Final Project – Independent Autobiographical Documentary

Hollywood and commercially-produced films are only one visible element of our history preserved on video. American filmmakers, both professional and independent alike, over the last century, have been creating documentaries, newsreels, anthropological footage and home movies. Independent moving images capture subjects and viewpoints outside of the mainstream media of their period, which can contain a special historical and cultural value.

Documentary filmmaking has initially been responsible for capturing and explaining the material and social world. In the very beginnings of film, the Lumiere Brothers documentary films explored the world over, associating documentary with ethnography and empire.

Early Lumiere films also recorded scenes of family domesticity   “Although the Lumiere records of family domesticity made routine life public, few families had access to moving picture technology in the early twentieth century, and far more rare was any means of public distribution or exhibition of “home movies.” Indeed, the private worlds were areas kept out of most early filmmaking as it was a technology that was not available to the normal family. “Documentary’s links to journalism, social science and government deepened, and, consequently, exploration of personal subjectivity was considered anathema to the documentary enterprise” (Routledge).

Therefore, autobiographical or experimental texts were more or less nonexistent until the influx of the 16mm technology and the independent filmmakers it created therein. In the late 1940s and 50s, the films of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas found expression in experimental and avant-garde filmmaking. Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon

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Deren and her husband, Alexander Hammid wrote, directed and performed in Meshes of the Afternoon. Deren said, of Meshes, the “film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience” (Deren).

Indeed, Deren is notorious for claiming that her films were made “for what Hollywood spends on lipstick” and her films attempted to explore the fact that Hollywood “[had] been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form” (Deren).

Independent films of the 40s and 50s were “exhibited publicly but narrowly, marked an important shift from traditional documentary impulses to create a hybrid cinema that combined documentation with creative interpretation . . . this experimental urge to explore subjectivity continues as a potent influence for contemporary film and video artists” (Routledge).

Technical and social changes influenced the further development of independent autobiographical films. “The introduction of lightweight, relatively inexpensive 16mm equipment; a distrust of all things official; the burgeoning women’s movement; and a heightened interest in the political dimensions of persona life in the late 1960s and early 1970s- led to a surge in autobiographical filmmaking.”

One method of autobiographical documentary employed the methods of direct cinema to create moving picture diaries that “emphasized the immediacy, intensity, and unpredictability of experience.” Light cameras were one element that made direct cinema possible; the hand-held camera allowed more intimacy in filmmaking, and also produced movements that are the style’s visual trademark. The ability to record sound, as well, was another important element in the development of direct cinema methods.

The technical conditions of Direct Cinema were made possible by improved sound, lighting and portability of the camera; these conditions made it possible for the social and ideological conditions of direct cinema to develop.

Technical possibilities are what usher in new ideas and changes to genre and subject matter, especially in the realm of cinema. Examining queer/LGBT images is an interesting road to take in terms of exploring independent autobiographical queer documentary; as LGBTQ images in Classical Hollywood Cinema are laden with the marginalization of LGBTQ people, “a large percentage of all queer moving images are found in independent and amateur works. These films and tapes contain the great majority of moving images that have a queer point of view, portray LGBT people as complex individuals rather than stereotypes, offer a diversity of race, age, ethnic background, politics, gender identification, and other qualities, and show LGBT people in the context of relationships, families, and communities” (Kirste).

Sadie Benning has been a force in the queer community for almost a decade. She was in 1973 to a filmmaker father and artist mother. She began making short films at sixteen after receiving a Pixelvision camera from her father for Christmas. The Pixelvision was a small, hand-held, black and white video-camera that was marketed for children by Fisher-Price in the late 1980s. It failed in the general market for obvious reasons; bad quality of image as well as sound, but appeared to have been successful among experimental photographers.

Benning hated the camera, “I thought, ‘This is a piece of shit. It’s black-and-white. It’s for kids. He’d told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder.”

Benning was standoffish about the camera at first. After a shooting in her neighborhood and her friend being injured in a car accident, she turned to the camera to express her thoughts toward the events. The camera became a confidate, a listening ear that did not judge her.

