Charles Musser

Errol Morris and Chris Choy @ Yale

Posted by chamus on April 19, 2013

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Charles Musser, Chris Choy, documentary, Errol Morris, The Thin Blue Line, Who Killed Vincent Chin?. Leave a Comment

Have Errol Morris and Chris Choy ever met? Their personal and cinematic styles are so extraordinarily different, it is almost hard to imagine; and yet they both made ground-breaking, innovative courtroom documentaries ca. 1988, which profoundly contributed to the revitalization of documentary practice in the United States: Chris’s Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987, with Renee Tajima-Peña) and Errol’s The Thin Blue Line (1988). Both films are audacious, inspirational and ultimately complementary. On an obvious level, everyone agrees that Ronald Ebens killed Vincent Chin: there were numerous eyewitnesses and Ebens himself confessed. For that crime, he received nothing more than probation. If the immediate answer to the film’s title is obvious, a search for deeper answers is far more troubling. In contrast, Randall Adams was convicted of murdering a police officer and faced death until The Thin Blue Line effectively proved that Adams was innocent and identified the actual killer. Yin and Yang. I wrote about both these films in an essay: “Film Truth, Documentary and the Law: Justice at the Margins,” University of San Francisco Law Review 30:4 (Summer 1996), 963-984. (At present it seems to be available on line here.)

I can’t take any credit for this, but a mere eight days separated their recent visits to Yale. Chris showed her documentary Sa-I-Gu (1993) about the experience of Korean women (mostly small business owners) during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Rebellion that was sparked by the Rodney King trial–-and excerpts of forthcoming effort that re-examines that upheaval some 20 years later. Sa-I-Gu shares a recurrent theme with her other documentaries: Asian Americans have to stop acting like a model minority and stand up for their rights! For his presentation at the Art School, Errol returned to The Thin Blue Line and the noir films of the 1940s and early 1950s that inspired him.

One thing for sure. Until very recently I avoided those posed portraits of eager scholar and famous filmmaker. They have always seemed slightly tacky. I’ve known both Errol and Chris for more than 20 years but never requested a photo op from either one. Obviously, that has just changed. The public diary, narcissistic ruminations and inevitable self-promotion of this website is certainly one explanation. But it also has something to do with the rapid passage of time and being ready to document at least one instance in our associations. So somewhat shamelessly here they are–along with the posters for Chris and Errol’s visits:

photo by Victoria Chu

****

As readers of my website know, I have been working on a documentary: Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2013). It’s been shown as a work in progress at several universities and even a few odd classes largely devoted to documentary. It all came about because my own failed efforts to get Errol down to Yale. Fate had something else in mind: a backdoor documentary. Carina Tautu and I went up to his Cambridge offices to record a conversation with Errol and bring it back down to show at a festival of his films, which I programmed. The rest, as they say, is history–or friendly persistence on my side and a certain graciousness on Errol’s. Since our visit, he has made two appearance on the Yale campus– under someone else’s auspices. Once again this has all been to the good. I haven’t had to worry about hosting and both times showed up at his events with video camera in hand. My goal has simply been to have some kind of lasting record of his speculations on cinema and the nature of our universe. In fact, Errol asked his hosts at the Art School if someone could record his conversation as he was walking into the “pool.” So I quickly solved that problem. I could easily begin to see this as one of my responsibilities.

Among the various high points of his talk, Errol shared his “Fuck You Theory of Art” with the MFA art students, where he had a ready audience. In a way, many of the filmmakers that have fascinated me practice this in some shape or form. Chaplin–for sure. Oscar Micheaux–certainly. No filmmaker has ever made a film that said “Fuck You” to his star more than Micheaux did to Paul Robeson in Body and Soul (1925). And in a different way, much could be said about Ernst Lubitsch and Lady Windermere’s Fan, released in the same month. On this particular occasion, Morris focused on Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the Evangelist Matthew. EM sees himself as being in this tradition: certainly it is crucial for understanding many of his individual films as well as his body of work as a whole. One should emphasize perhaps that the other side of this “Fuck You” approach is incredible rigor and discipline.

Well if Errol will let me, I will post that section of his talk sometime in the future.

