Film Screenings / Programs / Series
DOCUMENTARY FEEDBACK
April 21 – May 20
April 21-May 20, 2023
The ethical dimension of documentary filmmaking (and to some degree, of cinema as a whole) is a topic that has inspired endless debate and critical discussion. However well-intentioned, all non-fiction films call into play a constellation of fraught phenomena: power dynamics between the director and their subjects, the threat (if not the inevitability) of exploitation and misrepresentation, the danger of fostering the illusion of objectivity. This debate has fueled countless books, articles, and academic conferences, but one relatively unacknowledged manifestation is the way that filmmakers themselves have at times attempted to weave these issues into the fabric of their films.
This series showcases works (non-fiction or hybrid) that foreground the ethical questions and power dynamics that pervade the practice of non-fiction filmmaking, and that demonstrate a very particular way of confronting them. In the works gathered here, the filmmakers have taken the radical step of involving their subjects in the filmmaking process, by giving them the opportunity to watch footage from the film and then incorporating their responses – sometimes indirectly, but more often quite literally – into the works’ final form. In effect, these films create a kind of feedback loop: the subjects respond to the film, which takes further shape in response to their reactions, and so on.
The series brings together works from the mid-1960s to the present day, and from filmmakers including Lizzie Borden, Sara Gómez, William Greaves, Darcy Lange, Helga Reidemeister, and many others. And as a special sidebar, we’ll be focusing on the filmmaker for whom, perhaps more than any other, the strategy of documentary feedback was central: Jean Rouch.
Very special thanks to Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Lizzie Borden; Rebecca Cleman, Tyler Maxin, and Karl McCool (Electronic Arts Intermix); Anke Hahn (Deutsche Kinemathek); Darcy Lange, Jr.; Susan Lord; Marc Mauceri (First Run Features); Carel Rowe; Mercedes Vicente; and Abby Wratten (Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision).
We hope to present a follow-up series later in the summer that focuses on a more literal form of feedback: film and video works that make use of the technique of audio and visual feedback loops.
Lizzie Borden
REGROUPING
1976, 80 min, 16mm + DCP. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, Colorlab, and Audio Mechanics.
For her first feature film, Lizzie Borden collaborated with a small feminist group of four white middle class women in New York in the 1970s. Her intention was to explore their thoughts and ideas as well as the dynamics that animated their relationships and discussions. Adopting a radically experimental approach to nonfiction filmmaking, Borden combined interactions with the women themselves, dramatized sequences made in collaboration with the group, and interviews with other women in their orbit, such as artist Joan Jonas. Even more unusually, and especially as the group’s attitude towards the film project grew increasingly contentious, Borden incorporated their responses (and others’) to various in-progress versions of the film itself, creating a kind of socio-filmic feedback loop that foregrounds and transcends many of the intrinsic limitations of the documentary form. Despite these attempts to engage with and incorporate their criticisms, the women in the group continued to take issue with and protest the film following its completion. Borden soon withdrew it from circulation, and it languished virtually unseen for 40 years, until Anthology revived it in 2016 and restored it in 2022. Despite this tumultuous production and exhibition history, REGROUPING is an extraordinary film: a clear-eyed, tough-minded contribution to feminist thought, a still provocative exploration of female experience, group dynamics, and political work, and a fascinating attempt to rethink the conventions, methodology, and possibilities of documentary cinema.
Fri, April 21 at 6:30 and Wed, April 26 at 6:45 (16mm), and Wed, May 3 at 9:00 (DCP).
Arthur Ginsberg
THE CONTINUING STORY OF CAREL AND FERD
1972, 59 min, digital
“From 1970 to 1972, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America recorded the private life of a not so average American couple – Carel Row and Ferd Eggan. She is a porn actress and filmmaker; he is a bisexual junkie. The video vérité camera captures the desires and frustrations of their evolving relationship and their responses to the ongoing videotaping exercise. The tape, a study in ‘the effect of living too close to an electronic medium,’ reveals attitudes and discussions that also render it a fascinating social document of the West Coast counterculture. Produced before the landmark PBS documentary AN AMERICAN FAMILY, this project foregrounds the role played by media in contemporary life by positioning a video crew within the living space of a couple. Like a number of documentary projects at the time, THE CONTINUING STORY OF CAREL AND FERD was originally shown as a 3-channel video installation on 8 monitors, with a live camera feed of the audience, and often with Carel and Ferd present. This one-hour tape was broadcast on WNET’s series ‘Video and Television Review’ in 1975, and features an interview with Carel, Ferd, and Ginsberg five years later.” –Surveying the First Decade, VIDEO DATA BANK
Followed by:
Carel Rowe
FERDISH
2007, 30 min, digital
A glom of “Ferd” and “Kaddish”, FERDISH finds CAREL AND FERD’s co-star, Carel Rowe, continuing the experiment begun by the earlier film. In 2004, Carel taped Ferd on her farm in Vermont. Topics included drugs, sex, AIDS, psychotherapy, the vanishing of American politics, and death.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Fri, April 21 at 8:45, Tues, April 25 at 9:00, and Tues, May 2 at 6:30.
