We are horrified by the violence taking place in Palestine and Israel and condemn the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. We stand with people around the world fighting for their rights to home, safety, and dignity — as well as their right to narrative sovereignty. Ceasefire now.
So much is at stake in the future being written, so much trauma inscribed in generations to come. Trauma that is apparently palatable, to some, perhaps because we have seen it before. The tactics are so familiar because they enabled the inception of our current settler states. In their midst, we have learned to be either voiceless or fragmented in our outrage. We have learned to look away.
Beauty is not uncomplicated. It is the ability to see everything; to confront everything.
— Dionne Brand (Nomenclature, 2022)
I have been thinking about power. About narratives of belonging and how these stories circulate, curdle and coalesce in ways that can ignite both our deepest humanity and our darkest brutality. I have been thinking about the role of documentary in our notions of who deserves land, dignity, our time, our compassion. We all know how ferociously credence has been given to a settler aspiration to home, at the expense of the people to whom these lands have always been home.
I have been thinking of the ways this institution and our founders, Robert and Frances Flaherty, have contributed to the notion that indigenous people need to be “humanised“. As with land, property, and laws, the contours of these stories of home were set by the newly arrived: the settlers (often terrible listeners), whose own humanity consistently exhibited such fatal flaws.
Robert Flaherty went to the North as a mineralogical prospector. He was searching for something of value. What he found was not minerals but a people, the Inuit. The prospects were good; his method still applied. He mapped, charted, extracted, and brought what he had ‘found’ back to where it had ‘value': monetary. A fur trading company financed the film; they (rightfully) understood it to be advertisement for its wares. A century later, this is still how most documentary films are made, and shown. We understand the value of cinema from the comfort of our seats, but rarely come to know the scars left behind by the excavation. We rarely note the ways our cultural values can be flattered, swayed, and atrophied by the enticing worlds onscreen.
Robert and Frances Flaherty’s filmography outlines the efforts of empire: Moana (1926) was made with Hollywood money in the newly annexed American Samoa; Elephant Boy (1937) was filmed with British money in India under British rule. A commission from Standard Oil brought us Louisiana Story (1948) alongside expanded drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Each film presents an enchanting, if infantilizing, glimpse into a people whose long standing way of life and home was about to be irrevocably changed by the very forces commissioning the film. Each film remains silent about this intentional erasure. Flaherty relegated the people in his films to a fantasy space of peaceful — or rather, pacified — coexistence with the colonial coup at play.
It is not by accident that the colonial industries funded Flaherty’s endeavours: they saw the value in controlling the narratives of the lands they were seeking to exploit. The script of colonialism continues to run deep. I can’t help but notice the many elements of today’s news cycle that continue to reiterate ideas etched long ago by people like The Flahertys whose humanity was, at times, only as deep as their funders’ pocketbooks.
Allakariallak, the man who portrayed Nanook, died a year after Nanook of the North premiered — not the first documentary film, but by all means the first commercially successful one. Flaherty would tell reporters that ‘Nanook’ had died of starvation on a hunting trip, a careful PR move highlighting the hostile environment he had braved while making the film. The elders of Inukjuak told another story: Allakariallak had died of "white man's disease" – tuberculosis, brought most certainly by the fur traders, if not by Flaherty himself. Maggie Nujarluktuk, who portrayed Nanook’s fictional wife in the film, mothered Flaherty’s child, Josephie Flaherty, on Christmas day 1921. Josephie never met his father, and his generation was then subjected to the brutal relocation measures set in place by the the Canadian government: families were separated and brutally relocated, lifestyles obliterated, sled dogs killed, a way of life effectively and irrevocably erased. While a generation of settler Canadian children watched Nanook in their classrooms, generations of indigenous children were stolen from their homes in the Sixties Scoop which lasted well into the 1990s. The Flahertys toured on with the film, never speaking to these great inhumanities.
