Solstice and a Seminar
Traveling tomorrow under the sagging skies of Massachusetts and New York for the weeklong Flaherty Seminar at Colgate University. This year’s program is being curated by Irina Leimbacher who, in her adventurous work for SF Cinematheque and kino21, has done much to enrich film culture by the bay. As someone who has learned much from her, especially with regards to documentary form, I’m duly jazzed for her Flaherty program, titled “Witnesses, Monuments, Ruins.” Sounds a little doom metal album, perhaps, though the changing technology of testimony is certainly front and center in the news from Iran.
Working through some of the recommended reading for the seminar, I paused on this little passage from Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas’ excellent introduction to a volume on trauma and visual culture, The Image and the Witness:
“The social and political role of the image as icon dates back to early Christian times when the image was bestowed with metaphysical power as not simply in the likeness of God and the Saints. Rather, people behaved to certain images as to the very abode of God. In the conventional use of religious icons, some of the earliest uses of images ‘were kissed and venerated with bended knee…they were treated like personages who were being approached with personal supplications.’”
In the context of Guerin and Hallas’ essay, this passage situates the claims made for visual representation, but it also serves to illuminate auteurism’s vaguely Christian doctrine — the Saints of Sarris or whoever. The idea of images being the “abode” of an invisible presence is a nice way of thinking about the auteur principle’s essential gambit.
I’m missing a wealth of film programming during my stint back east (onwards with Oshima, Canyon and the Kuchars at Frameline, Lucrecia Martel’s YBCA visit), but I had the good fortune of catching eight or nine reels of Lawrence Jordan’s gigantic compilation film, Circus Savage, last Saturday. He screened it as part of an exhibition of his still art at Gallery Extrana in Berkeley, just a quick ride up the hill from my house. The compression of architecture, cats, love, friends, poetry, texture, color and surrealism was mesmerizing — all the more so for unspooling in a modest Berkeley woodframe. In the longstanding love affair between Bay Area experimental filmmakers (Dorsky, Baillie, Sonbert, etc.) and their gardens, Jordan’s forays are nearly neon in their enamored slow-motion. But there I go constructing another abode…Happy longest day of the year if I don’t write before.
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