Every other year I teach a required graduate course: Film 603, Historical Methods in Film Study, which focuses on the history of American cinema to 1920–roughly from the beginnings of commercial projection to the establishment of the vertically integrated studio system that constitutes what is generally called the Classical Hollywood Cinema: from the Vitascope to Cecil B. DeMille and Oscar Micheaux. I regularly devote one week to the films of Lois Weber (Suspense, 1913; Shoes, 1916) and Alice Guy Blaché (A House Divided, 1913, Matrimonial Speed Limit, 1913)–as well as to the writings of Shelley Stamp (Movie Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon, and a couple of her essays on Weber). This year we were able to get Shelley to come in person:

Shelley Stamp in my Yale classroom

Viktoria Paranyuk, Kirsty Dootson, Mal Ahern, Jorge Cuéllar

Jorge, Andrey Tolstoy, Nick Forster

Andrey, Nick, Luca Peretti, Andrew Vielkind. Outside the frame: Sean Strader

Shelley and I have a special relationship that has become clearer over time. It started at NYU in the Department of Cinema Studies, where we both got our Ph.D’s. I had essentially completed my degree by the time she arrived and stayed on to teach as an adjunct–not early cinema but documentary. So we have never been in the same class room –until her visit documented in the above images. If I was working on American early cinema up until about 1909 (when Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company––the dual subjects of my dissertation––parted ways), her scholarship focused on the immediate post-1909 period. Seemingly we were ships passing in the night. Then, as Shelley began to research and write on Lois Weber, our connection became clearer. Lois Weber and her husband Phillips Smalley worked with Porter after he left Edison––at the Rex. As I studied Porter’s career, I came to realize that he almost always worked with a collaborator––whether George S. Fleming, G. M. Anderson, Wallace McCutcheon, J. Searle Dawley or eventually Hugh Ford. (He actively resisted the more hierarchical organizational structures of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.) At Rex, Porter found collaborators in Smalley and/or Weber. And when he left Rex in 1912, they stayed on and retained this collaborative manner of working.

As I began to write more about the American cinema of the 1910s, our ships soon came within easy hailing distance on a calm sunny day. I eventually wrote about another husband-wife team of filmmakers: Herbert and Alice Guy Blaché. The success and eventual breakdown of the Smalleys and the Blachés as filmmaking teams coincided very closely. These couples were at their professional best between roughly 1912 and 1916, after which their relationships rapidly deteriorated. Both marriages ended in divorce around 1922. However, Shelley’s and my historical approaches share something more than subject matter–it involves a theoretical or methodological orientation which is instinctive dialectical.

Let me reveal a small secret. Typically I show students Traffic in Souls (Tucker, 1913) and have them read Lee Grieveson’s Policing Cinema, which views the 1910s as a period of increasing social and cultural regimentation–a narrowing of what is possible. Lee finds the kinds of debates and state interventions around Traffic in Souls and other white slave films to be exemplary of this policing of cinema. His approach is explicitly indebted to Michel Foucault. Now Lee is an outstanding researcher and I admire the force of his arguments. Yet I find myself aligned with Shelley’s position when she remarks

Negotiating a place for female viewers within cinema’s imaginary topography was made all the more troubling by the vice pictures: their sexually frank subject matter was assumed to repulse women, yet observers could not ignore women’s evident attraction to the material. The way that cinema enable a fictive remapping of a viewer’s relation to social space––although potentially liberating for women––was for the same reason threatening to any commentators. Now an industry actively courting female patronage also had to consider the implications of female spectatorship. Indeed, the white slave film controversy shows an industry grappling with the distinction between the characterization of cinema’s social audience and the various spectatorial positions that it offered (Movie Struck Girls, p 94).

This is the kind of film history (or media history) to which both me and my students should aspire. At a moment when the Woman’s Suffrage Movement was transforming the social and political landscape, cinema gave women virtual access (however diluted and sensationalized) to a formally inaccessible realm.

After our class meeting, Shelley screened a few hard-to-see Weber films and gave a public presentation:

Later we traded stories about something else we have in common: the ways that administration and family have retarded the completion of various book projects.

