David Riker at Stanford

David Riker (Boston, 1963). Director: La ciudad / The city, 1998; The Girl, 2012. Writer: The Witness, 2013; Dirty Wars, 2013; The Girl, 2013; Sleep Dealer, 2008; La Ciudad / The City, 1998.

David Riker:

My father always wanted to leave the small town he grew up in. He wanted to get out and was very driven. I share this feeling of being uprooted and of feeling like an outsider. And another ingredient—that perhaps I wasn’t aware of, consciously—is that I’m struggling with what it means to be an American today. I struggle with this question and there are a number of different sides to what it means. There is the personal side, I have many relatives in the United States and yet I feel I am shaped by a completely different world than theirs. There is a political dimension too. I would prefer to not have to deal with the belly of the beast. I am most comfortable outside of this country but I also feel some strange primordial responsibility to be here and to be trying to work here. The fact that the United States is, and always has been, this contested space implies that is still ours to decide what it means to be American. We can still be part of shaping that, of answering that question. There are many parts of the country’s formation and history that I am very inspired by but it’s the history from below, it’s the Abolition Movement against slavery, the great anti-imperialist struggles in this country, the immigrant struggles and the stories of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs. These are inspiring. And yet the state history is very hard to even acknowledge, to accept what it means to be American from that standpoint. The great holocaust, the genocide against native peoples which today—500 years later—we still do not talk about. It is still almost unspoken. So it is a very complicated question for me what it mean to be American but when I started making La Ciudad I was aware that I was working in a tradition—filmically or photographically—with roots in the early twentieth century. The Lewis Hine photographs and the photographic record of mass immigration of the 1900’s, the 1910’s. And I thought that in the same way that there were these portraits of Americans—all immigrants, new-immigrants—at the beginning of the twentieth century, I was making a portrait of Americans and the end of the twentieth century. Whether these Americans—who were uprooted by NAFTA, uprooted by the hurricanes both political and climactic—will choose to stay here or to visit and return, or whether they are constructing identities now in two places at once, these are Americans. And I found this as a source of strength to make the film. I originally called the film The Other City—when it was just the story of the puppeteer—but then I realised this was a mistake. The film needed to be called The City because it is as much the city as Woody Allen’s New York is New York City. This is just as important as Manhattan, just as valid and I didn’t need to say the other New York because this is New York. So, I think I have been shaped by these forces of not feeling like I have a legitimate place and not even knowing what my original place is and wondering what it is to be American. These forces have not only shaped La Ciudad but all the work that I do. I realised, probably in my twenties, that the uprooted immigrant was no longer a marginal character, globally speaking. The uprooted person was the central subject of the time I was living in. The period of the 1980’s through to the turn of the century was a period of mass uprootedness across the planet. Not all of the uprooted immigrants are moving from the south to the north, many are uprooted from the country to the city...