Benning’s videos are autobiographical, with a reflective eye towards self awareness, violence, deceit, fear and homosexuality. “Made in the privacy of her childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity” (Video Data Bank).

Benning’s videos are just one example of the availability of technology influencing the creation of independent works. Tarnation by Jonathan Caouette was made for a total budget of $218.32, using free iMovie software on a Mac. It is composed of hundreds of hours of old Super 8 footage, VHS videotape, photographs, and answering machine messages to tell the story of Caoette’s life and his relationship with his mentally ill mother, Renee. Tarnation went on to win awards including Best Documentary from the National Society of Film Critics, the Independent Spirits, the Gotham Awards, and the LA and London International Film Festivals.

Tarnation focuses on Caoette’s early life and childhood, as well as the life of his mother, Renee LaBlanc, who was treated with electroshock therapy in her youth. She did not need the electroshock, which resulted in her lifelong insanity. Caoette eventually settles into the Houston area with his grandparents and mother, who, despite personality quirks, are able to provide a supportive family structure for him. The film explores Caoette’s life as he negotiates his ongoing complicated relationship with his mother as child, friend, and ultimately, parental figure to her while continuing to develop his creativity as an actor, writer, director.

While Tarnation is not necessarily a text that’s main focus is on queer lifestyles or coming out, it does document and express Caouette’s coming out as gay as a young age, his early experiences of being a gay teenager, as well as his living with his partner.  “His homosexuality seems to have been a help, not a hindrance; new gay friends provided a community that accepted this trouble teenager” (Ebert).

Indeed, the method of Tarnation was critical to its being a successful film. But what of the independent films, videos and home movies that have not been exhibited at film festivals, and remain still within attics, basements, warehouses, and abandoned stockrooms?

“Orphaned films” as they are called, are “valuable documentary and historical evidence of our society and culture” (Miller) and are just beginning to become archived for their valuable cultural content.

Dan Streible, film historian, associate professor of cinema studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and founder of the Orphan Film Symposium describes orphaned films as “any film that doesn’t have any commercial value.”

“At one time, archivists informally used the term orphan film to describe any film that had been abandoned, or for which the identity of the filmmaker was unknown,” he said. After 1993, congressional hearings on film preservation led to the creation of both the National Film Preservation Board and the National Film Preservation Foundation has caused the term to be used more broadly.

The archival of orphaned images is of tremendous social value. “These orphan films can rewrite what we know because they are not part of our conventional set of images,” he said. “This is a rediscovery of all kinds of knowledge, and these films are – in every case – documentary evidence of something” (Streible).

Indeed, the collecting and archiving of these orphaned images could be of monumental importance in both the making sense of past social circumstances, and the preserving of material for future study and interest.

Another use of orphaned footage outside of the realm of scholarly analysis is the Found Footage Festival. The FFF is a “celebration of odd and hilarious found videos” (they’ll be in Chicago Dec. 18)  that finds orphaned footage in thrift stores, or is donated from the attics and basements of FFF fans.

The Found Footage Festival is reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan’s idea hot and cool media. McLuhan distinguishes hot media as enhancing one single sense, in the case of movies, vision, in such a manner that the viewer “does not need to exert much effort in filling in the gaps.” Cold media, on the other hand, consists of “those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus.”

It’s difficult for me to distinguish how McLuhan would categorize the Found Footage Festival. I would imagine, as TV requires the viewer to fill in more gaps, the queuing of random footage without much information or backstory would tend to make found footage more of a cool medium as the viewers must fill in more of these gaps and therefore participate more with the material.

Weinberg #5 – The Image: Visual Representation and its Own Emotional Track

In the last segment from Weinberg, I was interested in learning more about Tom’s background and the experiences that led him to where he is today in both his career and his stance on independent film and video.

Tom’s comments about commercial television were statement that also rang true to me, and part of my interest in examining independent films about gender and sexuality. Tom says he was interested in “using video as a tool to reflect the world as we experience it,” which is a contrast from commercial TV where selling ads and enhancing corporate bottom lines was the only goal. Indeed, in my research on independent autobiographical documentaries, I learned more about the separation between independent and commercial desires in the production of documentary, and moreover, the projection of ideas of gender/sexuality/self image, etc.

