July 2020
The Flaherty Preservation Initiative Receives 2020 Grant from National Film Preservation Foundation
Notes of an Early Fall
The Flaherty/International Film Seminars, Inc. will preserve Notes of an Early Fall (USA 1976, Super 8mm, 33 min., color, sound) by Saul Levine, as part of the Flaherty Preservation Initiative with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation’s (NFPF) Avant Garde Masters Grant.
NFPF’s Avant-Garde Masters have saved 177 films by 65 filmmakers over the last sixteen years. We are honored to be one of the twenty-nine organizations that have participated, making the newly preserved prints available for study and sharing them with hundreds of exhibition venues. Levine’s career stands over fifty years, he was a featured filmmaker at the Flaherty Seminar in 2016 programmed by Harvard Film Archive’s David Pendleton. The Flaherty will work with former IFS trustee Bill Brand at BB Optics, Inc. who has inspected the original Super 8mm materials.
Levine made Notes of an Early Fall (1976) having then been recently fired for his leftist political activism from his job at the prestigious SUNY Binghamton film department. Levine returned home to New Haven, Connecticut in the autumn season to celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, with his family. With his new Super 8mm sound camera he began experimentations with the unification of sound and moving image, a change from his previous silent works and a “fall” from the strict formality of producing moving image materials based purely on the visual. Notes of an Early Fall marks a new chapter in Levine’s ongoing series of small gauge films titled “Notes” including, among many others, Note One (1968), Lost Note (1968-69), New Left Note (1968-82), Note to Pati (1969) and Note to Colleen (1974). The film plays a significant role in the history of Avant-Garde film more generally for its innovative exploration of montage through in-camera and post-production sound/image relationships in the Super 8mm sound format.
Previous Flaherty Preservation Initiative projects include Troublemakers, a 1966 documentary by Norman Fruchter and Robert Machover about community organizing in Newark, New Jersey and Reflections (1955) by Madeline Tourtelot. Tourtelot was a prominent member of the Chicago fine arts scene of the 1950s and ‘60s and attended at the first-ever Flaherty Film Seminar in the summer of 1955 as a student. The projects were completed in conjunction with Bill Brand, graduate students in the Film Preservation class of New York University’s graduate Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program (MIAP), part of the Cinema Studies Department, Tisch School of the Arts and The Chicago Film Archives.
Thank you to all who logged in for the Unassembled on June 13. We had 3,400 views from 41 countries during the 24 hour streaming period. Thanks again to our featured contributors: Frances H. Flaherty, Janaína Oliveira, Kevin Jerome Everson, Pablo de Ocampo, Shai Heredia, Bill Brand, Ruth Somalo, Kate MacKay, Greg de Cuir, Jr., Jeronimo Rodriguez, Kevin B. Lee, Lisa Barbash, Carlos A. Gutiérrez, Laura Major, Crystal Z. Campbell, Jheanelle Brown, and Daniela Alatorre.
Dispatch: “Revisiting the parts”
When The Unassembled starts transmissions at 4pm ET, June 13th, the new Flaherty board of trustee’s president, Ruth Somalo, reminds us in her own words that what we are about to witness is “The first ever virtual Flaherty event”. The day of the opening night of the Flaherty Seminar would have been this day, June 13th, 2020. A date chosen to launch a unique event that for the first time would not have us sitting side by side engaging in unforgettable discussions after provocative screenings at Colgate’s film theater. However, what was offered was the invocation of virtual spirits manifested through a small chat window on the right side of the screen. And by “spirits” I mean “us”, the audience in front of hundreds of computers and smartphones trying to connect with “hellos” and cheerful comments sharing our locations and other information that could in theory make us feel closer and geographically aware of each other. One thing became a common feeling and that is to be part of the Flaherty family for at least one of the seven days that the seminar lasts and that we could not fully experience this year due to the pandemic. This day would become a source of hope in a path to find an appropriate format for cinema encounters that adapt to our current times.
