Question of the Day – Sunday
By flaherty08
What is a moment from the Flaherty so far that has provoked or stayed with you?
This entry was posted on June 22, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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June 22, 2008 at 5:23 pm |
I really am interested in the sub-theme of the sea that is emerging, and how the maritime, and all of its symbols and meanings: the container ship and container, the borderlessness of the ocean, are intertwined in ideas of migration and globalization. Lee, Laura and Ursula’s films all contain this imagery, which is fascinating.
June 22, 2008 at 5:42 pm |
Yes, what’s interesting too is where sea and land come into contact with each other–for example, in the space of the port, which can become either a zone of transferring things, or a stoppage or blockage point, as in the workers in _Cargo_ who can’t get off the ship. Or the idea of fluidity within or buried under the land itself, as in the underground pipeline of oil that will be, once it’s finished, invisible to people walking or driving atop it. The aerial shot of the offshore drilling site in _Black Sea Files_ was very striking: that barge as a kind of constructed island or land at sea. Even Oliver’s film _Q_ brought up the question of subterranean waterway with that eery gondola tour in the darkness. I was surprised about the introduction of that underworld space of escape/ further entrapment in connection with the claustrophobic mall space above.
June 22, 2008 at 5:47 pm |
The prostitutes
June 22, 2008 at 5:49 pm |
Was it a wise decision for the female filmmaker to board a ship with so many oppressed as well as sex-starved males? Was she joining in the taunting of these men? This question was on the mind of audience members
June 22, 2008 at 11:19 pm |
James’ curt responses.
June 23, 2008 at 1:09 am |
The 2d neon monkeys in Q as representation of a sort of natural history museum exhibit.
June 23, 2008 at 1:33 am |
I felt like we were all riding a wave in this morning’s discussion. The sometimes precarious energy that was floating around the room at one point was exhilarating and nauseating at the same time (I do tend to get seasick). But I made it to the shore safely, and now I look back fondly on that fun ride, and want to go again.
June 23, 2008 at 5:59 am |
Hey there,
There are a couple of themes I have wanted to bring up, which I hope resurface or are commented on before the seminar is over, either on the blog or in the group discussions to follow.
1.
The main one is the feminization of the immigration, issue, which I believe has mostly been presented as a male phenomenon during the last century in America and the world. This theme came up for me particularly in Saturday evening’s program. I’d be interested in talking about the role of women as family providers who are now an integral part of the body of migrant workers world-wide and also about the role of women who are left behind once the men (or their daughters) leave and how that affects the fabric of societies.
There was a comment made about Lee’s main characters immigration being part of her education and her emancipation somehow that is worth revisiting and expanding upon. How has this development affected the role of male migrant workers or has it? Has it re-defined the role of men in the affected societies? I also would like to know about the father in that family since I don’t remember him being mentioned at all.
Though I do not think it was articulated completely in Lee Wang’s film, “God is my safest bunker” touches on how, after several generations of fathers being absent because of migration, there are generations of single mothers who are now forced to migrate and have a support system to be able to do so, usually through their mothers.
In Laura’s film, it is worth echoing and listen to reactions to the female protagonist’s framing of her story in a sexual context by introducing the prostitute on the dock and several references to the sex-starved men on board and her lover “not going to be happy about this”. I found the film to set out on an objectifying tone of the men onboard that is, traditionally, most typical of a male voice/stance and I found the role reversal of this set-up quite evocative and worth some conversation.
2.
Inner distances vs. outer distances. We touched upon distance of filmmakers to the subjects on Saturday night’s program but Sunday morning’s program pointed to inner distances, in my opinion. The first two short films were concerned with representation or perception, while I found “Half Moon” to be a subversive document trying very hard to validate a culture on the verge of annihilation under the guise (or method) of fantasy/fiction. The exploration of these assumed inner distances would be interesting to compare to the distances presented in Saturday program, which were more between the filmmakers and their subjects. This also may apply to “Colossal Youth,” perhaps.
One last general comment. I hope that last night’s group conversation does not repeat because it was truly a monologue and quite one sided. We never discussed how “Colossal Youth” related to our “Age of Migration” theme, nor its relationship to the other films previously screened. Yes, there are many things we liked about the film and there are elements of it that posed some challenges (mainly length its length); however, I would advocate for the discussion to at least attempt to stay on point of the program that has been so carefully thought out by the programmer so that we may continue to develop threads that have been brought up or bring up new ones that can be be expanded upon later in the week.
Very excited to be here.
Thanks also for creating this additional discussion space!
June 23, 2008 at 6:24 am |
when Pedro Costa asked for a definition of “excruciating”
June 23, 2008 at 7:29 am |
I really appreciate James Hong’s comment about the 24-hour terror channel. it is so absurd but would undoubtedly do what he said – make people take notice for the atrocities going on in this world. His words were few, but really packed a punch.
