May 2020
#GIVINGTUESDAY
Traditionally, our appeal on giving Tuesday is dedicated to support for our incoming fellows cohort. With the postponed seminar and ongoing Pandemic, our ask this year is to ensure that 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.
Make a tax-deductible donation of any amount today!
IN MEMORIUM
“We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,”
The Flaherty would like to acknowledge all the lives that have been lost because of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is during these times, that we would normally gather together, to screen the works and celebrate the lives of the beloved filmmakers in our community –– which makes the loss and mourning of our loved ones even more difficult.
Last month, we lost two trailblazers in our community: Sarah Maldoror (2013 Seminar Artist) and Bruce Baillie (1966, 1967, 1969, and 1975 Seminar Artist). Steve Polta, Director of San Francisco Cinematheque and co-founder of Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS film festival, has provided a thoughtful piece on Bruce Baillie. Experimental Filmmaker from New York Amy Halpern also shared an intimate reflection on Baillie, a long time friend of hers. Amy relocated to LA in 1974, and has been an active member of the West Coast film community since.
Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020)
Sarah Maldoror with former Flaherty Executive Director Anita Reher at the 2013 Seminar.
Sarah Maldoror was not African by birth, but her work and dedication to the cause of Africa grants her a privileged place in any comprehensive analysis of Black African cinema. In the 1950s, she created her own troupe, Griots, and abandoned the legitimate stage to become actively involved in the struggle for African liberation. With the Angolan writer Mario de Andrade, one of the leaders of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), she subsequently went to Guinea-Conakry, where she came to realize that in Africa, cinema was the most appropriate medium to raise the political awareness of the masses of people, many of whom were and still are illiterate. At that point Sarah Maldoror set out to become a filmmaker. She went to Moscow to study filmmaking on a scholarship awarded by the Soviet Union. Maldoror became Gillo Pontecorvo’s assistant during the filming of The Battle of Algiers. It was also in Algeria that she made her first film, Monangambee. Her next film, Guns for Banta, was made among Amilcar Cabral’s freedom fighters in the bush of Guinea-Bissau. Maldoror spent the following year in France, where she made commissioned films. Sambizanga won a Tanit d’or at the Carthage Film Festival in 1972 and the International Catholic Film Office Award at FESPACO in 1973. She then made various short films and documentaries about her favorite poet, Aimé Césaire.
Sambizanga (Angola/Congo, 1972) film still
Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga (Angola/Congo, 1972) is recognized as one of the first feature films made by a woman in Africa and stands as one of the most important films on black resistance against colonialism. Though not a native of Angola, Maldoror was very much an insider in these events via her husband Mario de Andradea, a leader of the MPLA (the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) who helped to write the script. It was the first film for the first full day of viewing at the 2013 Flaherty Seminar, programmed by Pablo de Ocampo. Sambizanga stands as a sort of history lesson of colonial history in Africa and positions us to examine how a great masterwork of militant cinema made in a moment of urgency is shaped and influenced by the lens of history. Sambizanga is a film about acting. In fact, the film was seen to be so effective at mobilizing action that the Portuguese colonial authorities banned it from being screened in their then province of Angola. It was first seen publicly in Angola only after the country won its independence in 1974. Based on a novel by Luandino Vieira, a political prisoner of the Portuguese from 1961 to 1974, Sambizanga is a fictionalized chronicle of the arrest and fatal imprisonment of a man whose underground activities were an impenetrable secret to all around him. It was at a prison near the Luandan suburb of Sambizanga on February 4, 1961, that the first uprising of what was to become the Angolan resistance movement was staged. The film is set a few weeks before that uprising, during a time of increasingly desperate and repressive security measures by the colonial government. Rather than depicting the rebellion itself, Maldoror concentrates on the events leading up to it, the growing dissatisfaction among people forced into submission by colonial rule, their realization that they must unite to end it, and the subsequent emergence of Angola's first revolutionary martyrs. In these respects the film may occupy the same position in the history of Angola's revolution that Eisenstein's Potemkin did in the history of the Soviet revolution. However, an important difference is that, since Angola's revolution had not yet been achieved when Maldoror released the film, she was both presenting history and issuing a call to arms. It is worth noting, too, that Maldoror assisted Gilles Pontecorvo in the filming of The Battle of Algiers, a masterpiece of semi-documentary filmmaking and a seminal document in the history of that struggle. Sambizanga could not be made in Angola, and Maldoror decided to film it in the Congo with a French crew and a cast of exiled Angolan guerrillas. The performances are so candid that at times the film appears more as documentary than staged performance.
Bruce Baillie (1931-2020)
Bruce Baillie and his 16mm Bolex. Image courtesy of Canyon Cinema Foundation
Steve Polta, director of the San Francisco Cinematheque shares a touching short piece on Bruce Baillie’s recent Passing.