When Frances appears on the screen soon we realize the power of archival images. The message behind Frances's words is one that connects us back to one of cinema's fundamental missions through its most essential instrument, the camera. This mission is to reveal. “(…) You take us to a new dimension of seeing, you give us a new awareness, through your eyes, we re-discover the world around us”. This is a phrase that not only recognizes Robert's vision and his personal use of the camera but also the vision of all the filmmakers who continue to rediscover their actualities and frame new images from different parts of the world.
This collective mission, which is also a first way to open our eyes to the cinema, is the opening to “The Unassembled”, and event made by audiovisual parts ready to be gathered and put together by the audience.
Kevin B. Lee
It is the turn of Kevin B. Lee, who shares with us a reflection originated in the seminar he was a part of back in 2013. In that seminar, he recalls how he read a passage of James Baldwin’s letter directed to his nephew, to a room full of mostly white people. He not only reads the sentences again, this time he shows us the text written in 1962: “Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger”. The act of reading and showing the text works almost as a pleonasm. It seems that this is the poetic figure that is needed in these times to be able to make certain messages clearer. To be redundant, to insist, to remind us what are the important questions we should be asking ourselves. At the time, Kevin B. Lee, says he realized that “the question of what is documentary? Gave away to a new question, who is documentary? Who’s reality do we get to see? And who gets represented?”
At the end of his “audiovisual part” Kevin reads another powerful text by Baldwin and closes with his words by saying “(…) that we with love shall force our brothers (and sisters) to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it”. Quoting, and repeating passages of history can be a powerful way to keep fighting for representation and to keep creating spaces for the voices that are constantly cast aside by mainstream media and dominant culture.
Cardinal is described as a film about bird-watchers looking for the state bird of Ohio. Kevin Jerome Everson’s piece opens up a path to observation. But this time, who is observing? Who is looking for the origins, for the symbols? And at the same time, who are we looking at? They, the characters of the film, are not watching us back; we are the ones observing them while they continue their observation ritual. From below, from a place of contemplation and admiration, we witness a frame that’s framed again, demarcated, divided but centered, to help us pay attention to this search. Our center is “them”. Their center is beyond the frame; it is something we cannot see, something only approachable by them. We can only wait and see. We can only wait and let them seek.
The journey of The Unassembled continues and gives way to the next round of testimonials. Jheanelle Brown, a 2019 Flaherty Seminar curatorial fellow, opens this section describing her personal experience as a seminar participant. “It is a contested space” – she says – “a space full of deep contradictions in which I felt, sense and participated in very complicated conversations”. Jheanelle's words call us to pay attention to what has been the organization’s recent effort to open up the screening traditions and incorporate more POC artists, curators and participants. And as an optimistic closure to this idea, her words bring about what the seminar has always been, a place to meet collaborators and build strong friendship bonds out of the intense one-week experience. The community at the seminar can be considered a small sample of the film world out there, as it always encounters challenging dialogues that derive from challenging films but it does it thanks to the inspiring and groundbreaking work presented in an ideal setting for discussions to take place.
Bill Brand
As we continue with more testimonials of participants and volunteers we dive into the love and fun that means to be a part of the seminar. Everyone agrees how dancing becomes unforgettable. Intersections and memory are at the center. Bill Brand, artist, film preservationist and former Flaherty trustee mentions the importance of creating an archive and his effort to make this happen. An urgent goal that has been passed down from generations of executive directors and that involves the possibility to connect all the work made by Robert and Frances as well as the history of the seminar as an annual gathering of exceptional filmmakers. The Flaherty Preservation Initiative started by Bill, is an ongoing project in collaboration with NYU’s graduate moving image archiving preservation program “to preserve neglected important films by artists who had presented at past seminars.” Bill’s quote here reflects the urgent task that an organization like Flaherty has. Every year Flaherty presents programs that add up to hundreds of films, among them, some of the films will have no outlet other than that of these programs.
