Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, 2011: Sonic Truth (review)

For six days in June 2011, a group of 173 media makers, curators, scholars, archivists, and film enthusiasts from fourteen countries assembled at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, to participate in the 57th Flaherty Film Seminar. Named for the American filmmaker Robert Flaherty, a man who holds almost mythical prominence in nonfiction film history, the seminar was devised and founded in 1955 by his collaborator and widow, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, four years after his death. Before the era of film schools, Frances imagined the seminar as a dynamic space where people could gather to participate in screenings, debate, and discussion. Originally held at the Flaherty's bucolic Vermont farmhouse, the seminar quickly established itself as an important American site for serious cinephilia.

Tradition looms large at the Flaherty: the schedule, the way of watching films, the manner of discussion, even the name and hours of the well-attended bar hearken back to some previously established (and reverentially honored) way of doing things. The rigorous daily schedule includes, at minimum, three two-and-a-half-hour screening and discussion sessions. There are no simultaneous events; rather, participants engage in an immersive experience of communal spectatorship, watching up to nine hours of media a day. Breaks are taken for meals and for various social activities, events that bolster a sense of camaraderie among the participants. Over the course of this year's seminar, ninety films were screened. At its best, this marathon mode of spectatorship results in a rich intertext—films align and mesh with each other in complementary and conflicted ways. Slowly, over the course of six days, a dense network of intertwined styles and thematics emerges to produce a complex viewing experience. The downside of watching films this way is, of course, that individual works—often the short or particularly subtle pieces—can get lost in the palimpsest of images and sounds.

There is a tangible cinephilic voraciousness present at the seminar, an eagerness to see all the films, many of which are experimental or otherwise difficult to see. This feeling that each film is uniquely important is directly tied to one of Flaherty's most vaunted traditions: non-preconception. This awkward neologism means that the day's screening schedule is withheld from the participants. One never knows what one is about to see (and one doesn't dare skip a screening for fear of missing out) as screening notes are handed out only after the films have been viewed. Beyond this practical dimension, nonpreconception is devised to produce a kind of provisional naïveté; it's designed to promote an intellectually open experience of spectatorship. Screenings occur without the supposed blinders of context: title, director, country of origin, decade of origin, genre, synopsis, or interpretation. And true enough, it's a uniquely disarming experience to sit in a theater and have very little idea about what one is about to watch or even what one is watching. Every film, in this setting, deserves our curious generosity.

What exactly does one gain or lose by isolating a film so performatively from information about the conditions of its production? It's a worthwhile question and an ongoing one for participants at the Flaherty. As one person declared during one of the public discussion sessions, "when you are not given much context, all you have left is your preconceptions." And, perhaps not surprisingly, tensions about the relationships between text and context— film and culture—arose in relation to films that were historical and/or charged with ideologies of colonialism, race, and nation in particular. A screening of a recently rediscovered and rare Spanish-language edition of an American film from 1925, Kivalina of the Icelands (Kivalina La Esquimal; dir. Earl Rossman) produced some of the tensest exchanges at the seminar. Like Nanook of the North (1922; dir. Robert Flaherty), a film that Rossman tried to emulate and whose financial success he tried to capitalize on, Kivalina of the Icelands depicts "indigenous arctic life" through the lens of turn-of-the-century...