[Frameworks] documentary conscience

[Bernard Roddy]

When Chrissie Iles posted, it struck me as a diminution of the cause one
might want to identify with, say a concern for Black film artists. But what
David at Lake Ivan posted restores the question of interest, as I would
like to see it. That question has to do with a conscience often belonging
to documentary makers, and particularly white makers of an experimental
bent. The narrative about a screening of a Deren film in Brooklyn reminds
me of the significance of Edward Curtis photographs of Native Americans for
me. I arrived in Oklahoma to teach film with a critical reading of Curtis'
work, and it was there that I met an historian who devoted his career to
Native American art (modern art, in particular). He said in passing once
that he liked Curtis' photographs, and suddenly the colonial critique I
would have found very natural no longer sailed of its own momentum. I love
these questions, and actually found them addressed in Heidegger's Being and
Time. It is European, and, it seems to me, it's not particularly resolved
by casting our gaze at black bodies or advancing the careers of others.
Here too I would raise the distinction between scholar and artist. What is
an artist under these circumstances but someone prepared for a kind of
initiation, in search of such enlightening?


Bernie
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