UKSUUM CAUYAI: THE DRUMS OF WINTER

Transcription

1 October 25, 2016 (XXXIII:9) Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling: DRUMS OF WINTER (1988), 90 min. (The online version of this handout has color images and hot url links.) Director, Producer, Writer Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling Editor Sarah Elder Cinematographer Leonard Kamerling Sound recordist Sarah Elder Yup ik language and culture consultant Walkie Charles Re-recording mixer Mel Zelniker Presented by Emmonak Singers and Dancers and the Alaska Native Heritage Film Project Awards National Film Registry, 2006 The Best of the Mead, Margaret Mead Film Festival, 25 Year Anniversary, Osaka, Japan, 2000 Best Documentary, Best Doc. Director, Best Cinematography, Festival of the Native Americas, Santa Fe, 1996 The Heritage Award, Alaska International Film Festival, Anchorage, 1995 Award of Excellence, American Anthropological Assoc., New Orleans, 1991 Special Commendation, Royal Anthropological Institute, International Ethnographic Film Festival, Manchester, UK, 1990 Grand Prix Best of Festival, Third International Arctic Film Festival, Fermo, Italy, 1989 First Prize, Blue Ribbon, American Film Festival, Chicago, 1989 Silver Apple Award, Educational Film and Video Festival, San Francisco, 1989 International Film Festivals and Exhibitions Institut Lumière Centennial Anniversary of the Invention of Cinema, Lyon, France, 1995, Northern Lights International Film Festival, Anchorage, 1996, Parnu International Visual Anthropological Festival, Estonia, UKSUUM CAUYAI: THE DRUMS OF WINTER Directed by Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling 1991, Flaherty International Film Seminars, Riga, Latvia, 1990, Hawaii International Film Festival, Honolulu, 1989, Neighbor Islands Festival Week of the Hawaii International Film Festival, Kauai, Kona, and Hilo, 1989, Anthropos International Film Festival, Los Angeles, 1989, Musica Dei Popoli Festival of Ethnomusicology Films, Florence, Italy, 1989,Tallin International Ethnographic Film Festival, Estonia USSR, 1988, Margaret Mead Film Festival, American Premier, New York, September 1988 SARAH ELDER (b.1947) is an international award winning documentary filmmaker and Professor of Film in the Department of Media Study in the University at Buffalo. Her documentary career focuses on the ethics and challenges of filming across cultural boundaries and explores the political and moral consequences of filming real people. Working in rural Alaska for 30 years, Elder collaborated with Alaska Native communities and pioneered a new community-collaborative approach to making documentary film in which the individuals and the communities who are filmed share control in the filmmaking decisions. From , Elder co-founded and co-directed the Alaska Native Heritage Film Project with Leonard Kamerling at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her current film project, Surviving Arctic Climate Change, looks at the consequences of global

2 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 2 warming on the small Yup ik Eskimo village of Emmonak, Alaska, near the coast of the Bering Sea where she filmed Drums of Winter some 35 years ago. In 2006 Elder s documentary, The Drums of Winter (1988) was named to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Her films have won four First Prizes in the American Film Festival, three Cine Gold Eagles and two American Anthropology Association Awards of Excellence. Elder has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Alaska State Council on the Arts, Aperture Magazine, Atlantic Richfield Corp. and others. For many years she served on the board of the Society for Visual Anthropology. Her films have exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Cinématèque Française, Freiburg Film Forum, Musée de L'Homme, ARTE TV in Europe, International Center for Photography, Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History, Parliament of the World s Religion, Sofia International Festival of Ethnographic Film and the Field Museum. In 1995, the Institut Lumière in Lyon, France, honored Elder as a distinguished filmmaker, inviting her to show her body of work and speak as part of the 100-year anniversary celebration of the Lumière brothers' invention of cinema. A UB faculty member since 1989, Elder received a bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College and a MFA in film from Brandeis University. Elder continues to conduct research and make films in Alaska and keeps a small log cabin outside Fairbanks. LEONARD KAMERLING (b.1945) Leonard Kamerling is Curator of Film at the University of Alaska Museum of the North and Professor of English at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Over the last 25 years he has produced numerous critically acclaimed, international award winning documentary films about Alaska Native cultures and Northern issues, as well as pioneered a collaborative approach to producing cultural films that serves as a foundation for all his work. He received his training at the London Film School and earned his MFA in Creative Writing from UAF. In 