Curating a Weekend Film Festival - Essay Example

? Curating a Weekend Film Festival s: CURATING A WEEKEND FILM FESTIVAL List of Films Louisiana Story release: September 28th 1948 Director: Robert Flaherty Starring: Lionel Le Blanc, Joseph Boudreaux, Frank Hardy 2. Nanook of the North Date of release: June 11th 1922 Director: Robert Flaherty Starring: Cunayou, Allakariallak 3. Man Aran Date of Release: October 18th 1934 Director: Robert Flaherty Starring: Michael Dillane, Colman King, Maggie Dirrane 4. Moana Date of Release: January 7th 1966 Director: Robert Flaherty Starring: Fa'agase Su'a-Filo, Ta'avale 5. White Shadows in the South Seas Date of Release: November 10th 1958 Director: W.S. Dyke Starring; Irvon Thalberg Catalogue/Program Essay These films have been chosen due to their belonging to the docu-fiction genre, as well as their setting on beaches. Robert Flaherty’s name conjures up an array of complex debates with regard to films and documentaries, ethics, how others are represented, the director’s role, argument, ideology, gendered imagery, collaboration, ethnography, non-preconception, community, fantasy, voice, idealized or realistic cinematography, racialized bodies, and deep immersion in one the beach field (Usai, 2008). Flaherty worked or directed only 10 fiction films in his entire career. Nanook of the North, which was released in 1922, the Louisiana Story, released in 1948, and Man of Aran, released in 1934 are the popularly analyzed and recognized of his films. This, in part, is caused by the fact that these are the films that were dissected and filmed by his widow and collaborator Frances Flaherty, in the mid to late 50s, which she founded following his death at the Film Seminars held for Robert Flaherty (Christopher, 2009). She did this in order to advance his thoughts on artisanal filmmaking that he used as a way of exploration. Moana, which was released in 1926, was rarely screened because of theatrical legalities of copyright that he faced from paramount. Famous Players Lasky, a Hollywood studio that was later merged with paramount Studios and was directed in Samoa, financed the film for production (Christopher, 2009). The film occupies an obscured and awkward position in the legacy left by Flaherty. It is neither a well thought out narrative of silent film neither is it a documentary exemplar. It is what documentary scholars have long considered as among the very first in the genre of docu-fiction. The response by Famous Players Lansky, which was lukewarm, to Moana took the Flaherty’s towards views that were anti-Hollywood, especially following the holding back of exhibition and marketing by the studio after its debut in NYC (Christopher, 2009). Following his departure from MGM production of the film White Shadows of the South Seas, he went on to exhort that doing business with Hollywood was like sailing in a boat with a glass bottom over a sewer. Famous Players Lansky, in the mid 20s, looked towards the lucrative nature of overseas markets. Walter Wagner, a producer at the studio, imported realist methods of filmmaking that connected profit motives with the increase of world knowledge through foreign film-shoots (Rugg & Sedwick, 2009). He advocated for natural drama, which is a film that constructs stories through focusing on native actors, family, and animals in their natural habitats. Ernest Schoesdack and Merian Cooper were incorporated into the studio and taken to Thailand for the production of Chang in 1926. Stark Love in 1927 was about N. Carolina’s mountain people, Redskin in 1929 dealt with the Navajo people, and the Vanishing Redskin In 1926 dealt with the Monument Valley. Within this context of larger markets and studios, Lasky approached Flaherty for the production of another Nanook of the North, for which he was given a blank production check (Rugg & Sedwick, 2009). Polynesian cultural imagination and fantasy as a paradise that was pastoral and uncontaminated countered industrialization and urbanization’s realities and infused it into the post WWII popular culture (Obrist & Bovier, 2008). Flaherty contacted Frederick O’Brien, who authored White Shadows of the South Seas the novel in 1919, as he thought that he should shoot in warmer climates and not the polar north in order for his family to accompany him with O’Brien having stayed in Samoa for a while after writing his book. MGM acquired the book and took on Flaherty, who was Moana’s director to make the film in Tahiti and the film premiered in 1928. However, because