A Cinema of Urgency: Interview with John Gianvito

John Gianvito is an independent film director based in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is also Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. In addition, he has taught at numerous major universities in the Boston area and at the Rhode Island School of Design. In New York, he has served as Guest Curator, member of the Advisory Committee, and currently on the Board of Directors for the Robert Flaherty International Film Seminar. His extensive curatorial work also includes a five-year appointment as film programmer at the Harvard Film Archive. His essays have appeared widely in film journals and museum catalogues, and he edited a volume of interviews with Andrei Tarkovsky. The year 2008 saw two Gianvito retrospectives: at the Viennale Film Festival in Austria and the I Mille Occhi Festival in Trieste, Italy. Gianvito has made numerous short films, for example the 2002 Puncture Wounds (September 11th) in response to the 2001 terrorist attack on New York City. In recent years, he has devoted himself to three major feature projects:

Gianvito's 2001 feature, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (168 minutes), offers a dramatic exploration of America during the period of the first Persian Gulf War. The film received many awards, including the Jury Prize at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema and the Rosa Luxemburg Award at the New England Film and Video Festival, "given to the film or video that, through its sympathetic portrayal of grassroots struggle, best embodies the movement toward a more egalitarian society." Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called the film "a powerful and moving act of bearing witness." ¹

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007, 58 minutes) is a lyrical quest across the American landscape to uncover and document the hidden history—and the forgotten tragedies—of America's progressive past. The film received considerable acclaim, including awards for "Best Experimental Film of the Year" by the National Society of Film Critics (U.S.) and the Grand Prize for Documentary Feature at the Belfort EntreVues Film Festival (France).

Gianvito recently completed Vapor Trail (Clark), the first half (at 268 minutes) of a two-part documentary essay exposing the plight of the thousands of people living within the vicinity of the still toxic environs of two former U.S. military bases in the Philippines. This first part, focusing on the Clark Air Base, was an official selection at over a dozen film festivals and was listed among the top ten films of 2010 by Film Comment and Sight and Sound. Expected to reach approximately the same length, the project's second half, entitled Wake (Subic), is still in editing. It documents the distinct, though related, health and environmental devastation around the U.S. Naval Base at Subic Bay.

Puncture Wounds. John Gianvito. 10 min. 2002 (United States). Traveling Light Productions.

John Gianvito's films have been lauded all over the world, and his connections to France are many. His work has screened at the Jeu de Paume, the Centre Pompidou, and the Cinémathèque Française, and it has been reviewed in Trafic and Cahiers du cinéma. ² In 1987, he directed the fortieth anniversary recording of Antonin Artaud's radio play "To Have Done with the Judgment of God," which was broadcast from Boston and New York. He is also the author of essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Danièle Huillet, Philippe Garrel, and Françoise Dorléac. ³ In 2001 Gianvito was made a chevalier in the Ordre des arts et des lettres by the French Ministry of Culture for his curatorial work.

Lynn Higgins:

What terms would you use to describe your practice of socially and politically engaged cinema?

John Gianvito:

I suppose it's fair to say I've become, or at least aspire to be, some kind of agitator. I seek an agit-prop cinema in the original non-pejorative sense of the term—agitating emotions and propagating thoughts. As I see it, the world we find ourselves enmeshed in demands a cinema of urgency as opposed...