Helga Reidemeister
IS THIS FATE? / VON WEGEN ‘SCHICKSAL’
1979, 117 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In German with English subtitles.
“During the heady months of insurrection that marked 1968 across the globe, Helga Reidemeister (then a social worker) became part of a student-led struggle on behalf of the neglected residents of the Märkisches Viertel, the biggest housing estate in West Berlin at the time. Her second film [made on the estate], IS THIS FATE? is an…intense and unflinching document of the Bruder family and one in which the filmmaker’s interventionism and will constitute an important metatextual layer. The film opens with the family’s determined but exhausted matriarch Irene watching rushes on an editing table, in which one of her four children denounces Reidemeister’s desire to film their familial conflicts. ‘[The children] just don’t see that our family’s problems are not unique to us,’ Irene says, countering Tolstoy’s thesis that ‘every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. Violence is the focus of IS THIS FATE and it is what the verbose and charismatic cast of six variously analyze, refute, and justify. The film is a unique document of the second and third generation’s reckoning with their nation’s legacy – though despite the mother’s keenness to blame society, this geographically specific specter is never named. But it is also a hyperbolic, noisy case study for ideas about nature vs. nurture, the welfare state, and how to live together.” –ANOTHER SCREEN
Sat, April 22 at 4:15 and Wed, April 26 at 9:00.
William Greaves
SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE
1968, 75 min, 35mm
In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid, the pioneering William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they’re making. A couple enacts a breakup scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies.
Sat, April 22 at 7:00, Fri, April 28 at 9:15, and Thurs, May 4 at 7:00.
William Greaves
SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE 2½
2005, 99 min, digital
The “sequel” to SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM sees TAKE ONE actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker reunited in a more personal, metatheatrical exploration of the effects of the passage of time on technology, the artistic process, and relationships – real and fabricated.
Sat, April 22 at 9:00 and Thurs, May 4 at 9:00.
Sara Gómez
MI APORTE
1969, 33 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Spanish with English subtitles. Courtesy of the Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University, Canada.
“In 1972 the Federation of Cuban Women commissioned Gómez to make a film about women’s contribution to the sugar harvest. MI APORTE (“My Contribution”) was the result: a 33-minute ‘report’ on women’s lives 13 years after the ‘triumph of the Revolution.’ The film is a model of feminist consciousness-raising documentary form – self-reflexive, critical, direct. The ‘report’ is a series of testimonials and portraits of how difficult it is for women to contribute as full citizens due to machismo. The film was censored by the FMC and has rarely been screened on or off the Island.” –Susan Lord
Jean-Bernard Bucky, Norman Jacobson, and Robert Peyton
REPORT
1970, 56 min, 16mm-to-digital. Photographed by Ed Emshwiller. Courtesy of Jean-Bernard Bucky. REPORT was digitized through a partnership between Anthology Film Archives and Lightbox Film Center at University of the Arts, with funding from Ron and Suzanne Naples. Special thanks to Jean-Bernard Bucky, Robert Peyton, Max Bienstock, and Jesse Pires.
“Shot during the 1968/69 school year at University of California Berkeley, REPORT was created as part of Norman Jacobson’s experimental political science course ‘Toward an Expression of the Idea of Freedom’. The film, which features cinematography by avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, merges fiction and documentary as it portrays the widening generation gap within the university, and in society at large. At the center of the film is an uncertain teacher and the students who challenge him. The filmmakers sought to not only capture this scenario but the real-life experiences and opinions of the students in the class. Combining scripted elements, on-the-street interviews, behind-the-scenes conversations, and cinema verité footage of the demonstrations and police crackdown connected to the Third World Liberation Front campus protests, REPORT is a complex portrait of American higher education at a particularly tumultuous time in history. As issues surrounding free speech on college campuses continue to dominate our public discourse, REPORT is a fascinating time capsule from the epicenter of student activism.” –LIGHTBOX FILM CENTER
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Sun, April 23 at 5:30, Thurs, April 27 at 6:30, and Tues, May 2 at 9:00.
