[Frameworks] documentary conscience

[David Baker]

In An Anagram of Ideas, On Art, Form And Film <https://monoskop.org/images/3/31/Deren_Maya_An_Anagram_of_Ideas_on_Art_Form_and_Film.pdf>, Maya Deren contrasts
"wholes which are the sum total of parts” 
with "an 'emergent whole’… in which the parts are so dynamically related as to produce 
something new which is unpredictable from a knowledge of the parts”.
She states, 
"The effort of the artist is towards the creation of a logic in which two and two may make five, or, preferably fifteen;
when this is achieved, two can no longer be understood as simply two”.

The Ito’s Divine Horsemen adds up.
I love the film.
I see it as an ethnographic frame or portal
as well as an intimation of an imperiled unknown quantity,
a visionary realm whose measure has yet to be taken,
held captive in old coffee cans.

In the author’s preface to Divine Horsemen, 
Maya writes,
"I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality
into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity;
I end by recording, as humbly and accurately as I can
the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity,
and to abandon my manipulations.”

I write only to alert this community to the existence
of something extraordinary in the realm of cinema
a capacitor with polyvalent vectors and super-natural authority.
The Unedited Haitian Footage must be considered as a discrete work of art.
I expect it will reveal itself on its own terms and in its own time.

(Pip thank you for the information regarding Tavia. I was unaware of her involvement.)


> On Aug 28, 2020, at 8:13 AM, Bernard Roddy <roddybp0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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