Beauty is not uncomplicated; people are not uncomplicated. After Robert’s death, Frances Flaherty channeled most of her resources into a space for gathering and for critique. The home she bought for herself was converted into a screening space and hosted the first seminars. An avowedly white space at first, the seminar’s prerogative has nonetheless long been to invite a constant challenge of its blind spots. Since the fifties, it has brought revolutionary people together, across difference, to upend entrenched notions of people, place, and story.
It is our hope that you are receiving this newsletter because you have experienced this potential for transformation in some way. Coming together to debate and question is fundamental to our ability to navigate the complexities of our world with curiosity and love. To truly see.
We are a film seminar. We see cinema as a catalyst for the conversations and communities we all long to have.
Last week, Opacity programmer Janaína Oliveira offered a Manifesto for this Beautiful World. She spoke about the root of curation – as a word, curare, and as a practice – in care. She invoked Tina Campt’s speech at the Loophole of Retreat:
Care is comfort, compassion and sustenance delivered even in the face of inevitable failure. Care is a demonstration and instantiation of attachment and relation.
Care is also a refusal. It is a refusal to be insensitive to the pain or suffering of others. It is refusal to look away or look past the precarity of those in need.
We refuse to look away. The atrocities of the past month defy all humanity, we are mourning and aghast at the violent disconnect between the agendas of the powerful and the suffering of the people. We look to one another — to the resilience of those who are embodying love and resistance, community and solidarity. Our grief is borderless, our calls for ceasefire united. Thank you to all who are in the streets, and to all who in their daily practices are aching to manifest a new world, one where violence is obliterated, children are free to be children, and the genocides in Palestine, Congo, Sudan will cease.
Yes, it is hard to conjure repair when such gratuitous death is taking place in real time. Yes, an invitation to a film screening may very well feel incongruous, meaningless. How hard it is to conjure meaning when so much is so devastating and broken. It is a modest offering in the dark times, but we invite you to come, watch, listen.
“From the heavy debris of loss, together we emerge.”
Wolastoqiyik musician Jeremy Dutcher, quotes this poem by Qwo-li Driskill as the inspiration for his latest album, Motewolonuwok (2023). We are absolutely honoured to include Dutcher’s music in the exhibition Exhibition: Remembering Our Futures, Now, curated by Raven Two Feathers, which opens the MAKA: Many Eyed Vessel mini-seminar at DCTV, November 17-19.
MAKA: Many Eyed Vessel is an alchemy. It is “a collective spell towards a time/space/territory in which we are capable of expressing, in our own forms and languages, how we want to live.” Together we will engage with the works of artists Azucena Losana, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Christopher Makoto Yogi, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Colectivo Silencio, Colectivo Yi Hagamos Lumbre, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Demian DinéYazhi', Ha’aheo Auwae-Dekker, Jemma Desai, João Vieira Torres, Karrabing Film Collective, Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, Meagan Byrne, Miko Revereza, New Red Order, Poh Lin Lee, and Sanaz Azari. Together their works will ignite and inspire conversations, conversations many of us yearn to be having.
MAKA: Many Eyed Vessel engages questions of the moment, questions of ancestry, home, and futurity — questions Palestinian filmmaker Larissa Sansour in her formidable work In Vitro (2019), part of Janaína’s Opacity Seminar (2021) and also part of Program 1 Seen/Unseen in FNYC Season 25:
How do past traumas shape our sense of self? What do we do with memories of a place that no longer exists? How do we define a national identity? What other modes of belonging might we create in the face of colonial and climate catastrophe?
Thank you to our four capacious curators, Emily Abi-Kheirs, Ha’aheo Auwae-Dekker, Isabel Rojas, and Raven Two Feathers for the staggering heart they brought to this process. Thank you to the many artists coming together for this mini-seminar experience, for sharing the light that burns deep within their work.
From the heavy debris of loss, together we emerge. I invite you to join us next week to speak — and moreover, to listen — in whatever form feels right for you:
Nov 15–19 | For the entire event, including an online session Wednesday, November 15 & a meal together after the Metrograph screening on Friday, November 17.
Nov 18–19 | For the weekend at DCTV.
NEW | For any single screening + discussion.
You’ll find more details below.
Take care,
Samara