After a pause, Janaína Oliveira’s presence is one that we anticipated with many expectations. The programmer for this year's seminar finally appeared in front of us. Her opening remarks inevitably sparked conflicting feelings. Many of us did not want to see the cancelation of an event with so much history, but our times are the times of uncertainty. This pandemic has exhibited one of the greatest impacts in the state and city that have served as the home of the Flaherty –for so long–, New York. Janaína’s words fill us with regret but they also give us a sense of hope. “I am the programmer of the 66th seminar edition, the one that was postponed for next year, that was supposed to be starting today”, she says. At this point we can only join her on this wait for the next year to come with better chances to get together in deep conversations. We let go and follow her lead because we realize that things have changed from now on. The events that could easily become the subject of conversation during a seminar have reached us to such level that they have changed the way we gather around cinema. And the particular kind of cinema that identifies a Flaherty seminar is one that is already difficult to access. Janaína speaks about this issue when she mentions being a programmer from South America and how the Flaherty helped her have access to work to create new programs after participating in the 2018 and 2019 events. Many of the filmmakers and participants of the seminar coming from all junctions of the world have a life-changing experience at the seminar because they encounter each other, they see each other, and they find each other’s work for the very first time here. This is the new challenge that begins to find some answers at The Unassembled.
This pandemic showed our vulnerabilities, in the case of the seminar due to the postponing of the event, but it is also letting us show our strength. During her presentation Janaína insists that she will not reveal her program “Opacity” as one of the main qualities of the Flaherty Seminar is “non-preconception” but her virtual presence alone reveals the purpose of the evening: to share the Flaherty’s resilience and willingness to overcome any obstacles that could jeopardize the continuity of these thought-provoking curatorial practices.
The following selected piece represents the cinematic act of observation connected to cinematic creation. “During these viewing nothing existed for Flaherty except for what was on the screen. Gone was the moment when he took the shot. Gone was any preconceived idea of what he wanted for the film. Gone were any notions of good photography or focus or exposure. In the theater he was sitting for hour after hour, smoking a cigarette after cigarette. Concentrating wholly on the screen.” This memorable quote by Frances H. Flaherty from 1963 is part of a clip that contains the narration of the arduous process carried out by Robert Flaherty to obtain a cinematic sequence. In describing this process, Frances also indirectly describes the careful act of attending a non-preconception screening during the seminar and how this act of complete awareness and reflection creates a bridge that brings us closer to the creative hand behind the work.
Flaherty NYC film frames come as a glimpse to a recent past in the city. The black and white footage creates the illusion that we are going back even further in time. The images captured by Alex Cunningham were put together to remember some of the highlights of the 2019 fall program by Courtney Stephens & Mathilde Walker-Billaud. In doing so, these images never thought of becoming a documentation of pre-pandemic film screenings yet here they are in front of us as a portal to a different reality.
Janaína Oliveira & Palbo de Ocampo discuss the legacy of filmmaker Sarah Maldoror
Following what felt like a break in time, Janaína Oliveira joins Pablo de Ocampo in a conversation about Pan-African filmmaker Sarah Maldoror who passed away in April due to Corona virus. The summoning of her recently departed soul through her films becomes a powerful timeless moment in the evening. Sarah was one of the guest artists showing their work at the 2013 Seminar “History is what’s happening”, programmed by Pablo. “Sarah Maldoror’s work was a very essential component to the work I put together for the Flaherty,” says Pablo, responding to Janaína’s first question in this informal zoom Q&A. It is rather impossible to ignore the impact that Maldoror’s films have today, when June has become the busiest month on the streets of the United States due to the series of deaths caused by abuses against black lives.
In Monangambé (1968, Dr. Sarah Maldoror) black men are led into the darkness of the cells by white guards. Their liberties suppressed, haunted by political ideals that resist the overwhelming power of the colonizing agent. The wife of one of these men triggers a series of misunderstandings that easily turn into abuse from fear of the others alienated. Sunlight is a privilege and music keeps the living from falling. In Monangambé the language is what separates, dictates but also what marks their destinies. In Monangambé the skin does not protect, instead it calls for white death.
Monangambé
The political struggle and activism behind the different work conceived by Sarah Maldoror that Pablo and Janaína get to briefly discuss is equated to that of the movements that are born as a response to the actions of a racist society –emerged from the precepts of colonialism– that continues to marginalize and discriminate vulnerable lives. The airs of revolution and resistance are transferred from fiction to reality, one that can be heard and breathed from our windows from now and every day of the month.