On April 10, the world lost Bruce Baillie (b. 1931), widely hailed as a master of 16mm personal filmmaking, whose works epitomize the “lyrical” mode of filmmaking strongly identified with ‘60s era northern California counterculture.
Tung (1966, dir. Bruce Baillie, USA) screened at the 1966 Flaherty Film Seminar
As exemplified in such films as Valentin de Las Sierras (1968), Baillie’s Bolex—almost always hand-held—functioned as a graceful extension of his body and eye, giving breath to the living world through impressionistic imagery and subtle, caressing motion. His editorial hand wove his striking imagery into lyrical flows of cascading visual poetry (see, for example Mass for the Dakota Sioux, 1964). Castro Street (1966)—a landscape study of a Richmond CA trainyard—is a 10-minute tour-de-force on 16mm superimposition achieved both “in-camera” and through laboratory printing. To this day, the single-shot All My Life (also 1966)—a three-minute depiction of a northern California landscape; fence, flowers and sky—remains deeply inspiring in its profound simplicity. Quick Billy (1970), an epic visual travelogue and serial western(!), with its romantic interiority and expression of ever-questing spirituality stands one the most powerful expressions of visual philosophy in the history of the medium.
Quick Billy (1970, dir. Bruce Baillie, USA)
In 1961—in an innocent act of inspiration quite typical of the man—Baillie staged what would now be called a “microcinema” screening in his mother’s front yard in the rural community of Canyon CA which he called (what else?) Canyon Cinema. Under this name, and with friends (and with the era’s utopian spirit as its sole organizing principle), this serendipitous screening grew immediately into a peripatetic film series which has lasted for 59 years and running (and is now known as San Francisco Cinematheque) as well as the well-known independent film distributor and archive—Canyon Cinema— which bears its name.
Ever Westward, Eternal Rider…Rest in Peace: Bruce Baillie
———
Steve Polta is an occasional writer, occasional archivist, occasional historian and former taxi driver, living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the Director of San Francisco Cinematheque and co-founder of Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS film festival, presented annually at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2014 he was awarded a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for the study of contemporary and historic performance cinema which resulted in Perpetual Motion, an extensive series of live cinema performance presented un San Francisco in Fall 2016. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San José State University.
experimental filmmaker Amy Halpern shares a very special image and description of Bruce Baillie.
“Bruce as Bishop” Image of Bruce Baillie courtesy of Amy Halpern.
UNCLE BRUCE, the Admiral, the Bishop,
The Framer and renamer.
I loved it when he called me “fella”.
Over and over he presented real-time demos of Gertrude-Stein-Zen – i.e.
“A continuous present is a continuous present.”
He is a great clarifier, a real-time inspiration for image makers, Bruce,
OH, FLOWER OF CREATION!
Flaherty OFFICE TEMPORARILY CLOSED
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 Filmmakers & PROGRAMMERS
Flaherty NYC Co-Programmer Suneil Sanzgiri's short film, which made its premiere at IFFR in January, has three upcoming online screening dates. 'At Home But Not At Home' deploys a range of image-based tools to work remotely and intimately through a set of questions with his father, who grew up in an India under Portuguese rule, relating to identity and diasporic memory.
The ALCHEMY FILM & MOVING IMAGE FESTIVAL’s shorts program can be seen online. The festival runs May 1-3. Suneil’s film will also be available for online viewing on Thursday May 7th, 7pm EST (Rhizome DC Virtual Microcinema), May 7th - 29th (Platform Asia & Videoclub UK)
Flaherty FELLOWS
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy's (2018 Flaherty Fellow), ‘The Lake and The Lake,’ will screen as part of the Kinodot Experimental Film Festival, available online between May 22–26. The film recently won the award for Best Documentary at the 58th Ann Arbor Film Festival.
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
Call for work: First Annual Small File Media Festival
The coronavirus pandemic is showing us how dependent people are on streaming media. Streaming media is causing 1% of our global carbon footprint and rising fast! Let’s make streaming big files look unnecessary, unsexy, and so last decade. Small file videos are intellectual, innovative, attractive, creative, and fun. We encourage you to explore experimental processes through low-energy technologies and deconstruct the fetishization of the pristine image. The deadline to apply is May 30. For more guidelines and tips visit smallfile.ca
The Grierson Trust is open for entries to the 48th British Documentary Awards! With 14 awards categories covering all forms of documentary, the #GriersonAwards celebrate integrity, creativity, originality and overall excellence. Deadline for submissions is May 29.
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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
SUPPORT the Flaherty
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.
If you prefer to donate by check please make it out to: The Flaherty, 80 Hanson Place, #603, Brooklyn, NY 11217.
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.
