Still Reeling

A look back at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.

by Sam Adams

FAMILY MATTERS: An orphaned son befriends his father's killer in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Dry Season. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

seminar

A mixture of film festival, graduate seminar and sleepaway camp, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is as hard to describe as it is to leave. The recipe goes like this: Take 100 or so filmmakers, academics, programmers, writers and assorted lovers of film, cart them off to the middle of nowhere, and show them movies from morning until night for eight days. Leave ample time for discussion and drinking but not much for optional activities, like sleep. And most importantly, don't give them the slightest idea of what they're in for.

Among the sacred precepts of Flaherty lore is "nonpreconception," brought down from the mount by Frances Flaherty, the widow of Nanook of the North's director, who held the first seminar in her Vermont farmhouse in 1954. Just as Robert, who was as much explorer as filmmaker, entered a new environment with no idea of what his camera might capture (or so Frances claimed), so the seminar's participants would come to films unburdened by expectations. For this year's seminar, held at Vassar College from June 16 to 22, only the curators, a theme ("South of the Other") and a few participating filmmakers were announced in advance. Beyond that, the lineup remained secret until seconds before each thrice-daily screening.

The Flaherty's two dozen student and professional fellows arrived a day early to be initiated into the Flaherty's mysterious ways. We were told that the Flaherty was unlike anything we'd experienced before, that discussions could be boisterous and combative, and that the experience might well change our lives. (I was also told, privately, that it was "a little like the Stanford prison experiment.")

But nothing prepared me for opening night. Gathering in a dining hall, we moved our chairs into a circle, an action emblematic of the Flaherty's democratic ideals. Carlos Gutiérrez, of the Latin American film series Cinema Tropical, and Mahen Bonetti, the director of the New York African Film Festival, made introductory remarks, describing their program as "a journey — absolutely not a tour." And then, as the seminar's participants stood and introduced themselves one by one, Patricia Bruck, the Flaherty's president, uttered a phrase of deepest sacrilege: "We are not here to celebrate film."

During the week of the Flaherty, there are few places on Earth where people care more about filmmaking. But the atmosphere is collegial, not necessarily convivial. Tales abound of filmmakers whose works were found wanting by the seminar's notoriously tough (and, as the week goes on, sleep-deprived) audience.

Ethiopian-born Theo Eshetu came in for the seminar's harshest criticism, mainly because his explorations of African traditions showed little sensitivity for his subjects. The Ethiopians in Africanized look into his camera with emotions ranging from disdain to skepticism to outright hostility. But on video, and in person, Eshetu seemed astonishingly unreflective about the tricky issues inherent in his enterprise.

By contrast, Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Bye Bye Africa was a thoughtful and, at times, agonized reflection on artistic responsibility. Playing himself, Haroun stars as a filmmaker who has begun to wonder what use his movies are to a war-torn nation. Shifting between narrative and documentary footage, the movie lulls the viewer into a state of complacency that is shattered when one of its subjects takes exception to being filmed and angrily confronts the camera.

Individual screenings grew into retrospectives: Haroun returned with Dry Season, an exquisite parable of the cost of war, in which an orphaned son becomes an apprentice to the man who killed his father. The first shorts by Mexican video artist Ximena Cuevas showcased a wicked, self-reflexive sense of humor, but later pieces mixed in an apocalyptic undertone; Cinepolis, which overdubs a cheesy science-fiction movie to comment on the alien invasion of media in daily life, manages to be hilarious and terrifying at the same time.

As the week went on, single films were consumed by an ever-growing, ever-changing organism whose shape began to emerge on the fourth or fifth day. Niceties dispensed with and self-consciousness dissolved, comments became more pointed, questions more direct. People stopped being polite, and started getting real.

It's impossible to sum up the Flaherty seminar, but I keep coming back to one of its shortest and most surprising films. In Xanini (Corn Stalks), by indigenous Mexican filmmaker Dante Cerano, a naturalist walks through a field, taking notes on the devastation wrought by agricultural development. And then, suddenly, the perspective shifts, and the sympathetic human becomes a rampaging monster. As he is attacked and apparently killed, you realize that no matter how many frames of reference you think you have examined, there are always more to consider. Try seeing things from the corn's point of view.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)