In the background the audience responds by cheering the filmmakers and the organizers:
Cinembargo - "it is great to see what Arsenal is doing for the films they used to distribute! Support preservation!"
Marie Regan - "yes!"
Juanita Anderson - "Hope you will note that Sarah Maldoror is considered the first woman of African heritage to direct a feature film."
The evening continues with more impactful work that creates intersections between filmmaking and the current ongoing social unrest. “Can the camera shoot?” “Are you a camera?” “Have I been shot?” In Memory of Crystal Z Campbell wonders without fully arguing or answering to the questions she poses. Images too close to see and distorted strings repeat melodies that try to start too heavy a conversation. They claim this is the weight of circumstances.
Kate MacKay gives us a brief description of a cinema of the resistance program that she is preparing for a soon future. One of the films she is considering for the show is that of Joyce Wieland, Rat Life & Diet In North America.
Rat Life & Diet In North America.
The Flaherty shares this description with the audience: “A subversive short film which protests the Vietnam War and military establishment using a story of rats being imprisoned in the U.S. and making their way to Canada.” And Kate also states how the film is “a humorous fable of political oppression”.
When the film begins, another text appears printed on the screen and is added to the texts already shared: “This film is against the corporate military industrial structure of the global village.” The sum of the texts and the repetitive image showed in the film, printed in our memory, the death of a revolutionary man Ché Guevara, is similar to that of a political manifest. It is impossible to ignore the more activist tone voices that have been a fundamental part of the seminar. To this day, the seminar has many times become that safe place where difficult politically charged conversations can arise without fear of retaliation. Let’s not forget the many times that Flaherty has invited artists or has had participants that did not feel free to express themselves while being in the United States due to their political views. However, the remoteness of the actual location for the event allows a sense of privacy that does not exist today with online screenings. This is most certainly a challenge for all the virtual streaming and discussion around political cinema. The Unassembled indirectly becomes an event that is showing us more of the parts, more of the fragments, obstacles and possibilities for future Flaherty programs.
Child On A Chessboard
Up next is Shai Heredia, recent Flaherty curator from 2019’s Film Seminar, “Action”. She introduces a film that “represents her head space” and is, as she calls it, “a simple, psychotic film” Child On A Chessboard (1979, dir. Vijay B. Chandra)
It is described to the audience as “a film that contemplates the future of man in a world threatened by nuclear wars by experimenting with the medium of cinema itself”. This is a film of distortions, sound and visual effects that plays with the creative ingenuity of children subject to observation and experimentation. The animation in the film contrasts childhood innocence with political machinations and military powers that result in atomic bombs that detonate the cry of thousands of tormented children. The machine does not stop and continues its observations through cameras that hide at an apparent distance, beyond harmless perception.
The film sparks more comments in the chat room:
- carol almeida - "amazing! Right now I’m just so grateful for being here"
In one of the final sections of The Unassembled, Kevin Jerome Everson is to the right and Greg De Cuir, Jr. to the left of the screen in another zoom call. Greg and Kevin were the programmers of the 2018 Flaherty Film Seminar “The Necessary Image”. In this opportunity they get together to share clips of films and music videos that became their entryway to cinema. In a way, they are now sharing “their necessary images.”
“The Flaherty is something special, it’s a bittersweet pill obviously to not be able to gather in person, but is nice to revisit what we love about the seminar” are some of Greg’s opening words to this section. The conversation between Greg and Kevin is set to be 45 min of sharing with the audience how they got into film.
“For me when I got into cinema it was like going to the drive in,” says Kevin about how he became exposed to Blaxploitation films early in his life.
Greg brings up Cardinal by Everson, showed earlier in the evening, as a relevant film in terms of race. Greg considers it a film that resonates with current events taking place locally and internationally. Kevin responds by saying "I never imagined that a film I made would be so political… classic America" Kevin's sense of humor allows him to make sharp criticisms without having to dwell on details. Greg then introduces the first film of the night in dialogue with Cardinal. The clip from Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai by Jim Jarmusch shows Forest Whitaker freeing pigeons and watching them fly away. It is a magical cinematic moment, maybe the out of frame that Kevin did not want to show in his own film but the pairing of the two presented itself as an expansion for both works, something that Flaherty programmers are used to doing during seminar screenings.
