Wide Angle 17, no. 1-4 (1996), 66-69.

Reminiscences of a Journey to the Flaherty Film Seminar

As a graduate student in the M.F.A. program in Radio-Television-Film at Temple University in Philadelphia in the late 1980s, I thought of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar as the Mecca of independent film. Faculty members such as Ben Levin, Jay Ruby, and Warren Bass periodically mentioned legendary screenings from past years in casual conversation; the uproar over the brilliant mock-documentary David Holzman's Diary in 1967 (with Willard Van Dyke accusing filmmakers Jim McBride and L. M. Kit Carson of "destroying the documentary"), the discussion of the ethics of cinéma-vérité after the screening of some episodes of Craig Gilbert's An American Family in 1973, and feminist objections to Ross McElwee's Sherman's March in 1985.

In 1988, I received a grant from IFS to attend the seminar. Lise Yasui, another student from Temple, recommended that I bring a fan to cool the stuffy dorm room at the Wells College campus. (Lise's brilliant M.F.A. thesis film, Family Gathering, premiered at the Flaherty seminar that year.) When I arrived in Aurora, New York in early August, I knew virtually no one. The days and nights moved by in a blur of breakfasts, screenings, discussions, lunches, screenings, debates, dinners, screenings, arguments, drinks, and dances that started at eight am and ended at three the following morning. I met a group of young filmmakers that included Andrea Truppin, Elaine Charnov, Marlon Riggs, Michael Grillo, Michelle Mart, and Steve Roszell with whom to share these experiences. On the whole, the seminar participants were spontaneous and unpretentious. The setting on the banks of Cayuga Lake was idyllic. But, importantly, the focus was on the films and there were lots of them.

Dennis O'Rourke, the Australian documentary and ethnographic filmmaker, was one of the featured guests. His Yap. . . . How Did You Know We'd Like T.V.? offered a tongue-in-cheek look at change on a Pacific island caused by the introduction of Western technology. Though mildly amusing, it was too pat and did little to prepare us for the bomb he later dropped on the seminar audience. Half Life was projected the following day, August 15, presumably to mark the 43rd anniversary of Japan's surrender and the end of World War II. Meticulously shot and edited, this well-funded Australian feature documentary, blown up to 35mm for release, explored the history of U.S. atomic tests in the Pacific during the postwar period. In particular, it argued convincingly that, for purposes of medical research, American scientists associated with the military deliberately exposed native populations in the region to atomic fallout. O'Rourke's subsequent Cannibal Tours, shown on the last evening of the seminar, combined Yap's ironic look at cross-cultural contact with Half Life's more serious investigative stance to document the adventures of a group of West German tourists on vacation in New Guinea.

Many filmmakers at the seminar, like Tony Buba, seemed intent on following up on the groundbreaking first-person voice announced in Ross McElwee's Sherman's March, which premiered at the 1985 Flaherty. Using first-person voice-over narration, home movies, family photographs, and interviews, Lise Yasui's moving Family Gathering told the story of her own Japanese-American family's internment during World War II. Other powerful works were more conventional in approach. Like a Flannery O'Connor short story, Stephen Roszell's Writing on Water quietly explored a family melodrama in rural Kentucky. Through patient interviews and languid observational sequences of life on the farm, Roszell managed to capture the very syntax of the southern countryside.

Ken McMullen's made for television historical dramas demonstrated the continuing strengths of national

Though there were many highlights in an inspired program of screenings, my clear favorite was the performance monologue which Peter Rose, another Philadelphian, gave in tandem with the Wednesday evening screening of his Secondary Currents, a parody of the jargon of film semiotics, and The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, a tender experimental documentary on vision, memory, and family. As I recall, there was resounding laughter in the cavernous auditorium during the projection of Secondary Currents. Clearly, the audience was close enough to academic jargon to recognize it yet far enough from poststructuralist wordplay to laugh at it. Rose's live vocal accompaniment was simply stunning and his performance became the centerpiece of the week-long seminar. The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, a more complex work, opened with a long tracking shot of the countryside taken from a moving automobile. The voice-over narration that accompanied this passage, though subtitled in English, was delivered in a nonsensical invented language that alternatively sounded like Japanese, Yiddish, Swedish, Spanish, and Arabic. In each sequence, Rose seemed to re-invent the possibilities of the language of not only autobiographical non-fiction, but of cinema itself, climaxing with the filmmaker's monumental climb over the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco.

During the subsequent discussion of Rose's work, Marlon Riggs remarked that he wished his former teachers, now colleagues, at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism could see this freeform appropriation of the codes of documentary. Schooled in a tradition that prized journalistic objectivity and rational argument, as evidenced by his 1987 tape Ethnic Notions, Riggs, like the rest of us, was transformed by Rose's invention, humor, and willingness to take risks. I have always felt that Marlon's own experimental autobiography Tongues Untied, itself very well-received at the 1990 seminar, was born of his encounter with Rose's Secondary Currents and The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough. Similarly, I believe this experimentation with first-person voices encouraged Dennis O'Rourke in his subsequent work, The Good Woman of Bangkok. Surely, this was the Flaherty at its best. By bringing together talented independent producers, with different agendas, histories, and traditions, the seminar consistently challenged filmmakers to expand their vistas.