1973, Kamerling co-founded and co-directed the Alaska Native Heritage Film Project with Sarah Elder at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He joined the Creative Writing Faculty at UAF in 1999 where he specializes in teaching writing for film, theater and television. He recently produced and directed with Peter Biella the documentary, Changa Revisited: Thirty Years in the Life of a Maasai Family (2016). In 2013 he directed the feature documentary, Strange and Sacred Noise, on the wilderness music performance/composition of Pulitzer winning composer, John Luther Adams. His film, Heart of the Country (1997), was nominated for the International Documentary Association prestigious Pare Lorentz Award. In 2006, his documentary, The Drums of Winter (1988) was named to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Throughout his career, Kamerling has been concerned with issues of cultural representation in film, cross-cultural communication and the role that film and film writing can play in eliminating stereotypes and in credibly translating one culture to another. Andi Coulter: Q&A with Sarah Elder, October 2016 AC: Walk me through your first memories of film. SE: My first film memories were of Danny Kaye in the Court Jester and Hans Christian Andersen. [1950s actor known for his comedy, singing and dancing in such noted films as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and The Inspector General (1949)]. I was a small kid. He made me laugh my head off. I didn t come from a particularly happy home life, and I thought it was incredible that someone could make me feel so happy and have this mysterious power to affect a deep part of me. AC: SE: AC: Were you an avid film goer as a kid? No. I only saw a few films each year. How did your interest in film come about?

3 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 3 SE: I first started in still photography when I was around 8 years old. I didn t take any classes; my first camera was a little Brownie box camera. I still have it in my office. It was magic. It captured forever what was happening - out there in the world. You could stand here and get an image or you could stand there and get an entirely different image. You could be high or you could be low, and you could begin to make more meaning of reality than what you immediately saw. AC: What did you take pictures of? SE: I took pictures of things like stones because I thought they had personality. I took pictures of my beloved aging baby sitter and my dog s paws. My dog s paws meant a lot to me, so I took their picture. And my family laughed at me and asked, Why are you doing this?. I thought, Someone in the world loves a dog s paws; and they ll get it. It was a way to go into a different reality, a more intuitive reality. AC: How did you start to transition from this interest in photography to film? SE: The simple answer is, I didn t for a long time. There was no easy way to learn film in those days. When I was in college at Sarah Lawrence, I took no film classes until my senior year. However, I did study with the famous art historian and curator, William Rubin, Director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. He taught me how to see. How to think and how to talk about color, shape, movement and the ineffable. He was a passionate professor who filled his lectures with standing room only. People from all over the NYC area would drive hours to hear him perform every week. Our class was a freshman studies course, and there were only 15 of us with this internationally famous art historian. I began to think about color, light and the frame in ways I d never thought before. We went to museums in New York City all the time; we made our own art, and Bill (Rubin) helped us put the seeing and the making and the thinking about art all together. He was personally very close with all of the New York modernists at the time Pollack, Rothko, Stella, de Kooning it was very exciting for me to find people who lived in the world of vision. AC: What else interested or informed your work from this time? SE: I also studied anthropology in college and that really excited me. And creative writing with Grace Paley, Harvey Swados and poet Alan Dugan. This was in the early 60s, and I was extremely political often participating in some life-altering event. I was part of civil rights protests; and protests against the Vietnam War. AC: Did you go to Washington? SE: I went to Washington; I had my head cut open by the police batons. I was tear gassed. In college, I co-led the takeover of our administration for 10 days. We (the students), kicked out the President, kicked out the deans, kicked out the secretaries and ran the school. We asked the school to divest investments in apartheid South Africa; we wanted more minority students and faculty, more scholarships, college recognition of the Black Students Association and access to our own academic records. We had an entire list of demands. Our takeover made the New York Times. Several faculty came in with us. It was an idealistic time in America s history when you thought you could do anything. AC: How did you