On the Road: Charlie, the traveling filmmaker

Posted by chamus on March 1, 2013

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Anne Petrone, Errol Morris, Harvard, Karen Schmeer, Rebecca Wexler, Robb Moss, The Same River Twice. Leave a Comment

I often post about the films and filmmakers I go to see as an audience member. But sometimes I get to be the filmmaker and show my film. It is only fair. Of course, in the role of traveling showmen, we no longer traipse about with a reel or two of film. One can no longer identify fellow filmmakers at the airport by the instantly recognizable 16mm film carrying case they surely haul onto the plane. Now we just slip a DVD into our briefcases (or in my case, Danish school bag).

I am just back from Harvard where I showed Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch on February 25th in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. It was for Robb Moss’ class, Documentary Workshop.

Robb Moss and his class, Documentary Workshop

His students had seen two Errol Morris documentaries in preparation for my visit. My homework assignment was to fill an increasingly embarrassing hole in my viewing knowledge: Moss’s Same River Twice (2003).
It returns to a group of friends he filmed river rafting in the 1970s, which resulted in Riverdogs (1982). That material is the jumping off for his documentary as he catches up with these friends some 30 years later–as they reflect upon (and often struggle with) relationships, work, age and health. The film and the issues that it explores certainly engage me but the more distant past of leisurely encounters with nature were remote. I remember one summer in the 1970s, when I finally got outside the city for a day or so, my eyes ached from all the green. By the late 1970s I was spending my days in the editing room–or increasingly reading microfilm. My river experiences, if you will, came earlier. They were in the Outer Banks of North Carolina which I visited often, and where I worked as a commercial crabber and fisherman from the end of high school into college. (And where I did my first filming.) But my stint on Hearts and Minds (1972-1974) put an end to that kind of exploration forever–replacing it with a new type of encounter. Perhaps I should finally return to Edenton.

(I suspect these encounters with nature are much rarer today.)

I found The Same River Twice poignant for another reason. Several names in the credits were people I had come to know (directly and indirectly) through the making of A Lightning Sketch. This included Ann Petrone, who appears in my film and is Errol’s producer/office manager. But it was Karen Schmeer–the editor on Same River Twice––that struck home most poignantly. Karen Schmeer was killed in a horrendous hit and run auto accident in January 2010 and her death was still reverberating through Errol Morris’s office when we filmed. She was the editor on several of his films, notably The Fog of War (2003), which she was cutting while she was also cutting Same River Twice. (Amazing!) Her name and her contributions to Morris’s career came up several times and in the end, we dedicated A Lightning Sketch to her.

Kareen Schmeer

I didn’t know Karen, but I vividly remember reading about her death and the shock and sense of loss it cause. As someone who still sees himself as a New York-based film editor–an identity I established for myself as an adult in my 20s and into my early 30s, I thought to all those times when the film itself continues to consume an editor’s thoughts. One is in the film world much more than the real world. There is a sense, too, that we New Yorkers act like we own the streets–which we do except when some crazed driver comes out of no where and creates death and mayhem. Surprisingly, in the wake of my making the Morris bio, I have been meeting many of Karen Schmeer’s friends and colleagues and have been piecing together her life. These included Robin Hessman (made of My Perestroika) and film critic and historian Gerald Peary, who made the documentary For Love of the Movies (2009).

A few more photos from my class visit.

Teaching Assistant Lucy Lindsey and Robb Moss

Robb’s class reminded me a lot of my own. Roughly the same size. Grads and undergrads, all sitting around a seminar table. It is just that their table is made of mahogany while ours is definitely more downscale. The fact of this symmetry only became apparent through the good offices of a young filmmaker and mutual friend whom Robb and I both mentored: Rebecca Wexler. It is due to her good offices that we have a slowly evolving association that will hopefully take us in interesting directions. Thank you Rebecca.

***

This might be the place to add a few photos and remarks about a couple of other visits I made in the fall, when I was still recovering from having my camera stolen.

Two Kinds of Cinema/Two Sets of Collaborators

Posted by chamus on February 16, 2013

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Expanded Cinema, Flo Jacobs, Hans Hofmann, Jehane Noujaim, Ken Jacobs, Mona Eldaief, Nervous Magic Lantern, Rafea: Solar Mama, Stranger Than Fiction, The Green Wave, Thom Powers, Times Squared, Yale University. Leave a Comment

It’s been an interesting week. I’ll spare you the details except for my experience of two radically different screenings involving two sets of very different filmmakers. Due to the snow storm, Yale cancelled classes on Monday and Tuesday and provided me with the opportunity to run into the city and see Jehane Noujaim and Mona Eldaief’s new film Rafea: Solar Moma (2012) at Stranger than Fiction/IFC.
Of course, they were there for a Q & A afterwards:

Thom Powers, Mona Eldaief & Jehane Noujaim

In fact, their editor Jean Tsein joined them on stage, while various producers and crew were in the audience. It was an all-women support team.

