DOCSLIB.ORG

Black Feminism and the Counter-Poetics of Rhythm in Experimental Short Film and Video (1968-1998)

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Black Feminism and the Counter-Poetics of Rhythm in Experimental Short Film and Video (1968-1998) Mnemonic Aberrations: Black Feminism and the Counter-Poetics of Rhythm in Experimental Short Film and Video (1968-1998) By Ayanna Dozier Department of Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University, Montréal, QC August 2020 A dissertation submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ©Ayanna Dozier 2020 Table of Contents Abstract(s) ..................................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... 5 Declaration .................................................................................................................................... 7 List of Illustrations........................................................................................................................ 8 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 12 Methods..................................................................................................................................... 20 Literature Review.................................................................................................................. 26 The Selection ........................................................................................................................ 41 Screenings ............................................................................................................................. 46 Archives ................................................................................................................................ 48 Location ................................................................................................................................ 50 Theoretical Approach ............................................................................................................... 54 Time as a Life Process .......................................................................................................... 68 Chapter Outlines ....................................................................................................................... 73 Notes ......................................................................................................................................... 79 Part One: Histories ..................................................................................................................... 88 1_Kinship with the Dead: Agency and the Spectral Power of Affection in Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives and Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) ................................................. 89 The Camille Billops & James V. Hatch Archives at Emory University ................................. 100 A Dose of the Spiritual World in the Archives ....................................................................... 112 The Specter’s Power of Affection in Beloved (1987) and Atlantic is a Sea of Bones (2017) 120 Suzanne, Suzanne .................................................................................................................... 134 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 154 2_Mothering Ourselves: I Am Somebody (1970) and Madeline Anderson’s Early Film Beginnings .................................................................................................................................. 163 Fabulating My Methods of Approach ..................................................................................... 170 The Gossiper ....................................................................................................................... 176 As the World Turns: New York City, Direct Cinema and the Avant-Garde (1954-1964) ..... 178 Black Journal (1967-1969) ..................................................................................................... 188 Just Like You (1968) ............................................................................................................... 194 I Am Somebody (1970) and the Struggle for Equitable Labor Recognition ........................... 197 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 211 3_Crafting a Collective Commons: The Intersecting Narratives of Black Feminist Experimental Film and Video Artists (1970-1998) ................................................................ 215 1 Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) ......................................................... 222 Something New: Women and Experimentation in the L.A. Rebellion (1970-1989).............. 233 Against Representation: Sankofa and the Colonial Eye (1981-1993) .................................... 245 Playback Time: Video and the New Queer Aesthetic (1986-1998) ....................................... 254 Background ......................................................................................................................... 255 Aesthetics ............................................................................................................................ 261 Topics .................................................................................................................................. 263 Distribution and Exhibition Strategies .................................................................................... 268 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 282 Part Two: Aesthetics and Analysis .......................................................................................... 292 4_Conjuring Caliban’s Woman: Julie Dash’s Four Women (1975), Praise House (1991) and the Ritual Body .......................................................................................................................... 293 “Conjure” Cinema and Caliban’s Woman .............................................................................. 302 Four Women............................................................................................................................ 314 The Ritual Body ...................................................................................................................... 327 Praise House ........................................................................................................................... 331 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 349 5_Freedom From the Memory of Man: The Aesthetics and Analysis of the Counter-Poetics of Rhythm in Black Feminist Film and Video Art ................................................................. 354 Mnemonic Aberrations ........................................................................................................... 364 Dreaming Rivers (1988) ......................................................................................................... 371 Sapphire and the Slave Girl (1995) ........................................................................................ 385 Memory Tracks (1997) ............................................................................................................ 