start transitioning into film? SE: In my senior year at Sarah Lawrence College, I took a film class, and the film process was instantly natural for me. Film reflected how I engaged with reality both visually and conceptually. I could merge politics, writing, anthropology and art making. My brain, my eye and my heart could merge. When I saw Battle of Algiers [Pontecorvo, 1966] that s the film where I had my final conversion moment. I decided to apply to Brandeis University for graduate work in film and where I could study with Timothy Ash, who was considered one of the leading visual anthropologists and ethnographic filmmakers. I picked Brandeis specifically because Tim was there. I had a hunch by then about what I ultimately wanted to do. However, Brandeis didn t have enough cutting edge critical film studies or enough 16mm equipment so I went to M.I.T. and did a joint program between the two schools. I studied with Richard Leacock at MIT who was Robert Flaherty s last cinematographer. What stories I learned about Flaherty. Leacock was one of

4 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 4 the early pioneers of cinema verite and was perhaps the best mentor I ever had. Tim, on the other hand, had interned with photographers, Minor White, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams and studied with anthropologist Margaret Mead who I was also lucky to take a course with and Tim was on fire developing ethnographic filmmaking. During those days in Cambridge (Mass) I also interned at Documentary Educational Resources with filmmaker John Marshall who let me work on his seminal Ju/ hoansi Bushman film series. Boston was the crucible for new documentary then. Documentary was just getting its sea legs. It wasn t quite sure what it was, and it was exiting to be part of that discovery. AC: What were your impressions of the documentaries you d seen? SE: All of the documentaries I watched in college, and many later in grad school, I mostly hated. I was disturbed seeing our dominant culture talk about people of color, or poor people, or people who were different -- where the point of interest seemed to be placed on the exoticism of another culture. They were essentially racist. You were not presented with individuals with voices who had equal lives to ours. And a lot of other docs I saw were just boring. All these bad docs made me want to make good ones. AC: Did your political interests and actions play a part in your move toward film, and specifically documentary? SE: Part of the underground anti war movement during this time was smuggling in film from the North Vietnamese. We were beginning to see non Western documentaries, many of which had interviews with the enemy where they talked about their families and their values. I was becoming aware of a vast part of the world population that was not being represented in the U.S. A parallel to this now is the continuing struggle for us to see average women on the screen women of color, of all ages, of all body types. AC: How did your association with Alaskan Natives come about? SE: I went to Alaska after graduate school to make ethnographic films. I knew that I first had to live in the culture, and I began teaching high school in Emmonak. I taught all courses and all grades. I was trying to learn the culture, but along the way I realized I wanted to work there perhaps for the rest of my life. The people stunned me by their traditional knowledge, their relationships with the natural and spiritual world, their survival skills, their story telling and their friendship. I could go on. I also realized that there was not one person in all of the Native villages who had ever seen anyone who looked like themselves on the screen. AC: What types of movies did the Alaskans in these villages watch? SE: Westerns, musicals and comedies. They rooted for the cowboys to kill the Indians to kill the Natives. It was part of my politics, perhaps feminist politics, that I wanted to put more people on the screen who looked like Yup ik people. I knew what it was like to see mostly boys in my grammar school story books. Can you imagine if you had never seen a person on the silver screen who looked like you? AC: Can you speak toward your ethnographic practice on Drums? SE: I started with the idea that we would practice a new collaborative method. It came out of my cooperative experiences in my political past. First we (my film partner, Kamerling and I) would share filming control with villagers. Control was the key factor. We gave the community complete rights to tell us what to film, whom to film and what not to film. I was certain that there was no way that I, as an outsider, could know the important questions to ask. I wouldn t know unspoken values. If I was asking the questions and making the decisions, [the film] would be from my point of view. So, my hope was to work with people who had equal power, who would say, No you shouldn t film that. This is more important. There was a lot of trial and error over the years working out this participatory filmmaking. Some of it I have abandoned now in the face of small budgets or my own aesthetics.

