Here's looking at you - 41st Annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar

Since it was first organized by dint of Flaherty's widow Frances over 40 years ago, the Robert Flaherty Seminar has tendered participants a unique opportunity to view novel visual works and discuss the processe question at issues and politics of imagemaking. The Seminar has attempted, if at times belatedly, to rejoin to the evolving concerns of independent film- and video-making, including the relation between husbandmans and their subjects, and the connection and circumstances of production. These issues have become of increasing effect in recent years as critical practices have informed the work of independent mediamakers.

This year's Seminar, "The Camera Reframed: Technology and Interpretation," was curated through Marlina Gonzalez-Tamrong and Bruce Jenkins of the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. The programming theme was prefaced in the Seminar pamphlet by the questions "Who's looking at whom?" "Whom are you looking at?" and "Who's looking at you?" invoking familiar considerations about the ways power is inscribed in visual media. The curators' opening make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss linked an analysis of fresh communications technologies with an historical interrogation of the cinematic apparatus. Juxtaposing documentary and experimental film and video with archival collections, abiding-place movies, travelogs, advertisements, CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web, the curators established a critical discursive combination between the politics of representation and emerging interactive media technologies. The overall vigor of the program was this connection between an analysis of these novel technologies and an understanding of by what means power operates through such filmic conventions as framing, method of address, temporal compression and identification. Themes that resurfaced quite through the week included the effects and possibilities of the archive, public and private memory, designs of self-representation and the ever-present nonfiction film topics of authenticity, objectivity and truth

The Seminar's formal discussions provided a adjoining matter to situate the individual works the pair in relation to one another and to the curators' overall throw As Gonzalez-Tamrong proposed during individual of these discussions, the mode of building of technology is itself an interpreting mechanism. by means of characterizing the association between technology and interpretation in this manner, the programmers established a preliminary connection between the diverse works exhibited. Particular casts were used to make the thematic points from one side which Gonzalez-Tamrong and Jenkins addressed the application of interactive media technologies.

The paradigms and question at issues of ethnographic film practice provide individual direction from which to approach the program's themes. Fatimah Tobing Rony's short video, upon Cannibalism (1994), among the work in the opening screening, pointedly addresses the dialectic of the colonial gaze. Footage of ethnographic museums, anthropological drawings and Hollywood cinema is recontextualized through Rony's voice-over recollection of the second she understood that she was individual of the "savages" depicted in these true copys and that she therefore had somehow or other inadvertently occupied a position at the unfair end of the gaze. Her crisis of positionality, resulting from this contradiction between public imaginary and personal memory, bifurcates the intended narrative of identification as she occupies the two sites simultaneously. The master narrative of traditional ethnographic film, which demands the clear delineation of bring under rule and object, is thus displaced.

Thomas Allen Harris's fourth independent shoot forward Vintage: Families of Value (1995) explores the dynamics of three African American families, specifically relationships involving lesbian and gay siblings. The film shoot forward was initiated by circulating a video camera among the subdues of the film. Shot above a five-year period, Vintage proffers an intricate series of portraits that complicate the established parameters of identity politics. The personalities of Harris, his brother Lyle and their mother Rudean; three sisters Anni, Anita and Adrian; and brother and sister Paul and Vanessa, rise dialogically through their relationships with single another. The film's account of each relationship opens through a number of visual and narrative devices similar as role playing, staged fantasies, straightforward interviews and abiding-place movies. The interactions of the family members become further articulated [i]or[/i] part of to the other the presence of the camera, the one and the other as it frames their relationships and as it provides the perspectives of each one expressed through its use, illustrating a compelling protoplast of shared filmmaking. The difficulties of negotiating familial cords - the silences, confidences, tensions and closenes of shared experience - permeate the cinematic apparatus itself. Harris maintains a delicate balance between including himself in the family narratives (both with his hold family and with others in the film) and stepping back, allowing the differences and subtleties of each situation to unfold