect the flow or quality of the film. Many of his interviews were artfully done with a shallow depth of field. The story arc was well-conceived and led to a dramatic crescendo as the discontent in Iran increased and Israelis found themselves in a vulnerable and unsafe situation. The film stirred a balance of emotions in the viewers: a few of the anecdotes were humorous and generated laughter while others were riveting and had the audience on the edge of their seats.

While this film does approach the history of the period from a unique perspective, this is a worthwhile film for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Having a little fun with video

As I develop the story for my Iran documentary, I can't help but think visually about film clips that might be useful. I shot this footage last month when I was baking hamantashen--triangular-shaped, filled cookies, eaten during the Jewish holiday of Purim. The holiday commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman's plot to annihilate them, and the story is recorded in the Book of Esther.  In Yiddish, these cookies are called "hamantashen," meaning "Haman's pockets," and in Hebrew, they're called "oznei Haman," meaning "Haman's ears."

Making hamantashen and the story of Purim are important for my documentary in a few ways. One of the memories I have of my Turkish grandmother, a character in my film, is going over to her house as a teenager to learn how to make hamantashen. (Years later, when I started making them for my family, my father instructed me on how to pinch the dough so the hamantashen would hold their shape.) The Book of Esther takes place in Persia and the tombs of Mordecai and Esther, important characters in the story, are in Hamadan, Iran. Many Iranian Jews have made pilgrimages there over the years. The characters in my film are heroines like Esther in that they overcame hardship in order to perpetuate their culture, religion and peoplehood.

As incoming students to LUCAD during the June 2013 residency, Judith Barry described an ideal studio space that includes a "play" area, where we should have fun with our medium.  I had a lot of fun with this exercise as I was editing and listening to the song I included. A word about the music: I went to an elementary school founded by Yiddishists and one of the songs I remember learning was the one featured in this clip,  called "Hop Meine Hamantashen," a humorous ballad about a woman named Yachne Dvoshe and her attempt to make hamantashen. This particular version is sung by Abby Rosenblatt. Here are the translated lyrics:

Yachne-Dvoshe's in a dither
Packing for the market-place,
She is off to buy flour
For to bake the Purim cakes

Chorus:
Ho, my hamantashen
Ho, my white delight,
Ho, my hamantashen

Didn't come out quite right.
It's raining and it's snowing,
And the roofs are dripping,
Yachne's bringing corn meal home
In a bag that's ripping.

She bought no honey, no poppy seed,
And quite forgot the yeast,
But Yachne's making hamantashen
They're in the oven at least.

Yachne's carrying her Purim gift
To her mother-in-law,
Two or three hamantashen
Half-burned and half-raw.

Meeting with Dana Levy, 3-25-14

I had another productive meeting with Dana. My Iran documentary is taking shape. The film will be about women who emigrate from Middle Eastern Countries to the West, and how the traditions and skills they bring with them are an important part of culture and history. My next assignment is to streamline the Mizrahi family’s story, put it on a timeline using interview material, and intersperse it with sparse voiceover about my grandmother’s story. Dana explained that visually I should think in terms of texture. We looked at digitized photographs that I have of Iran in the 70s, and she showed me how textures from two different photographs can blend together using dissolves. Textures and smells are an important part of this film. Dana also recommended I see the documentary film Before the Revolution, a new film by Dan Shadur and Barak Heymann, about Israelis living in Teheran in the 60’s and 70’s who enjoyed a special relationship with the Shah until their world collapsed with the onset of the Revolution. Fortunately, it’s playing at the MFA in May. And one more thing--I’m building a pulley clothesline.  To be continued . . .

Meeting with Dana Levy, 2/4/14

I met with my mentor Dana Levy on March 4 in New York City.  My focus this semester will be to shape my documentary about the Mizrahi family who emigrated from Iran as a result of the Islamic Revolution. As a first step, I wrote out the story as though I was telling it to a friend, leaving out the visuals I might use to illustrate it. This version weaves in what brought me to this investigation as much as it tells the story of the Mizrahi family. On some level the Mizrahi family’s story becomes my story.

Dana was reassuring that I would likely be able to use the interview footage already shot. I’ve been working on this film since 2008, at varying stages of my development as a filmmaker, so I’ve been concerned about the interview quality. Dana said that with creativity, a film can be beautiful in spite of this.

Dana’s response to the first experimental exercise I did was that she’d like to see me take more of a 3-D approach to the objects I included. Rather than scan them and present them as 2-D, I should film characters interacting with the objects by pointing or holding them. She recommended that I watch the film Nobody’s Business by filmmaker Alan Berliner to stimulate my visual thinking. Alan owns an archive of found footage. In Nobody's Business, he weaves in short clips of old boxing matches to represent his relationship with his father.

Experimental Video--Take One

Hey Group 2,

I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept of index/indexical relationship in photography. Would you say these representations are indexical?

Thanks for your feedback.

Wendy

Documentary Camera at Mass Art

 

This exercise was my final project for the documentary camera course I took in January at Mass Art with instructor Michael Sheridan. Condro Lukitosari, another student, and I jointly filmed this, then we each did our own edit.

We filmed an interview and three scenes. For the scenes we captured a range of shots--wide, medium, and close up--then edited together the scenes using the interview as voiceover. The focus was on continuity editing, where we cut together shots in a logical order to make the viewers feel they’re living in a reality.