June 23, 2008 at 12:53 pm |
Issues of form, ethics, intention, working practices, prostitution, framing, director’s describing their decisions, performance, etc in these discussions are functioning as dangerous camouflage and as detours away from the deeply political issues of migration. Why is it, in the “Age of Obama” and “yes we can” that the issues of human tafficking, movement across borders, physical blocking of people and ideas, migrations of ideas, politics and bodies, political oppression, can not be spoken–and argued at the Flaherty? We have a serious of displacements and repressions of the larger political structures that have precipation, in the post cold war cybercapital era, completely, utterly reorganized all that we knew about the world. Transnational capital, cybercultures, trafficking of bodies, immobilization of bodies, depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation, remarking the ethnic, the religious, the nation that these films suggest demand new ways of thinking, and demand politics and political discussion. The discussions thus far have been far too safe, hiding behind form, hiding behind learning about filmmaker’s processes, hiding behind picking up threads. To deal with these networks of newly reconfigured and constantly mobile power, we need to grapple with new ways of thinking, theorizing and doing that far exceed and then disrupt our prior models.
Why is it that a bunch of men at the seminar have to share their rescue fantasies about prostitutes (please, use the term sex workers) and worries about ethics and voicing, when we watched a rigorous film trying to unknot, decompress, remapped TRANSNATIONAL CAPITAL AND OIL? Sexualities are part of capital, sex is racialized, race is sexed, sexualities swirl within political economies.
The great unspoken in film and media theory, in filmmaking circles, in public media, in the arts, is TRANSNATIONAL CAPITAL in all of its constantly moving and intersecting layers.
Why are the discussions avoiding cracking open the connections these films are proffering between the bodies on the ground and the forces and vectors of transnational capital that knows no borders?
Nanook
June 23, 2008 at 1:01 pm |
In Colossal Youth I was struck by the fact that the character of the woman spoke at length about her drug addition, but she did it with so little humility and with no real awareness of the suffering she had caused others. I couldn’t help but wonder if the filmmaker encourages this state of mind — that his subjects should express themselves endlessly, but not gain much awareness of their situation or ever find resolve!
June 23, 2008 at 5:07 pm |
I love the way words travel. The word “travel,” for example, roots in the French travailler/to work, which came from the Latin word trepallium/mobile torture chamber.
Migration comes from the Latin migrare “to move from one place to another,” probably originally *migwros, from the Gk. base *mei- “to change, go, move” (see mutable).
Migrate is first attested 1697. That European birds migrate across the seas or to Asia was understood in the Middle Ages, but subsequently forgotten. Dr. Johnson held that swallows slept all winter in the beds of rivers, while the naturalist Morton (1703) stated that they migrated to the moon.
Our movement from the screening room to the talking room feels like a migration.
June 23, 2008 at 11:52 pm |
I found the constant comparison between Vermeer’s paintings and Pedro Costa’s film, Colossal Youth, disturbing and pretentious at times (Vermeer painted for wealthy patrons, not for the poor). Even if we are talking about stylistic similarities, Vermeer’s interior domestic scenes and use of lighting are a far cry from what is seen in Costa’s film. I only point this out because so many people in the audience felt compelled to bring up this Vermeer connection over and over again during the discussion.
Perhaps Manohla Dargis and other film critics should stick to film, rather than play art historians.
June 24, 2008 at 8:26 am |
Thank you for including FROM ALEX TO ALEX. I think it’s important to include Queer people in this discussion about peoples whose location in the larger society is in flux.
More broadly, I am interested in how the promulgation of Western Queer identity has affected indigenous non-heterosexual concepts in the Developing World (through media and migration).
June 24, 2008 at 4:33 pm |
I wish the disagreements over Allen Sekula’s film had not been reframed into a matter of intelligent and non-intelligent viewers. We are all intelligent here, and if many such intelligent people do have formal issues with a work, their concerns are valid.
June 25, 2008 at 6:18 pm |
I was rather disappointed with how the Flaherty crowd treated Sekula and his film, and continue to use it as a punching bag in these blog comments. It is understandable that some had formal issues with the work, or had questions about its quality as a film, but they should have kept in mind that it was selected as part of a larger set of films addressing overlapping themes and ideas. The discussion, in my mind, should have focussed on these issues and themes, not simply whether a given viewer liked the film, would have edited it differently, etc. This is the Flaherty Seminar, not a test screening feedback session. Trust the programmer and appreciate that he has a reason for including the work, even if you don’t personally like it.
June 26, 2008 at 3:56 am |
I came to this seminar to be inspired in my own work. Seeing Bahman Ghobadi speak via webcam was the most inspiring part of this seminar. Although I did enjoy his films, I was more impressed with his perseverance and struggle in following his passion in storytelling and filmmaking. His love for his community was also touching and seeing the thread that binds his people and their commitment to tell their own stories will inspire me to tell the stories that are important to me. Thank you Flaherty & Chi-hui!