5 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 5 The other filmmaking factor essential to Len and me was pacing. We wanted to make what I call slow film. We wanted our pacing to force viewers to slow down and to experience real time. To not be pulled along by frenetic editing. You might say we wanted to make viewers be here now. We hoped also that our audience might sense the pace of remote village life. AC: How did this collaborative vision actually play out in Drums? SE: When Len and I started in 1974, we put together our own rules. We would not film for the first month. We would wait and watch. Allow people to know us. We would only film what the community asked us to film. We never filmed anyone without asking. We visited every house and explained our intentions. In 1978 in the beginning of shooting Drums, villagers knew me from teaching in 1972, but they still weren t really on board with the film project. We were not allowed to photograph at all within the sacred dance house without formal Tribal permission, and so I made a special trip to negotiate that permission two months before we even arrived to film. As they saw our responsiveness to their input, they started bossing us around more and more. By the third month, we started having young children sent by their parents run to our door saying, Oh, come film this! Oh, film that. And we were delighted. In the editing room, because of geographical distances and technology, we did not have as much community collaboration although our 4 Yup ik translators continued to guide us. AC: You ve been around this community for over forty years now. What are aspects that have either changed or you find interest in? SE: Now, the children take videos of themselves and are pretty active on social media. I m interested in questions such as, how does a Yup ik person think about themselves with one foot in their world and one foot in the non-native world? How do they gracefully, or not gracefully, live a life that navigates those worlds? People have this problem all over the world dealing with dominant cultures. AC: What are some of your recollections of audiences responding to the film? SE: I have shown the film all over the world, and I am always surprised how different audiences react. Western audiences are quiet and thoughtful. I lose them sometimes in the final Potlatch dancing. Yup ik audiences are riveted and then laugh and cheer and talk back to the screen. Polynesian audiences cried because they were so moved and stood up and testified about the strength of their own culture. Once, at the Hawaii International Film Festival, Roger Ebert got really excited by the film and asked for his own personal DVD and could not stop talking about it. I was touched by his interest in a young filmmaker like me. When Drums was just finished, the famous documentary historian, Erik Barnouw, said it was the best film he had seen in decades. I was a young filmmaker and wanted him to inscribe his words on my dinner napkin. He laughed, but his widow, later after his death, told me how much he really liked the film. I was very gratified. Part of my goal was to make a film that different audiences could respond to in meaningful ways. AC: What are you currently working on? SE: I m looking at climate change now in the same village. In the last 50 years, the average winter temperature in Alaska has increased 6 degrees F. It is extraordinary how climate change has affected every level of the ecosystem as well as peoples lives. The ice is not thick enough to travel on in winter, and so you can t travel or hunt safely; you fall through the ice. It s treacherous. The weather is unpredictable a lot more people are dying. More storms are eroding village houses and are killing hunters. Some animals and fish species are declining, other animals and plants are invading tundra habitat. Life has changed. AC: Beyond the cost, what are some of the most interesting technological advances for you as a filmmaker? SE: I have actually been writing about this lately the relationship between the subject and the film crew has changed with technology. Back then, Lenny shot with a heavy camera that only could film 10 minutes at a time,

6 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 6 and I took sound with a large heavy tape recorder and 3 foot microphone. We worked very formally. Because I knew the dancers (from living there as a teacher), I would suggest who and where to shoot, etc. This last time when I shot for my climate change film, I was the only crew. I m holding the camera, which is smaller, and I don t need lights as much. I m able to move my body. The experience feels more natural. The camera almost seems like part of my body. AC: How has that changed things being the only person shooting? SE: It is completely different. It s much more personal and intimate. I didn t anticipate how different it would be. I got deeper more personal interviews. People are much more relaxed with me. I m also working as a single woman, and I believe I get different responses than when I am working with a crew and or a man. AC: Do you think this type of intimacy would have changed Drums? SE: Completely. Drums