Outtakes At The Flaherty

Afterimage, Sept, 1999 by Laura U. Marks

The Robert Flaherty Seminar

Duke University

Durham, North Carolina

June 4-10, 1999

This year's Robert Flaherty Seminar, "Outtakes Are History," cohered around the theme of editing, with all its interesting aesthetic, political and technical ramifications. Programming was shared by Richard Herskowitz of the Virginia Festival of American Film, whose selections tended toward international and experimental work, and Orlando Bagwell of Blackside Productions in Boston, who presented broadcast documentaries by Blackside veterans and other filmmakers. Held at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, there was also a subcurrent of southern content.

Given this year's theme, some attendees were surprised that the history of women editors was not an explicit focus of the seminar as throughout the history of cinema women have worked in editing when other areas were less accessible to them. Since so many of the works shown were edit-driven, the question was raised (most insistently by Duke professor Jane Gaines) whether editors should perhaps deserve the top billing usually reserved for directors. There is a long history of male director/female editor couples like Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova. To that history the seminar contentiously added Artavazd Peleshian and his wife. Peleshian, the Moscow-trained Armenian documentarist, has developed Soviet montage practice and has published on his theory of "distance montage," whereby (to simplify) a shot is given its montage counterpart not immediately but some time later in the film. During the customary Flaherty introductions, the night after many of us had been overwhelmed by Peleshian's short films We (196 9) and Seasons (1975), his wife dropped a bombshell by introducing herself, through a translator, as Peleshian's editor. Editor and filmmaker Joanie Jordan asked for clarification, since the montage of these films is the source of much of their strength. It never became quite clear how great a role Mrs. Peleshian (as she introduced herself) had in the final form of her husband's films, and it became apparent that she did not want to be drawn into the dispute. The controversy blew over, although questions remained.

Peleshian's films are stunning and deserve more attention from the West. His shots capture movement in bold formal contrasts reminiscent of 1930s social-realist photography, and he takes a deeply humanist view of his subjects. Seasons, which follows the annual cycle in an Armenian village, includes a heart-stopping shot of a shepherd sliding down a snow-covered cliff clutching a sheep, in an apparently doomed attempt to save them both. But later, as more shots of shepherds sliding down sheer faces of snow, mud and scree appear the viewer realizes that these dramatic shots do not depict tragedies in this mountainous village but rather a means of transportation. Peleshian described how he slid down the opposite cliff, clutching his camera operator who held the camera, to get the dramatic shots.

The first explicit discussion of editing at the seminar occurred when Jordan and Bagwell presented Mississippi: Is This America?, a 1986 episode of the PBS "Eyes on the Prize" television series on the civil rights movement. Like many other compilation or historical documentaries, the program raised the question of how editing constructs meaning in quite material ways. Jordan revealed that the footage she used often consisted of material found in archives of TV news stations, minus the few seconds that had been selected to air. Thus what was available from the archive (or more accurately, stuffed into the stations' closets) was what had been deemed not newsworthy or not "typical" enough to be shown. This film and the question of editing integrated nicely with Ken Jacobs's Perfect Film (1985), which appeared in a found-footage program curated by Mark McElhatten. Perfect Film consists of an unaltered reel of 16mm synch-sound footage shot by a news photographer after Malcolm X's assassination, minus the brief cl ip that was used for broadcast. Behind an articulate African American man attempting to describe the shooting, a crowd of faces, black and white, presses into the frame, some serious, some mugging, reanimating the history of the assassination into something disturbing and strange. Also in McElhatten's program was Noema (1998), a lovely experiment in editing by the prolific Scott Stark. Stark isolated a lexicon of awkward and "arty" shots from pornography videos--e.g., the "turning over" shot, the pan to an objet d'art in the room--and paired each type of shot with a musical chord. I liked the film's structuralist rigor and could have imagined an extended sequence in which different shots are sequenced to generate an audiovisual tune; but it was also a friendly acknowledgment of the craft involved in this cliched genre.

Changes in editing technology have in turn changed documentary practice. This fact was most striking in the difference between "Eyes on the Prize" and Jacquie Jones's contribution to the "Africans in America" series, Brotherly Love (1998). This film details the increase of African American intellectual and political activity in the early nineteenth century and the "plantationization" of slavery after the invention of the cotton gin. This information was imparted in a lush, metaphoric style similar to work produced in the Black British workshops in the 1980s, and which Jones attributed to African cinematic style. Nonlinear editing allowed for a dense sound montage of African diaspora musics coordinated by Bernice Johnson Reagon and intense images, such as the rainstorm that was actually several filmed rainstorms layered on top of one another. Of course such effects are possible, at greater expense, in linear editing; however, this and other works suggested that the shift toward computer-assisted effects will have important consequences for documentary practice.