396 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 408 Conclusion: “This is the Remix” ............................................................................................. 412 Toward an Archival Remix ..................................................................................................... 414 Conclusion: Contemporary Exhibition and Screening Tactics ............................................... 416 Appendix: Figures..................................................................................................................... 426 Film Citations ............................................................................................................................ 478 References .................................................................................................................................. 484 2 Abstract Mnemonic Aberrations both analyzes and narrates the history of the emergence, production, and distribution of Black feminist experimental film and video across the United States and the United Kingdom from 1968-1998. I construct my analytical approaches to reading film through the underexamined film scholarship of Afro-Jamaican Philosopher, Sylvia Wynter. Mnemonic aberrations names the specific type of memory work these film and video works produce in their centering of Black womanhood as a fugitive to colonial temporality. Black feminist experimental film and video do not merely portray memory but rather strategically make and deploy it, bringing into our present being the temporal past of Black reinvented lives. The turn to experimentation in film and video, then, is expansively mobilized by these film and video makers for all the ways in which film generates affect and can disrupt our cognitive schema. Due to these patterns of experimental and cultural approach to film and video making, I employ
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Der Catalog 2009-10-W-LINKS.Pdf
    CONTENTS DER COLLECTIONS 2009-2010 3 New Collections 16 Latin America This year we are proud to announce, with our 4 Africa 17 Middle East partners at the Smithsonian Institution's Human 8 Asia 18 North America 13 Oceania 20 International Studies Archive, that the John Marshall Archive 14 Europe 21 Harvard SEL Collection has been added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. Great collections have formed the basis of DER's acquisition and distribution strategy since 1968, when we introduced the exemplary !Kung Bushman films of John Marshall and the ground- breaking Yanomamo films by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon. We continue to see the value in acquiring important filmmakers’ entire oeuvres; more recent examples include the works of Robert Gardner and Swiss documentarian Jacqueline Veuve. Now we are introducing new titles from the legendary George Stoney, considered to be the father of community access TV. These are soon to be followed by an in-depth look at the influential "direct cinema" innovator Richard Leacock, and we feel that these collected works will resonate in ways that provide a richer and more informative viewing experience. Additionally, exciting single new releases such as When Medicine Got it Wrong and the Emmy-nominated The Ballad of Esquiel Hernándezmean that DER continues to provide some of the best content available today. Cynthia Close Executive Director STAFF & CREDITS: Cynthia Close Frank aveni riChard Gardner Executive Director Design & Media Services Consultant Brittany Gravely Julia teitel nellie kluz Distribution/Office Manager Broadcast Distribution Associate Acquisitions Assistant MiChael hutCherson karMa Foley John Marshall Media Services Director Marshall Collection Archivist Founding President GreG MoBerG FoGelson-luBliner Media Services Specialist Catalog Graphic Design * ANTHROPOLOGY & SOCIOLOGY ARE SUbjECT INDEX NOT INCLUDED, AS MOST OF OUR TITLES FALL UNDER THESE CATEGORIES.
    [Show full text]
  • Thematic Program Family Affairs
    Thematic Program Family Affairs The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation McElwee, Ross. 2012. Thematic Program Family Affairs. In, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Program. 18-31. Durham: Horse and Buggy Press. Zebulon: Theo Davis Printing. Published Version http://issuu.com/fullframefest/ docs/2012_full_frame_documentary_film_festival_program Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10861180 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA [running head: verso: THEMATIC PROGRAM | recto: Films About Family/Family Affairs [word count: 5,081] FINAL TITLE Ross McElwee Documentary cameras have long courted danger. Recently, they’ve been hauled onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, slipped behind the fences of polluting oil companies in Ecuador, smuggled into sweatshop factories in China, disguised in order to film ecological disaster in Tanzania, smuggled into brothels to document child prostitution in India, and brandished in the streets during crackdowns by government troops in Iran. But perhaps the most challenging place to try to film is within the realm of your own family. The danger of doing so is, of course, not physical but emotional. The challenge is to present a portrait of your own family with honesty and sensitivity—honoring the people you grew up with, the people who raised you, or tried to—while also occasionally revealing details and character traits that may be depressing, unsavory, or just plain sad.
    [Show full text]
  • DA Pennebaker's Don't Look Back
    January 15, 2007 Terri C Smith D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back: Direct Cinema’s Early Portrait of a Cultural Icon Final Paper for Projective Artwork in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Professor, Chrissie Iles In 1965 filmmaker Donn Alan Pennebaker made a black and white documentary film about a young “folk” singer’s tour of England. The singer was Bob Dylan, and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman commissioned Pennebaker to make the movie. Titled Don’t Look Back after Satchel Page’s saying, “Don’t look back, it might be gaining on you,” i the feature length film utilized the latest portable, synchronous sound equipment to follow the three-week tour as it unfolded. Using the documentary style called “cinema verité” (truth film) in France and “direct cinema” in the United States, Pennebaker and his small crew gathered footage of concert performances, hotel room bantering and the tour’s repeated interstitial spaces of dressing rooms, trains, cars and back stage catacombs. During the process, Pennebaker parlayed the cinema verité style he learned making television documentaries with Drew Associates into the feature film format. The film gave Pennebaker the creative latitude television did not, he elaborates on this when discussing a scene where the theater manager opens the hall’s doors for a waiting crowd, saying, “I like the long length of this. Now if we’d been doing this for Time-Life, I would have had to cut this shot before we even got it open really. And I left it just going on and on. I couldn’t cut it.”ii His approach, however, was still formed by the lessons of television.
