Archaeological Digging in the June Gloom

Abstract

THE 51ST ROBERT FLAHERTY SEMINAR CLAREMONT COLLEGES, CLAREMONT, CA JUNE 11-18, 2005 Arriving at the Claremont Colleges east of Los Angeles for this year's Robert Flaherty Seminar, many out-of-state participants, like myself, were greeted with weather conditions that we had least expected for Southern California in early summer: overcast and relatively cool days, which locals affectionately call June Gloom. The term seemed particularly fitting for the overall mood of the seminar as we viewed and discussed the powerful, and at times, traumatizing works around this year's theme of Cinema and History: Piling Wreckage Upon Wreckage. This year's two programmers were Jessie Lerner, a documentary filmmaker and Associate Professor in the Intercollegiate Media Studies Program of the Claremont Colleges, and Michael Renov, Associate Dean and Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. Lerner furnished the seminar with a strong Latin American presence, while Renov's scholarly interest in the question of subjectivity and the documentary brought works with compelling and complex uses of the first person to the fore. As hinted by the programmers in the first few days, the works screened gradually began to incite less emotionally harrowing experiences, easing the seminar into a truly complex engagement with the diverse effects, uses and even pleasures afforded by the wreckage of history. Arguably the most emotionally disturbing film of the seminar was Oh, Uomo (Oh, Man, 2004), the latest feature from found footage by masters Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. This final part of their First World War trilogy begins with a fantasmatic journey through the fascist imagination that is initially filled with the disciplined masculine bodies of the Italian military. However, footage of an eye operation substantially more visceral than Luis Bunuel's infamous scalpel shot suddenly opens the film's vision onto the war trauma that fascism was designed to repress: emaciated, starving children and soldiers with the most horrific facial injuries and limb amputations. In light of the censorship and strict regulation of images depicting the human costs of the current war in Iraq (and elsewhere), these fragments of footage from the early twentieth century appeared hauntingly contemporary. Gianikian commented in a discussion that Our work is dedicated to the present. The past does not exist for us. Nevertheless, a number of participants expressed anxiety about the ethical implications of the unrelenting succession of such clinically cold depictions of corporeal trauma. The debate over history and affect continued after the screening of an altogether different film, Mark Jonathan Harris's Oscar-winning Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000). Well researched and highly polished, the film organizes itself around carefully staged studio interviews with survivors of the Kindertransport (which saved thousands of Jewish children from the Holocaust). Several seminar participants remarked on the emotionally overwhelming orchestration of the material (both visually and aurally), which isolated the testimonial interviews from their historical context, potentially risking their degeneration into fetishized moments of emotional catharsis. This question of retaining the emotional power of bearing witness without diminishing the historicity of the testimonial act itself--i.e. its status as an historical event in its own right--returned during the discussion of a number of animated films that combined the morphing plasticity of worlds created by animation with the documentary authenticity of testimonial voiceover. As Renov pointed out in a discussion on the fifth day, the voices on the soundtrack of such works retain an indexical claim on the real and the historical, even though their animated images cannot. Of particular interest was Dennis Tupicoff's His Mother's Voice (1996), based on a radio interview with an Australian mother bearing witness to how she discovered the sudden death of her 16-year-old son. …