The Mack
Right after this poetic moment, Kevin breaks the pace with a scene from The Mack, the 1973 film directed by Michael Campus. The scene is one in which Kevin says he is “responding to a Richard Pryor performance”. It is interesting to learn about Everson’s film references regarding performances since his own films are often based on staged actions with non-actors that will evolve into a memorable sequence easily passing as a documentary moment. The Mack is a film associated with Oakland, CA. It is a “classic hang out California film” according to Greg.
The next clip selected by Greg is extracted from Jackie Brown. In Greg’s words this could be the “greatest Los Angeles film ever made”. Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Tucker’s scene presents itself as an “homage to the Blaxploitation era of cinema.” Kevin adds that Jackie Brown is an “unglamorous” film due to locations, “but this is what I respond to”, the more visceral sides of cinema correspond to the materiality within a scene and cinema as a social event.
Continuing with the analysis of Jackie Brown, Kevin takes his research back to the seventies, to revisit Pam Grier’s influential filmography. In the scene he chooses this time, Pam appears as a heroine in an action movie. She is powerful enough to confront all of her enemies and proceeds to eliminate the entities that represent her battle against misogyny and racism. Kevin laughs. It is definitely a moment full of political meaning inserted in a comedic way. Sometimes comedy is the only way to get dissident ideas across and Kevin knows this very well.
The dialogue between Greg and Kevin is now taking us to the origins of the hip-hop scene with Grandmaster Flash DJing and spinning records in his kitchen in the film Wild Style. For anyone interested in African-American culture and its representation on mainstream media, this is a truthfully valuable moment. Suddenly the audience becomes aware of the importance of having a filmmaker like Kevin Jerome Everson and a programmer like Greg De Cuir, Jr. leading such a unique conversation in a time of social unrest, where black lives are continuously put in danger.
As this dialogue becomes more and more engaging, Kevin responds to Greg with a clip from Super Fly, a 1972 Blaxploitation crime drama film directed by Gordon Parks Jr. and starring Ron O'Neal, a young theater actor who had been doing Shakespearean work at the time he was casted in the film. Many have voiced this to be one of the best representations of Blaxploitation films. The “American Dream” scene selected by Kevin is probably the most celebrated performance moment in the film between the lead characters Youngblood Priest (Ron O’Neal) and Eddie (Carl Lee).
NOW
The final clip shares of this unforgettable conversation are probably the most powerful of the evening. Greg continues with his line of musical references and presents the first minutes of NOW, a film by Santiago Álvarez (Cuba, 1965) The lyrics of the song performed by Lena Horne reverberates so present “Enough of the quoting put those words into action. Now is the moment, no more waiting, no hesitating”, “I still believe we are all created free and equal.” The film is only 5 minutes long and fully available online on different streaming options. As Greg points out, this is a piece that should be watched by everyone and it will only take five minutes to get the complete picture.
The Murder of Fred Hampton, 1971, directed by Howard Alk and Mike Gray is the film that Kevin requests to finish this session with. The sequence selected is a cinema-verité moment documenting the activities of the Black Panther party in Illinois. After watching the piece, Kevin can’t stop commenting about the moment when one of the nurses asks for the type of blood to one of the Black Panther members. This is a moment that reveals so much in such a brief encounter. "I like that way of filming, trying to find the action", Kevin says and then he adds “the Blaxploitation films are kind of based on the black power/black panther movement”
The Murder of Fred Hampton
Greg mentions how this sequence reminds him of Kevin’s cinema; “not just because of the visual aesthetic but also these sort of under staged moments that hit hard."
A final exchange of words between the programmers of this section is one that I wouldn’t want to ignore. When referring to how Kevin’s selection of the final clip brings us back to our present contingency, Greg says "this is where we are" to what Kevin responds: "This is where we've always been".
Carlos Gutiérrez, Lisa Barbash and Daniela Alatorre share closing reflections of their past experiences at the seminar. The last idea in our minds that will echo after the final fade to black derives from Daniela’s words. The Flaherty Film Seminar has always been a place to connect with those who think differently. Their work, their thoughts and words result into impactful interactions that give the participants the opportunity to dissolve their preconceptions and open up to new ideas.