Also, the methods by which commercial and independent video are created in Tom’s piece was a distinction I made in my research. Tom talks about his first experience with porta-pak cameras and how he was blown away by the playback, which was “just as much about the process of [creating and filming] it as it was about the pictures and sounds on the videotape.” My examining of independent autobiographical documentaries also highlighted the importance of the availability of technology to the general public in order for these alternative texts to be created.

McLuhan 28-67

In this section, McLuhan says that in order to understand the media, “one must probe everything…including the words and oneself.” I believe McLuhan may be talking about how our perceptions and how we digest information is a product of our world view. What exactly shapes this world view is interesting to me, as the combination of language, upbringing, experiences and environment all go to shape this worldview seems impossible to measure, though.

I was also amused by McLuhan’s idea of the Videophone (which I’m not sure existed at the time of McLuhan’s writing, but what is certainly pervasive at this time). “The Videophone: If it replaces the telephone, the world will become a global theater, with no boundaries between education, entertainment, and business.” Indeed, webcams and computer programs like Skype are things presupposed by McLuhan which are shaping the world to become this “global theater” without boundaries.

The Medium is the Message

McLuhan stretches the word “medium” beyond our usual understanding of the world to suggest that it is any extension of our bodies, minds, or beings (in one of his examples, clothing is an extension of the skin). The message, is well, is stretched from its normal definition, and sees it as “any change in scale, pace, or pattern that a medium causes in societies or cultures.” This is because of one of the most important features of media to McLuhan, that is, the power of media to “change the course and functioning of human relations and activities.”

My understanding of how the medium is the message, then, is a result of how content interacts with the manner in which it is produced and distributed (distribution being heard, read, etc).

Media as Hot or Cool

McLuhan’s definitions of media as hot or cool hinges on the sense of the words “definition” and “information.”

A high definition medium “gives a lot of information and gives little to do” like letters of the alphabet, numbers, photographs, and maps, etc. A low definition medium are forms, shapes and images that are not so distinct, like sketches and cartoons. The viewer must “scan what is visible and fill in what is missing to ‘get the full picture.’”

In terms of the “information” that a medium transmits, McLuhan is refering to how our physical senses respond to, or participate in, media.

Over all, high definition is hot media, low definition is cool. Hot consists of radio, print, photographs, movies and lectures. Cool consists of telephone, speech, cartoons, television and seminars.

McLuhan 1-27

The first section of McLuhan laid a good foundation by which to approach McLuhan and his theories. McLuhan emulated the very multidimensional approach that he sought to explain and critique. “For McLuhan, understanding always requires a multidimensional approach. To fully understand anything, he argued, you have to look at it from several points of view” and indeed, McLuhan for Beginners takes this same mosaic approach toward the questions McLuhan studied.

McLuhan believed that media effects “reorganized audiences’ perceptions of the world around them,” a belief influenced by his study of language. And indeed, this different format of book allowed the reader to step back from media and “perceive it as an environment” which was important in understanding the power and effect of media.

In examining this way that media “reorganizes” the world around audiences, I thought about viral marketing. From Wikipedia, “viral marketing consists of techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-repliating viral processes.” Viral marketing sinks into our world and environments; rather than a print ad we see on a billboard, or a commercial on television, viral marketing spreads like a virus into social networks and personal lives.

Viral marketing was not nearly as pervasive when McLuhan was writing, though the spread of viral marketing, which is “analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses” is likely something to have been preconceived by McLuhan, who saw media as an environment we inhabit that focuses and influences our perceptions.

Orlando

I appeared to have saved this entry as a draft and never published it. Oopsies.

I screened Orlando in a film class I took this summer. It is based on the novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf, was directed by Sally Potter and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, the art house division of Sony.

The film begins with the Elizabethan Age before the death of Queen Elizabeth 1, where on her deathbed, she gives a tract of land with a castle built upon it to a young nobleman named Orlando (Tilda Swinton) on the promise “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.”