    [Show full text]
  • The Branagh Film
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The University of Sydney: Sydney eScholarship Journals... ‘It Is An Art That Cannot Live By Looking Back’: Dont Look Back, Performance, and the Revision of Direct Cinema KEITH BEATTIE Alexandre Astruc, in his brief manifesto ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Grade: The Camera Stylo’, emphasized the development of the portable 16mm camera as the essential element of his formulation of the ‘camera as pen’ and the emergent individual filmmaking that he envisioned would blossom from this development.1 Echoing Astruc’s emphasis on the mobile camera, portable camera and sound recording equipment occupy a privileged place in histories of direct cinema, the mode of observational filmmaking deployed in the US in the late 1950s. Interestingly, a crude technological determinism functions in many such histories, one that argues, in effect, that new portable camera technology created the new form of documentary. Notably in this relation Richard Leacock, one of the founding practitioners of direct cinema and an inventor of the portable camera technology used by many direct cinema practitioners, refused to reduce the development of the form to the new equipment. While he acknowledged that the new camera technology made possible a new mobility in filming, Leacock also recognised that ‘far more was involved [in the development of direct cinema] than the technology of portable equipment.’2 In this relation, as the film theorist Stella Bruzzi has astutely suggested, ‘perhaps it is the ground- breaking performances in these films and not merely the arrival of 1 Alexandre Astruc, ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra Stylo’, in P.
    [Show full text]
  • NEW RELEASES • SUMMER I FALL 2013 New Releases
    NEW RELEASES • SUMMER I FALL 2013 New Releases FRAMING THE OTHER by I1ja Kok and Willem Timmers 25 min, 2011, English and French subtitles The elaborate body ornamentation ofthe Mursi women is at the center ofa new wave ofethno-tourism in Southern Ethiopia. Each year, the Mursi are visited by hundreds oftourists, and posing for camera-toting westerners has become their main source ofincome. To make more money, the Mursi now embellish Official Selectian their "costumes" to appear more exotic to foreigners. Framing () Margaret Mead the Other intercuts the inner dialogues oftwo women - one Film Festival, Mursi and one Dutch tourist - to create an intimate and complex 2013 portrayal ofa tourist encounter. In so doing, this film foregrounds the messy relationship between tourism, consumption, cultural identity, and authenticity. A LIFE WITHOUT WORDS by Adam Isenberg 71 min, 2013, English, Spanish, French, Catalan, Turkish, Kurdish subtitles In rural Nicaragua, deafyoung adults Dulce Maria and her brother Francisco have lived their entire lives without any access to language - spoken, written, or signed - until Tomasa, a deafsign-language teacher, arrives determined to teach them their first words. A Life Without Words provides an intimate look at the situation for deaf Includes subtitles for the individuals raised in rural outposts, where access to a sign-language Deaf and Hard of Hearing community is difficult to come by. In this hauntingly beautiful film we follow the siblings as they awaken to language; their resistance Margaret Mead is clear, but so is their marvel at their teacher and the learning () Filmmakers Award, process. This film avoids hard and fast answers, instead offering a Margaret Mead quiet exploration ofuncomfortable questions related to education, Film Festival, 2012 psychology, language, ethics, and class.