is made in the old fashioned mode of documentary. There was a certain kind of fourth wall between them and us. You can sense there is a kind of formality in the film. Film subjects rarely look into the camera. Now, they look at the camera as if it were part of me, an extension of my eyes. It s how you and I are looking at each other right now without the camera. Technology will always change. If we had not filmed back then, there would be no document of the old ways, of old stories, no images of elders dancing in old styles. If I want that kind of document of my own culture from 1978, I simply go to any film archive or Hollywood film and find it with a click. AC: Do you think this level of intimacy gets at a deeper understanding? SE: Well, that s complicated. I mean, whose understanding? The people of Emmonak really like the film. They can repeat full interviews almost word for word. They recite exact scenes. But, if you don t know the ways of this culture, or they are not your ancestors, (almost all the adults in the film are dead now) you may experience an element of boredom and/or bias or just emotional distance. If a film represents that distance, I do not know what the good of it is, except at a very material level. You hear people sing, you can see their ritual, but that is very superficial in the long run. So, how do you make a film that allows us to sense the humanity between us? How do you make viewers emotionally and intellectually respond to someone else? Those are the kinds of things I am interested in. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams in Sight and Sound: My favorite film music is in The Drums of Winter (1988) by Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling. This music was not composed for the film. The music is the subject of the film. In The Drums of Winter we see and hear traditional songs of the Yup'ik people of Western Alaska performed with dances in the intimate setting of the potlatch ceremony. The sound and the cinematography are equally strong. There is no narration, no one who tells us what to think. Rather than watching from the outside, we feel as though we're inside the dance house experiencing each moment with the community. Documentary (from Wikipedia) A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. Such films were originally shot on film stock the only medium available but now include video and digital productions that can be either direct-tovideo, made into a TV show, or released for screening in cinemas. "Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries. 2 Definition The cover of Bolesław Matuszewski book Une nouvelle source de l'histoire. (A New Source of History) from 1898 the first publication about documentary function of cinematography. Polish writer and filmmaker Bolesław Matuszewski was among those who identified the mode of documentary film. He wrote two of the earliest texts on cinema Une nouvelle source de l'histoire (eng. A New Source of History) and La photographie animée (eng.

7 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 7 Animated photography). Both were published in 1898 in French language and among the early written works to consider the historical and documentary value of the film. Matuszewski is also among the first filmmakers to propose the creation of a Film Archive to collect and keep safe visual materials In popular myth, the word documentary was coined by Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by "The Moviegoer" (a pen name for Grierson). Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" 6 has gained some acceptance, with this position at variance with Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov's provocation to present "life as it is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera). The American film critic Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film which is dramatic." Others further state that a documentary stands out from the other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, and a specific message, along with the facts it presents. Documentary practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies in order to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries. Documentary filmmaking can be used as a form of journalism, advocacy, or personal expression. History Pre 1900 Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. They were single-shot moments captured on film: a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work. These short films were called "actuality" films; the term "documentary" was not coined until Many of the first films, such as those made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, were a minute or less in length, due to technological limitations. Films showing many people (for example, leaving a factory) were often made for commercial reasons: the people being filmed were eager to see, for payment, the film showing them. One notable film clocked in at over an hour and a half, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight. Using pioneering film-looping technology, Enoch J. Rector presented the entirety of a famous 1897 prize-fight on cinema screens across the United States. In