his working methods were too slow for Hollywood’s system of efficiency, he quit production. Following this, Flaherty left for the Samoan village of Safune on the Savaii Samoan Island in the year 1923 together with his brother and filmmaking gear, projectors, and generators. Living here for two years, he showed the Samoans the film Nanook and brought with him some famous features from the Famous Players Lasky as examples of narrative films produced in the studio (Durant & Orbanz, 2009). His wife was a vital and credited collaborator in the Moana film and shot thousands of stills for use as storyboards. However, there were conceptual cinematic problems that were posed by Samoa for Flaherty with the easy tropic life not being able to offer the thematic structure for Nanook that was man vs. nature. Instead, as observed by Richard Brasam, the absence of any struggle with the people in Samoa and the abundant environment that is naturally available in Samoa presented problems for casting and narrative that resulted in a romanticized and disjointed, as well as idaealized episodic structure of Moana’s and Fa’angase’s romance (Durant & Orbanz, 2009). Flaherty removed any evidence of the 20th century, as well as any Western missionary effects on the life of Samoans and required those who were casted to wear siapo outfits that were from the nineteenth century, although western clothing had already reached Samoa at the time (Grieveson & Wasson, 2008). Flaherty also used two Samoans for film processing to replicate Nanook’s collaborative style of production. Flaherty did not use a script and shot using a camera that was hand cranked, shooting more than two hundred and forty thousand feet of film that was pioneering in panchromatic stock use. The stock was chosen to highlight the tone of the Samoan’s skin, as well as to deal with the tropical sun’s intensity. In Moana, Flaherty used a wider array of lenses compared to Nanook with a longer lens that meant he could shoot from a distance. It is also claimed that Flaherty and his wife staged episodes, which would later become scenes in Moana (Grieveson & Wasson, 2008). Moana uses the episodic structure of a day in life, which essentially is to be found in the majority of travelogues of the period before the sound period. This film is focused on everyday rituals with men harvesting turtle fish, firewood, banana, leaves, coconut, mulberry boughs, as well as hunting wild pig (Barsam, 2008). The women are also seen beating mulberry strips using a mallet to form fabrics, whereas also crushing candlenut seeds in order to create dyes. The men are also fishing by using outrigger boats. The climax of Moana pivots on a couple of scenes that are controversial: Fa’angase and Ta’avale dancing to the Siva rite and Ta’avale being tattooed as a ritual. Flaherty’s fantasies can be seen to be seen to be flowing through the two scenes, which aim to erase any veracity of ethnography. The dancing to Siva would have done as a dance between siblings, rather than rendering as a romantic scene. The episode with the tattooing can be reimagined as one questing for manhood, and it is revealing of the fact that most other male adult Samoans were not tattooed, especially in the scene (Barsam, 2008). It has also been pointed out that Flaherty included customs that Samoa had abandoned for a while, although they ignored Samoan life’s contemporary challenges through neutralization of tattooing pain, as well as the ocean’s danger. Moana’s position in the industry, ironically, does not reside too much in artistry as it does in the film category it launched. As a docu-fiction, it coined the “documentary” term. Being a visual account of everyday Polynesian life for youth, Moana has a documentary value (Geritz et al, 2011). John Grierson, who noted this in the New York Sun Review, contended that he had derived the documentary term from documentaire French term that referred to expedition or travelogue films. As he claimed, he employed documentary as a term in the review, not as a noun, but as an adjective. As a filmmaker who was hailed for a long time as an independent one, Moana was a film that was financed as a studio film. Flaherty is a filmmaker whose process of filmmaking is linked with non-preconception Zen concepts. However, the film Moana has created what has been noted as imperialist fantasies for white men that figure Polynesian life as idyllic in quest of rituals and food (Geritz et al, 2011). All scholars who have written about this film