Orlando makes the promise and lives in the castle for many centuries; he pursues interests in poetry and art after being brushed off by a Russian princess, travels to Constantinople as British ambassador to the Turks, but is almost killed in a diplomatic intrigue. Waking up the next morning, however, he learns something even more startling: he has turned into a woman overnight.

‘Lady’ Orlando returns to her estate in Middle Eastern garb, only to learn that she has several impending lawsuits, The lawsuits are centrally based on the believed fact that Orlando was a woman to begin with and therefore has no right to the land or any of Her/His royal inheritance.

The succeeding centuries tire her; the court case, bad luck in love and the wars of British history eventually bring her up to the 1990s with a book written and a child; having lived a most bizarre existence, yet having found a tranquil niche within it.

Orlando is an interesting film to consider in the manner that it depicts gender; Orlando being a somewhat ambiguous and neither distinctly male or female. Orlando’s transition from being a male character to a female is never explicitly discussed or explained.

Also in Orlando, the traditional fetishizing of female characters in Hollywood cinemas is reversed; Orlando’s male love interest, for example, is shot in soft focus and shown in fragmented and fetishized parts.

The Celluloid Closet (with super fun video links)

The Celluloid Closet is an HBO documentary about the depiction of GLBTQ people in cinema from its very beginning, leading up to the present day.

The program discussed images of gay/lesbian in early film. Early and silent film gay men were depicted as “the sissy.” Both in times of silent film, or when audio was available, the Sissy was not specifically titled as gay or straight, but was used as a device to “make females feel more feminine and men more masculine.”

This example, Algie the Miner is a 1912 silent film and perhaps the first example of the Sissy character.

Also in the category of early film and crossdressing, the gender bias of female crossdressers versus male was discussed, using the example of Marlene Dietrich in Morocco.

Dietrich dressed in a tuxedo, “to “please the women and the men” as well as an on-screen kiss to another female is an interesting statement, as this depiction would be wholly unheard of for a male.

Censorship of the 20s and 30s shut down “raunchier” films. From then on, Hollywood films had palpable gay/lesbian subtexts. In Queen Christina (1933) with Greta Garbo, the story of a Swedish monarch and lesbian, the story has been altered but the traces of truth still linger.

Hollywood of the 40s and 50s authorized censorship; a movie about gay bashing and murder became a movie about anti-seminitism and murder.

Hollywood, however, didn’t erase homosexuals completely, but made them harder to find. Homosexuals were made a new identity, as cold-blooded villains, in the example of Dracula’s Daughter.

In the 60s,  The Children’s Hour demonstrated that homosexuality was talked about on the screen, but only as things that nice people don’t talk about. The Children’s Hour and many other films of the period depicting homosexuals were coupled with images of unhappiness, suicide and tragedy.

Leading up to the present day, the program further outlined homosexuals in portrayals of both the victim and the victimizer for example, in Cruising.

Concluding the program were many mushy statements about how “movies and cinema define us.” However, I found Oliver Platt’s statements about translating heteronormative cinema into “gay narratives” to be far more interesting. If indeed movies and cinema are what define us, perhaps it isn’t necessarily the objective images that we see, but how we mold them to our individual likenesses and understandings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sadie Benning – Early Films

When I sat down to watch a compilation of Sadie Benning’s early films, I was slightly disoriented by the pixelated images and tinny audio of A New Year, Living Inside, Me & Rubyfruit, If Every Girl Had a Diary and Jollies.

Later, after reading more on Benning’s history and subsequent videos, I believe I have a better understanding of her early work.

Benning received a Pixelvision camera fro her father for Christmas when she was sixteen. The Pixelvision was a  small, hand-held, black and white video-camera marketed for children by Fisher-Price in the late 1980s. It failed in the general market for obvious reasons; bad quality of image as well as sound, but appeared to have been successful among experimental photographers.

Benning hated the camera, “”I thought, ‘This is a piece of shit. It’s black-and-white. It’s for kids. He’d told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder.”