    [Show full text]
  • Cross-Cultural Filmmaking "0"
    Cross-Cultural Filmmaking "0" Cross-Cultural Filmmaking A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1997 The Regents of the University of California [Dedication] Preferred Citation: Barbash, Ilisa, and Lucien Taylor. Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ ft1h4nb0hh/ http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft1h4nb0hh&doc.view=content&chunk.id=0&toc.depth=1&anchor.id=0&brand=ucpress22/10/2005 01:39:33 p.m. Cross-Cultural Filmmaking "d0e31" INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION • 1 • This handbook is for anyone who wants to make a documentary or ethnographic film. You may be a student, a professor, or out on your own, working independently. You may be a budding filmmaker or an emeritus anthropologist. You may have a burning desire to shoot a feature-length movie about a revolution in a remote spot of the globe, or have long hoped to make a ten-minute video about your grandmother. You may want to learn the technology simply to shoot research footage, or to improve your home video style. In any of these cases, this handbook contains the background information you'll need to work with moving images. Making Films and Writing Texts Since the early 1960s, documentary makers have been able to shoot films with synchronous ("sync") sound almost anywhere in the world. From the mid-1970s, portable video cameras have been widely available too, and they're getting cheaper, smaller, and better by the day.
    [Show full text]
  • Rockumentary: Style, Performance & Sound in a Documentary Genre
    Rockumentary: Style, Performance & Sound in a Documentary Genre Michael Brendan Baker Department of Art History & Communication Studies McGill University, Montr#al $une 2011 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial ful)llment of the re*uirements of the de+ree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication Studies , Michael Brendan Baker 2011 Abstract Rockumentary: Style, Performance, and Sound in a Documentary Genre is the comprehensive study of an audio-visual genre concerned with the nonfctional representation of rock music and related idioms. Sparked by the explosive rise in popularity of rock music in the 1960s, rockumentary follo.s a tra3ectory tracing the broader history of documentary practice, at times serving to reshape that history and at others providing the clearest examples of documentary4s limits and potentials. It both captures and contributes to histories of documentary flm and popular music generally, and rock music and rock culture specifcally/ 5t is note.orthy for its visual style, inno"ation in the area of flm sound technolo+y, and the complex industrial interactions which in part foster its de"elopment. Moreo"er, rockumentary ser"es as an early and ongoing example of the ne+otiation of the presence of stars and sta+ed spectacles in the context of nonfction flm and video. It is the site where the anxieties about sound and the documentary ima+e—an unease which runs throu+hout the history of cinema and has specifc implications within the context of nonfction flm—are particularly acute, and the various conceptual and sociolo+ical issues surrounding flm as a mediation of live experience versus a wholly constructed entity are crystallized most concretely.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Introduction WILLIAM ROTHMAN DESPITE THE INCLUSION OF ACCOMPLISHED documentary filmmakers in so many university fi lm faculties, fi lm study has tended to treat documentaries as if they were marginal to its concerns. In the past few years, of course, a number of documentaries have attained such an unprecedented degree of popularity that the fi eld has belatedly taken notice of documentary’s political, social and cultural infl uence. Even today, however, there remains a dearth of serious critical studies of documentary fi lms and fi lmmakers. Ten years ago, I argued in the preface to Documentary Film Classics (1997) that the scarcity of critical studies of documentary fi lms was indica- tive of fi lm study’s more general neglect of criticism, a consequence of the revolution the fi eld underwent when it began to accord precedence to what it called theory. As I pointed out, there was also a special animus in fi lm study’s resistance to devoting sympathetic critical attention even to the most signifi cant works within the documentary tradition. It derived from the claim sometimes made on behalf of documentaries—less often by their makers than by their detractors—that documentaries are capable of capturing unmediated reality, or “truth.” From the standpoint of the fi lm theories that dominated the fi eld for many years—theories that take reality to be an illusory ideological construct—such a claim seems intolerably naive or disingenuous and in any case pernicious. Now that those theories have loosened their grip over fi lm study, it has become clear to most scholars and students in the fi eld that, although documentaries are not inherently more direct or truthful than other kinds of fi lms, it does not follow that they must repudiate and 1 © 2009 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 Introduction subvert the traditional documentarian’s aspiration of revealing reality.