Our 2020 Programmers-in-residence ––Devon Narine-Singh, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Alia Ayman –– will curate two programs for the inaugural Mimesis Documentary Festival. This partnership will also include several Q&A seasions with featured filmmakers. Details to follow.
The first annual Mimesis Documentary Festival brings filmmakers together for an immersive week of film screenings, masterclasses, workshops, and discussions. The 2020 edition will be reimagined as an artist-focused online presentation from August 12-18 as a response to the uncertainty surrounding the ongoing world health crisis.
Our office is going dark for some time, we don’t know how long we will have to close our doors to the public but we are hoping to come back in the summer to plan new events and be with our community. If you want to contact us you can send us an email to ifs@flahertyseminar.org
Please continue to share your events and screenings with us, you can always submit your info here.
Flaherty Fellows
Publication of "The Temenos: Before, After, During, Towards" by Christina Phoebe Thomopoulos
In light of the upcoming Temenos screenings, Christina Phoebe Thomopoulos (Flaherty Fellow 2018) reflects on her first experience of Gregory Markopoulos' ENIAIOS while revisiting her personal archive of images made during three days in Arcadia 2012. Her pictorial piece "The Temenos: Before, After, During, Towards" appears in the online publication "The Eye of Time", curated by Maximilien Luc Proctor for Photogenie.
ARTISTS RESOURCES
Emergency Support for Non-Salaried Workers in the Visual Arts
The Tri-State Relief Fund to Support Non-Salaried Workers in the Visual Arts will distribute one-time unrestricted cash grants of $2,000 each to freelance, contract, or non-salaried archivists, art handlers, artist/photographer’s assistants, cataloguers, database specialists, digital assets specialists, image scanners/digitizers, and registrars. Applicants must show proof of residency in Connecticut, New Jersey, and/or New York from the last two years. They must also have a minimum of five years experience in the aforementioned behind-the-scenes roles in the visual arts, and be able to show proof of critical financial need due to loss of income directly related to the COVID-19 crisis.
CALL FOR ENTRIES
Apply Now to ITVS Open Call
Filmmakers, you still have time: The deadline for receiving all application materials is July 24, 2020, at 11:59 pm PT.
Get funding and support to complete your single nonfiction program for broadcast on public television—whether you’re an emerging filmmaker or a veteran producer. Visit their website to learn more about who we fund, your eligibility, and what to expect when you make ITVS your co-producer: let's change the conversation.
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2019 Catalog Available Now!
The 2019 Seminar Catalogue includes detailed information about the 65th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. This publication is the result of a collaboration between Flaherty / International Film Seminars, Inc. and World Records, in conjunction with the Action: the 2019 Flaherty Film Seminar, programmed by Shai Heredia.
Thank you to all our contributors: Shai Heredia, Jason Fox, Abby Sun, Joel Neville Anderson, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Priya Sen, Ani Maitra, Pooja Rangan, Aparna Sharma, Jim Supanick, Tenzin Phuntsog, Jheanelle Brown, Chet Pancake, and Carl Elsaesser.
Edited by World Records
Design by Dan Schrempf
Copy Editing by Nadine Covert
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With your support, we will continue to bring filmmakers and audiences of all levels together. All contributions, whether large or small, help ensure the excellence of Flaherty programs for many years to come. Every donation makes it easier for us to support the artists in their art and to inspire others to create. Any amount you are able to donate will have a big impact. During COVID-19, The Flaherty can continue to present thoughtful interactive programming about the exploration of film culture and time-based media. Cinemas may be closed, but we must continue to preserve film history and hope to support the restoration of important works for many years to come. This year, your donation will be more impactful than ever.
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About the Flaherty
The Flaherty is a media arts organization that brings together diverse, curious minds to foster an in-depth discourse on film and the creative process. We believe in the transformative power of the moving image and its ability to change how we think about film, and the world we live in. Since 1954, our unique Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, has provided an unparalleled opportunity to explore beyond known limits of the moving image and renew the challenge to discover, reveal and illuminate the ways of life of peoples and cultures throughout the world.