May 1896, Bolesław Matuszewski recorded on film few surigical operations in Warsaw and Saint Petersburg hospitals. In 1898, French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen invited Bolesław Matuszewski and Clément Maurice and proposed them to recorded his surigical operations. They started in Paris a series of surgical films sometime before July Until 1906, the year of his last film, Doyen recorded more than 60 operations. Doyen said that his first films taught him how to correct professional errors he had been unaware of. For scientific purposes, after 1906, Doyen combined 15 of his films into three compilations, two of which survive, the six-film series Extirpation des tumeurs encapsulées (1906), and the four-film Les Opérations sur la cavité crânienne (1911). These and five other of Doyen's films survive. Between July 1898 and 1901, the Romanian professor Gheorghe Marinescu made several science films in his neurology clinic in Bucharest: 11 Walking Troubles of Organic Hemiplegy (1898), The Walking Troubles of Organic Paraplegies (1899), A Case of Hysteric Hemiplegy Healed Through Hypnosis (1899), The Walking Troubles of Progressive Locomotion Ataxy (1900), and Illnesses of the Muscles (1901). All these short films have been preserved. The professor called his works "studies with the help of the cinematograph," and published the results, along with several consecutive frames, in issues of "La Semaine Médicale" magazine from Paris, between 1899 and In 1924, Auguste Lumiere recognized the merits of Marinescu's science

8 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 8 films: "I've seen your scientific reports about the usage of the cinematograph in studies of nervous illnesses, when I was still receiving "La Semaine Médicale," but back then I had other concerns, which left me no spare time to begin biological studies. I must say I forgot those works and I am thankful to you that you reminded them to me. Unfortunately, not many scientists have followed your way." Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. They were often referred to by distributors as "scenics." Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time. 16 An important early film to move beyond the concept of the scenic was In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), which embraced primitivism and exoticism in a staged story presented as truthful reenactments of the life of Native Americans. Contemplation is a separate area. Pathé is the best-known global manufacturer of such films of the early 20th century. A vivid example is Moscow clad in snow (1909). Biographical documentaries appeared during this time, such as the feature Eminescu- Veronica-Creangă (1914) on the relationship between the writers Mihai Eminescu, Veronica Micle and Ion Creangă (all deceased at the time of the production) released by the Bucharest chapter of Pathé. Early color motion picture processes such as Kinemacolor known for the feature With Our King and Queen Through India (1912) and Prizmacolor known for Everywhere With Prizma (1919) and the five-reel feature Bali the Unknown (1921) used travelogues to promote the new color processes. In contrast, Technicolor concentrated primarily on getting their process adopted by Hollywood studios for fictional feature films. Also during this period, Frank Hurley's feature documentary film, South (1919), about the Imperial Trans- Antarctic Expedition was released. The film documented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in s Romanticism With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism; Flaherty filmed a number of heavily staged romantic films during this time period, often showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then. For instance, in Nanook of the North, Flaherty did not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but had them use a harpoon instead. Some of Flaherty's staging, such as building a roofless igloo for interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of the time. Paramount Pictures tried to repeat the success of Flaherty's Nanook and Moana with two romanticized documentaries, Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), both directed by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack. The city symphony City Symphony Films were avant-garde films made during the 1920s to 1930s. These films were particularly influenced by modern art: namely Cubism, Constructivism, and Impressionism. According to Scott Macdonald (2010), city symphony film can be located as an intersection between documentary and avantgarde film; "avant-doc". However, A.L. Rees suggest to see them as avant-garde films. City Symphony films include Manhatta (dir. Paul Strand, 1921), Paris Nothing but the Hours (dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926), Twenty Four Dollar Island (dir. Robert Flaherty, 1927), Études sur Paris (dir. André Sauvage, 1928), The Bridge (1928), and Rain (1929), both by Joris Ivens. But the most famous city symphony films are Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (dir. Walter Ruttman, 1927) and The Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929). A City Symphony Film, as the name suggests, is usually based around a major metropolitan city area and seek to capture the lives, events and activities of the city. It can be abstract and cinematographic (see Walter Ruttmann's Berlin) or utilise Russian Montage theory (See Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera). But most importantly, a city symphony film is like a cine-poem and is shot and edited like a "symphony". The continental, or realist, tradition focused on humans within human-made environments, and included the so-called "city symphony" films such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City (of which Grierson noted in an article 18 that Berlin represented what a