    [Show full text]
  • Bob Dylan, the Ordinary Star
    Oral Tradition, 22/1 (2007): 151-161 Bob Dylan, the Ordinary Star Laure Bouquerel This paper provides a study of Bob Dylan’s public image as a star performer and what he represented for his audiences within the framework of 1960s counterculture. I will begin with an interpretation of his public image at the rise of his career in an effort to better understand how Dylan came to be considered a social symbol and a representative of a historically specific counterculture as the voice of a young frustrated generation. This study will focus primarily on D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, which portrays a 23-year old Dylan on his 1965 English tour. Ultimately, we will see how this film brilliantly captures the paradox of Dylan’s star popularity in light of his refusal to portray the star his audience wanted and expected. This was not only a personal struggle but a cultural contradiction. In addition to featuring a counterculture celebrity, Pennebaker’s film itself falls into the genre of counterculture films. Such films are indeed quite different from what had been done before. Not only did American cultural symbols shift in the 1960s (Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, for example, became as famous as Marilyn Monroe had been in the ’50s, becoming not only stars, but social icons) but the aspirations and principles of countercultural films moved to the opposite end of Hollywood’s artifices. In effect, counterculture films are based on the idea of realism and experimentation: a formal freedom inspired by the French Nouvelle Vague.1 Filmmakers of this period grew fascinated with popular musicians and often pursued them as subjects for their films.
    [Show full text]
  • Documentary Film, Observational Style and Postmodern Anthropology in Sardinia: a Visual Anthropology
    DOCUMENTARY FILM, OBSERVATIONAL STYLE AND POSTMODERN ANTHROPOLOGY IN SARDINIA: A VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY SILVIO CARTA Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Birmingham Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I hereby declare that this thesis has not been submitted to this or any other University for another academic programme. 1 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................................................ 4 ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................................................... 5 INTRODUCTION DOCUMENTARY FILM, OBSERVATIONAL STYLE AND POSTMODERN ANTHROPOLOGY IN SARDINIA ............................................................................................................................... 6 1 RATIONALE OF THE
    [Show full text]
  • DOCUMENT RESUME ED 366 309 IR 016 505 TITLE Media Log: a Guide to Film, Television, and Radio Programs Supported by the National
    DOCUMENT RESUME ED 366 309 IR 016 505 TITLE Media Log: A Guide to Film, Television, and Radio Programs Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Public Programs, Humanities Projects in Media. INSTITUTION National Endowment for the Humanities (NFAH), Washington, D.C. REPORT NO ISBN-0-16-038136-3 PUB DATE [92] NOTE 156p. AVAILABLE FROMU.S. Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328. PUB TYPE Reference Materials Directories/Catalogs (132) Reports Descriptive (141) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC07 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Childrens Television; *Educational Radio; *Educational Television; Films; *Humanities; Literature; *Mass Media; United States History IDENTIFIERS *National Endowment for the Humanities ABSTRACT This guide describes more than 800 film, television, and radio productions developed with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). NEH supports projects that convey significant scholarship to the general public and engage citizens in critical interpretation and analysis of the humanities. Film, video, and radio programs are listed in clphabetical order in one of the following eight sections: (1) United States History and American Studies;(2) Literature and Language;(3) World Culture and History; (4) History, Theory, and Criticism of the Arts; (5) Archaeology and Anthropology; (6) Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics; (7) Children's and Family Programming; and (8) General Humanities. Each program listing includes information about content, production credits, format, length, ancillary materials, awards, and current distribution agent (as of June 1992). All distributor addresses and phone numbers can be found in the back of the book.(TMK) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
    [Show full text]
  • One AM / One PM
    One AM / One PM One A.M. [1968] AKA: 1 A.M., One American Movie, One P.M. [1972] 90 Minutes In ‘Without Marx Or Jesus,’ French journalist Jean-François Revel hypothesises a youth led revolution in the United States. Revel believes this revolution is possible due to unprecedented changes in technology and its ability to disseminate information, effectively creating a different social fabric. However, Revel has reservations about the context of the basis of this chance of revolution. There is, he believes a “spirit of criticism of values, which is still more emotional than intellectual, [and] is made possible by a 1 freedom of information such as no civilisation has ever tolerated before...” Intrigued by the prospect of revolution in the United States, and the rise of a new radicalism, Godard undertook a collaborative project with the U.S. filmmakers Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker in October of 1968. Provisionally entitled One A.M., or ‘One American Movie,’ the project was to be shot in the United States, but never reached 2 completion under Godard’s direction . Pennebaker and Leacock continued with the project under the title One P.M. [1972], or ‘One Parallel Movie,’ and did not release the film until 1972. At the time of Godard’s collaboration with Pennebaker and Leacock, the two American directors were known and regarded for their use of cinema-verité (direct cinema) techniques in documentary films. In particular, their success was cemented by the popularity of Don’t Look Back [1967], a cinema-verité styled documentary film which followed Bob Dylan on his tour of England in 1965.
    [Show full text]