Benning was standoffish about the camera at first. After a shooting in her neighborhood and her friend being injured in a car accident, she turned to the camera to express her thoughts toward the events. The camera became a confidante, a listening ear that did not judge her.

Bennings videos were autobiographical, with a reflective eye towards self awareness, violence, deceit, fear and homosexuality. “Made in the privacy of her childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity” (Video Data Bank).

Knowing this makes Benning’s videos a bit easier to understand; they are a confession and a working through of Benning’s thoughts about growing up and accepting oneself.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story uses Barbie and Ken dolls and found footage to tell the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death from anorexia.

As a viewer of Superstar, it’s important to distance oneself from the fact that Haynes likely created the narrative of Superstar from information he read in newspapers or magazines, saw on television, etc. For that reason, I am certainly not interested in Superstar as an honest portrayal of Karen Carpenter’s life, but rather, the way in which Haynes tells the story fascinates me.

Using Barbie and Ken dolls as characters is a terribly interesting choice. Barbie, in a way, is seen as a feminine “ideal.” She is a symbol of woman; tall, blonde, slender and large-chested that is programmed into young girls from very early on. Karen Carpenter drives herself to illness to achieve this ideal. As Karen plunges deeper into anorexia, Haynes subtly shaves away the arms and face of the doll.

Through the use of the dolls, Haynes is saying that Karen herself was reduced to a dress-up doll by her overbearing mother and brother. She lives in a plastic universe that enforces these ideals of femininity, ignoring the psychological price they pay.

Karen Carpenter is formed into an “angel of complacency” for the 70s.  Rich Carpenter isn’t smashing his guitar and Karen isn’t burning her bra; they are an act that is invited and performs for Nixon’s White House! Haynes’ portrayal shows, perhaps, Karen’s resentment of this role that has been built for her.

Weinberg 4 – What about video now?

In Weinberg’s fourth piece about video today and the changes of the internet, I was interested in learning about the evolution of video as it changed formats, from television to being available digitally.

Weinberg quotes McLuhan on this paradigm change, “We constantly perceive the world we’re living in and the world we’re going to through the lens of what we used to know and do.” Digital video is therefore “still primarily a transiet, ephemeral, and therefore unaccountable medium.”

However, it won’t be long until digital video is more accessible to be studied as more and more digital archives open their internet doors.

What exactly is the most useful to contents of these archives to study also interested me, that is, raw tape. The originals shot by independent producers, Weinberg says, establish context. “It provides depth. It establishes the perspective of the time and place, characters and relationships.”

This makes sense to me. In other classes regarding media theory, we have talked before about how context is created through editing; this has different meanings in both independent and commercially-produced film. However, raw footage that has not been manipulated to convey a certain idea could be useful to study.

This makes me wonder, though, about how to verify the credibility of raw footage, and how we are certain we are interpreting it in the correct, least problematic manner. Could differing interpretations be problematic to studying raw footage? How do we identify film without knowing the circumstances around it prior to viewing?

Gender Rebel

Gender Rebel was another segment produced by LOGO, the first LGBTQ television network in North America (and owned by Viacom, owner of MTV, VH1, etc, etc).

Gender Rebel was much like the other LOGO show I watched, Elephant in the Room. In the typical style of MTV-reality-documentaries, it follows 3 biologically-female, genderqueer identifying individuals. One, Kim/Ken, who is surgically removing his breasts and beginning to take testosterone. Another, Lauren, who moves from New Jersey to San Francisco to find more acceptance, and the last, who is confronting her mother about her genderqueer identity and breast-binding.

I found this segment to be somewhat problematic in terms of the idea of genderqueer it projected; the show only showed biological females, as they said, “dressing as boys.” Genderqueer rejects the binary ideas of gender, and doesn’t accept the terms or descriptions “masculine” or “feminine,” but instead views gender as fluid and ever-changing. While the individuals on the show do, at times, give vague outlines of what genderqueer is to them, they appear to be portrayed as little more than female transvestites and, imaginably, are viewed that way by the general public who has never even *heard* of genderqueer before.