9 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 9 documentary should not be), Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures, and Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera. These films tend to feature people as products of their environment, and lean towards the avant-garde. Kino-Pravda Dziga Vertov was central to the Soviet Kino- Pravda (literally, "cinematic truth") newsreel series of the 1920s. Vertov believed the camera with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion could render reality more accurately than the human eye, and made a film philosophy out of it. Newsreel tradition The newsreel tradition is important in documentary film; newsreels were also sometimes staged but were usually reenactments of events that had already happened, not attempts to steer events as they were in the process of happening. For instance, much of the battle footage from the early 20th century was staged; the cameramen would usually arrive on site after a major battle and re-enact scenes to film them. 1920s 1940s The propagandist tradition consists of films made with the explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. One of the most celebrated and controversial propaganda films is Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will (1935), which chronicled the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and was commissioned by Adolf Hitler. Leftist filmmakers Joris Ivens and Henri Storck directed Borinage (1931) about the Belgian coal mining region. Luis Buñuel directed a "surrealist" documentary Las Hurdes (1933). Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) and Willard Van Dyke's The City (1939) are notable New Deal productions, each presenting complex combinations of social and ecological awareness, government propaganda, and leftist viewpoints. Frank Capra's Why We Fight ( ) series was a newsreel series in the United States, commissioned by the government to convince the U.S. public that it was time to go to war. Constance Bennett and her husband Henri de la Falaise produced two featurelength documentaries, Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935) filmed in Bali, and Kilou the Killer Tiger (1936) filmed in Indochina. In Canada, the Film Board, set up by John Grierson, was created for the same propaganda reasons. It also created newsreels that were seen by their national governments as legitimate counter-propaganda to the psychological warfare of Nazi Germany (orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels). In Britain, a number of different filmmakers came together under John Grierson. They became known as the Documentary Film Movement. Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, and Humphrey Jennings amongst others succeeded in blending propaganda, information, and education with a more poetic aesthetic approach to documentary. Examples of their work include Drifters (John Grierson), Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright), Fires Were Started, and A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings). Their work involved poets such as W. H. Auden, composers such as Benjamin Britten, and writers such as J. B. Priestley. Among the best known films of the movement are Night Mail and Coal Face. 1950s 1970s Cinéma-vérité Cinéma vérité (or the closely related direct cinema) was dependent on some technical advances in order to exist: light, quiet and reliable cameras, and portable sync sound. Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, in a broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based film production constraints. Shooting on location, with smaller crews, would also happen in the French New Wave, the filmmakers taking advantage of advances in technology allowing smaller, handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded. Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are important differences between cinéma vérité (Jean Rouch) and the North American "Direct Cinema" (or more accurately "Cinéma direct"), pioneered by, among others, Canadians Allan King, Michel Brault, and Pierre Perrault, and Americans Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Frederick Wiseman, and Albert and David Maysles. The directors of the movement take different viewpoints on their degree of involvement with their subjects. Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault, Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favor direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary.