Arthur Barron
16 IN WEBSTER GROVES
1966, 52 min, 16mm
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Arthur Barron
WEBSTER GROVES REVISITED
1966, 52 min, 16mm
“Alone, [16 IN WEBSTER GROVES] is an interesting portrayal of a prototypical upper middle class, largely white American suburb of a certain time period. But in tandem with WEBSTER GROVES REVISITED, Barron’s project takes on a self-reflexiveness that is also an examination of the documentary process, particularly that sort practiced by network news film crews of the era. In the latter film, Barron examines the effect that observation has had on both the observed and the observer. The films shun the traditional ‘objective’ model of journalism, as well as the strict observational direct cinema practices being pioneered by the Drew Associates production company around the same time. Seen as one unit, the films have more in common with the French cinema vérité approach, in which the filmmaker is an actor (though not necessarily on-camera) whose presence and influence is made clear to the viewer. In WEBSTER GROVES REVISITED, narrator/reporter Charles Kuralt pulls back the production curtain to show viewers still photos of the cameraman in action, a technique intended to draw attention to the filmmakers’ manipulation of reality. Barron uses the setting of Webster Groves High School to implicitly criticize attitudes about class stratification, the perils of capitalism, political apathy, and racial segregation.” –Raphaela Neihausen, STRANGER THAN FICTION
Sun, April 23 at 8:00, Thurs, April 27 at 9:00, and Wed, May 3 at 6:30.
Michael Apted
49 UP
2006, 141 min, 35mm-to-digital
“The British TV documentary SEVEN UP! introduced the world to a group of ordinary British schoolchildren in 1964, and every seven years since, director Michael Apted has rounded up those same people to quiz them about their lives and loves, achievements and disappointments. This seventh installment is utterly fascinating, drawing heavily on footage from the previous movies to follow each child on the journey into middle age. Yet the subjects speak frankly about the pressure of growing up in public, the narrowness of Apted’s questions, and the emotional trauma they’ve come to expect from having their lives measured every seven years. SEVEN UP! may have been a film that examined individuals, but 49 UP is a film about individuals being examined.” –J.R. Jones, CHICAGO READER
Mon, April 24 at 7:30, Mon, May 1 at 7:00, and Sat, May 20 at 5:00.
Darcy Lange
WORK STUDIES IN SCHOOLS: STUDIES OF TEACHING IN FOUR OXFORDSHIRE SCHOOLS
1977, 82-min selection (from ca. 10-hour original), digital
“Trained as a sculptor at Royal College of Art, Darcy Lange (1946-2005, New Zealand) subsequently began working with video, creating remarkable studies of people at work that draw from conceptual art, documentary traditions and structuralist videomaking. Using film, photography and video – often shot simultaneously– he recorded people at work in English factories, mines and schools and in agricultural communities in New Zealand and Spain. Presented without commentary, his long, often unedited observations of workers aimed to convey the image of work ‘as work, as an occupation, as an activity, as creativity and as a time consumer’ and stressed the ‘responsibility to keep questioning the nature and power of realism’. […] An increasing interest in exploring the critical potential of video for its capability to provide live and taped feedback and the relationship between the camera, subject and spectator marked a shift in Lange’s work. In his series WORK STUDIES IN SCHOOLS 1976–77, the studies of teachers in action were extended by the videotaping of the teachers’ and pupils’ reactions to these recordings, inviting them to speak for themselves. Seen by the artist as a means of personal assessment and ‘an educational process’ – as well as a means of exposing the process of its making – WORK STUDIES IN SCHOOLS also became studies of videotaping as a work activity in itself.” –TATE
These screenings will be introduced by curator, writer and lecturer, Mercedes Vicente, who is an Associate Lecturer of Critical and Contextual Studies at the London Metropolitan University, and previously at the University of Arts London and the Royal College of Art. Vicente has curated numerous exhibitions and screenings on Darcy Lange at institutions such as Tate Modern, Ikon Gallery, Cabinet, Camera Austria, and CCA NTU Singapore. She is the editor of “Darcy Lange: Study of an Artist at Work” (2008) and the author of a forthcoming monograph on the artist (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023).
Tues, April 25 at 6:30 and Fri, April 28 at 6:45.