underscore its deep ethical issues, especially Flaherty’s payment to Ta’avale to endure a long and painful ritual of tattooing below the waist because this was not practiced in Samoa any longer. Ricky Leacock in his memoirs defended Flaherty and film from scholarly criticism as the man who shot Louisiana Story. In his argument, he contended that Flaherty was not for the large crews used by Hollywood and that he wanted to do things himself (Griffith, 2012). He claims that Flaherty collaborated with the subjects and showed the rushes to them to get feedback. There were no art cinemas or alternative cinema circuits during Flaherty’s lifetime. There are even more theoretical and historical complications that augment the fantasies and intellectual disorders that surround Man Aran (Griffith, 2012). Flaherty’s daughter, way later in the 70s, returned to Samoa with a lightweight recorder in tow so as to record new soundtracks for Samoan chants, poetry, voices, and songs to replace Felix Mendelssohn, Pyotr Ilyich, and Sergei Rachmaninoff on the original soundtrack for Man Aran that was originally produced in the studio. Because of her idealization of the Samoan childhood that they had undergone, his daughter remembered the Samoan song’s power and decided to integrate them into the re-release of Man Aran. Repeating the strategies used by Flaherty in the early 20s, they screened Man Aran for the people of Samoa and tracked some of the original cast members from Moana who were alive and gathered sound in a style that was of a direct cinema style. In order to match the original sound to images, they step-printed the original film and doubled frames for the new soundtrack to be recorded at 24 frames/second (Griffith, 2012). This would match the original film shot at silent film speeds of 18 per second. The Monica/Richard version of the film with a fresh soundtrack was premiered in 1981 at Cinemateque Francaise. After fourteen years later, various programmers programmed Man Aran with sound using a film seminar by Flaherty entitled technology and Interpretation with his daughter explaining her mixing process and sound recording. The reconstructed soundtrack raised an issue as to what makes up original or authentic Man Aran. Questions arise as to whether the originally Hollywood Studio produced film was read or marketed as a realist fiction or whether the version reclaimed with the new direct cinema soundtrack documentary, which looks at the film afresh renders the documentary to look like Samoa back in the 20s (Griffith, 2012). In addition, there is also the question of whether the new soundtrack just maps out a fantasy of Samoan childhood. It is difficult to exemplify what happens to a docu-fiction shot and cast as a narrative is remade using Samoan music as the soundtrack with chanting, voices, and music recorded more than a century later. In addition, it is not clear if it becomes more of a documentary when the sound is gathered using ethnographic styles. Could the collaborative soundtrack that is made by Flaherty’s daughter using Samoans as a remedy for fantasies of white imperialists for her father? Or does changing the soundtrack be any different to altering live music that accompanies silent film screening, which is a common practice in silent film, or even at present at museums and film festivals? These questions continue to drive the maelstrom around Flaherty, and it is up to the audience to make their own decision. References Christopher, Robert. (2009). Robert and Frances Flaherty : a documentary life. Montreal : McGill-Queens Univ. Pr. Durant, Helen. & Orbanz, Eva. (2009). Filming Robert Flaherty's Louisiana story. New York : Museum of Modern Art. Geritz, Kathy. Oxtoby, Susan. Seid, Steve. & Kramer, Edith. (2011). Film 220 film curating. United States : University of California, Berkeley. Griffith, Richard. (2012). The world of Robert Flaherty. New York: Da Capo Press. Barsam, Richard. (2008). The vision of Robert Flaherty: the artist as myth and filmmaker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grieveson, Lee. & Wasson, Haidee. (2008). Inventing film studies. Durham : Duke University Press. Murphy, William. (2008). Robert Flaherty. Boston: Hall . Obrist, Hans-Ulrich. & Bovier, Lionel. (2008). A brief history of curating. Zurich : Les Presses du re?el. Rugg, Judith. & Sedgwick, Miche?le. (2009). Issues in curating contemporary art and performance. Bristol: Intellect. Usai, Paolo. (2008). Film curatorship. Wien: O?sterrechisches Filmmuseum. Read More