10 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 10 The films Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch), Dont Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker), Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles), Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman), Primary and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (both produced by Robert Drew), Harlan County, USA (directed by Barbara Kopple), Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor) are all frequently deemed cinéma vérité films. The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisis with a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shooting ratio (the amount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching 80 to one. From there, editors find and sculpt the work into a film. The editors of the movement such as Werner Nold, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Myers, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde are often overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they were often given co-director credits. Famous cinéma vérité/direct cinema films include Les Raquetteurs, Showman, Salesman, Near Death, and The Children Were Watching. Political weapons In the 1960s and 1970s, documentary film was often conceived as a political weapon against neocolonialism and capitalism in general, especially in Latin America, but also in a changing Quebec society. La Hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, from 1968), directed by Octavio Getino and Arnold Vincent Kudales Sr., influenced a whole generation of filmmakers. Among the many political documentaries produced in the early 1970s was "Chile: A Special Report," public television's first in-depth expository look of the September 1973 overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in Chile by military leaders under Augusto Pinochet, produced by documentarians Ari Martinez and José Garcia. Modern Box office analysts have noted that this film genre has become increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, Food, Inc., Earth, March of the Penguins, Religulous, and An Inconvenient Truth among the most prominent examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable. The nature of documentary films has expanded in the past 20 years from the cinema verité style introduced in the 1960s in which the use of portable camera and sound equipment allowed an intimate relationship between filmmaker and subject. The line blurs between documentary and narrative and some works are very personal, such as the late Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989) and Black Is...Black Ain't (1995), which mix expressive, poetic, and rhetorical elements and stresses subjectivities rather than historical materials. Historical documentaries, such as the landmark 14-hour Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1986 Part 1 and 1989 Part 2) by Henry Hampton, Four Little Girls (1997) by Spike Lee, and The Civil War by Ken Burns, UNESCO awarded independent film on slavery 500 Years Later, expressed not only a distinctive voice but also a perspective and point of views. Some films such as The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris incorporated stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger & Me placed far more interpretive control with the director. The commercial success of these documentaries may derive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries; critics sometimes refer to these works as "mondo films" or "docu-ganda." However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form due to problematic ontological foundations. Documentary filmmakers are increasingly utilizing social impact campaigns with their films. 22 Social impact campaigns seek to leverage media projects by converting public awareness of social issues and causes into engagement and action, largely by offering the audience a way to get involved. 23 Examples of such documentaries include Kony 2012, Salam Neighbor, Gasland, Living on One Dollar, and Girl Rising. Although documentaries are financially more viable with the increasing popularity of the genre and the advent of the DVD, funding for documentary film production remains elusive. Within the past decade, the largest exhibition opportunities have emerged from within the broadcast market, making filmmakers beholden to the tastes and influences of the broadcasters who have become their largest funding source. Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged. The making-of documentary shows how a movie or a computer

11 Elder and Kamerling DRUMS OF WINTER 11 game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary. Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices. The first film to take full advantage of this change was Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, where 150 DV cameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to record themselves. National Geographic television collaborates local video production agencies to present the best content for viewers, APV delivered modern documentaries programming focussed on Hong Kong Local region with collaborating National Geographic. Without words Films in the documentary form without words have been made. From 1982, the Qatsi trilogy and the similar Baraka could be described as visual tone poems, with music related to the images, but no spoken content. Koyaanisqatsi (part of the Qatsi trilogy) consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. Baraka tries to capture the great pulse of humanity as it flocks and swarms in daily activity and religious ceremonies. Bodysong was made in 2003 and won a British Independent Film Award for "Best British Documentary." The 2004 film Genesis shows animal and plant life in states of expansion, decay, sex, and death, with some, but little, narration. Narration styles Voice-over narrator The traditional style for narration is to have a dedicated narrator read a script which is dubbed onto the audio track. The narrator never appears on camera and may not necessarily have knowledge of the subject matter or involvement in the writing of the script. Silent narration This style of narration uses title screens to visually narrate the documentary. The screens are held for about 5 10 seconds to allow adequate time for the viewer to read them. They are similar to the ones shown at the end of movies based on true stories, but they are shown throughout, typically between scenes. Hosted narrator In this style, there is a host who appears on camera, conducts interviews, and who also does voiceovers. COMING UP IN THE FALL 2016 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXXIII: Nov 1 Hal Ashby Being There 1979 Nov 8 Brian De Palma The Untouchables 1987 Nov 15 Norman Jewison Moonstruck 1987 Nov 22 Andrei Tarkovsky The Sacrifice 1986 Nov 29 Alfonso Arau Like Water for Chocolate 1992 Dec 6 Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck The Tourist 2010 CONTACTS:... Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: subscribe to the weekly informational notes, send an to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com...for cast and crew info on any film: The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.