Kathy Acker & Alan Sondheim
UNTITLED
1974, 55 min, video
“This black-and-white video [often referred to as BLUE TAPE, though that title was applied only later] depicts a sexually explicit, emotionally charged, and psychologically fraught encounter between a twenty-six-year-old Acker and a thirty-one-year-old Sondheim that took place over the course of a 48-hour period in Sondheim’s NYC loft. [It] opens with a close-up shot of Acker as she recounts her initial meeting with Sondheim several weeks prior and the subsequent unfolding of events leading to the making of the work, including her practice of ‘memory experiments,’ intended to ‘break through memory to desire.’ With the camera framed tightly on Acker, Sondheim reads aloud a text she sent to him in advance of their second meeting in which she ascribes to him the role of her father, whom she never met. The text, and Sondheim’s out-of-view recitation, set the stage for the exchange (of ideas, of roles, of pleasure and its lack, of fluids) we bear witness to over the next 55 minutes.” –JOAN
Kathy Acker & Alan Sondheim
UNTITLED (TAPE 2)
1974, 33 min, video
The day after recording the video piece that has come to be known as BLUE TAPE (but which was never intended to have a title), Sondheim and Acker made a second, related tape. Commenting on and structured after the first, it similarly documents a charged intellectual and sexual encounter but with Sondheim and Acker’s roles reversed. This tape had never been screened in the U.S. until we showed it at Anthology as part of our Wilhelm Reich-themed film series this past March!
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Sat, May 6 at 3:15 and Thurs, May 18 at 7:30.
Helena Třeštíková
RENÉ
2008, 83 min, DCP. In Czech with English subtitles.
“Why has my shitty life turned out like this? No one knows. Not even God. God’s on holiday and he’s reading porn” – an excerpt from Diary of the Forgotten, the journal kept by the protagonist in another of Helena Třeštíková’s long-term documentaries. With raw authenticity, the director records the luckless fate of René over a period of twenty years as he alternates between prison and freedom. The life of René, who styles himself in the role of a desperado, unfolds against a backdrop of important political events occurring in the Czech Republic and beyond its borders. The Velvet Revolution, the presidential election, 9/11, and the Czech Republic’s accession to the EU – all this is “digested” by René, mostly from the confines of various prisons.
Sun, May 7 at 6:00, Tues, May 9 at 6:45, and Thurs, May 11 at 9:00. Filmmaker Helena Třeštíková in person on Sun, May 7!
Helena Třeštíková
RENÉ – THE PRISONER OF FREEDOM / RENÉ – VĚZEŇ SVOBODY
2021, 102 min, DCP. In Czech with English subtitles.
“The Czech criminal René is finding it difficult to go straight. Roaming from job to shelter, from woman to woman, he discovers that living honestly is a lot more difficult than just stealing something every once in a while. In 1989, filmmaker Helena Třeštíková started filming the then-18-year-old delinquent, ultimately resulting in the 2008 film RENÉ, which follows his life inside and outside prison. This sequel begins with the premiere of RENÉ and the ensuing storm of media attention. In the years that followed, Třeštíková continued to film René’s daily life and his existential reflections, with intervening pauses of several months. So far, his newly acquired national status as ‘lovable criminal’ has brought him few benefits, except for the attention of female fans. Will he manage to keep out of jail this time? His personal motto tattooed on his neck: ‘Fuck Of People’ [sic] seems to be fading as he grows older and more friendly. René gradually starts finding his way in a more socially approved way of life – and even in love.” –IDFA
Sun, May 7 at 8:30 and Wed, May 10 at 7:00. Filmmaker Helena Třeštíková in person on Sun, May 7!
JEAN ROUCH: DIALOGUE AND DISSENT
For full details and descriptions, click here.
Jean Rouch
HIPPOPOTAMUS HUNT / BATAILLE SUR LE GRAND FLEUVE
1951, 35 min, 16mm. In French with English subtitles.
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Jean Rouch
JAGUAR
1957-67, 92 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Sat, April 29 at 5:00 and Sun, May 21 at 8:00.
Jean Rouch
MOI, UN NOIR
1958, 70 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
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Oumarou Ganda
CABASCABO
1969, 45 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Djerma and French with English subtitles.
Sat, April 29 at 8:30 and Sun, May 21 at 5:00.
Jean Rouch
THE HUMAN PYRAMID / LA PYRAMIDE HUMAINE
1961, 93 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Sun, April 30 at 5:30 and Fri, May 19 at 9:00.
Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin
CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER / CHRONIQUE D’UN ÉTÉ
1961, 90 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
Sun, April 30 at 8:00, Fri, May 19 at 6:45, and Sat, May 20 at 8:00.