The website for Rafea gives a bare bones description:

Rafea is a Bedouin woman who lives with her daughters in one of Jordan’s poorest desert villages on the Iraqi border.

She is given a chance to travel to India to attend the Barefoot College, where illiterate grandmothers from around the world are trained in 6 months to be solar engineers. If Rafea succeeds, she will be able to electrify her village, train more engineers, and provide for her daughters.

Rafea has the ability, confidence and determination to pull it off, but her husband continually tries to sabotage her efforts. One feels it from the film itself, and it was openly acknowledged by Noujaim and Eldaief: the filmmakers’ presence and even their active intervention on Rafea’s behalf enabled her to persevere and thus provide the film with its tentatively upbeat outcome. This is Third World Feminism in action. The solidarity involves those in front of the camera with those behind it. Noujaim and Eldaief help Rafea deflect her husband’s jealousy at her growing independence and sense of purpose. His threats of divorce––which would mean taking her children (all daughters) away from her–are less and less credible. Nevertheless, one has a sense that the film’s modestly uplifting conclusion may be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to sustain.

There are ways in which Rafea: Solar Mama has the quality of a reality TV program in which impoverished, illiterate women from all over the world are selected and brought together at a distant locale, then given a chance to escape poverty against long odds. And nowhere do these odds seem longer than among a poor Bedouin village in Jordan. Yet the filmmakers’ activism as well as their persistence and filmmaking talents are essential parts of this story. One should note that these co-directors are Egyptian-born women who undoubtedly faced related challenges and exemplify the possibilities of sucess. Carol Chazin, who was in the audience, remarked after the screening that it reminded her of Barbara Kopple and Harlan County--that is an important moment of feminist breakthrough in the documentary field that happened some 40 years ago.

At the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum is Ken Jacobs and his Nervous Magic Lantern performance which he and his wife Flo Jacobs presented at Yale as part of a graduate student conference entitled Expanded Cinema.

Flo and Ken Jacobs with the apparatus for their Nervous Magic Lantern Performance

His short before the Nervous Magic Lantern was The Green Mile (2011), a five-minute tour de force that played with vision and made clear the ways in which digital media has liberated certain kinds of so-called experimental filmmaking. What was once done painstakingly on an optical projector with all the challenges of multi-generational printing have been solved. The picture is pristine and aggressive in the way it challenges us to think about optical illusions and perception more generally.

The Green Wave (2011)

In some respects, The Green Wave is part of a genre of experimental film that goes back, at least, to Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965) with its aggressive assault on the spectator. Conrad’s film begins with this title card:

WARNING. The producer, distributor, and exhibitors waive all liability for physical or mental injury possibly caused by the motion picture “The Flicker.” Since this film may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment in certain persons, you are cautioned to remain in the theatre only at your own risk. A physician should be in attendance.

With The Green Wave, I found myself engaged in an optical challenge that was caught between intellectual fascination and physical pain. This was only intensified with the Nervous Magic Lantern, which Ken and Flo used to present the piece Times Squared. The sound track was an audio recording that Ken made as he moved through the subway system, starting at Times Square. The piece starts with a simple play of light on the screen that suggests the strobe effect one often encounters on the subway. The exhibition then turns to the projection of “smudges” (Ken’s words) that have a powerful 3-D effect as well as a sense of motion and depth.

Image from The Nervous Magic Lantern

Again I found myself torn between a fascination with what I was seeing–the illusion of motion, the false sense of 3-D––and the visceral sense of being under assault.

The Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium was full–standing room only, and the Film Studies faculty were there in force. I was sitting next to Brigitte Peucker who suggested that the piece might better be called “Torture the Spectator” and made an exit. She was not alone. I sympathized but decided to stay. Others, like me, found ourselves simply closing our eyes at moments. One way or the other the visual experience was being etched into our retina and nervous system to the point that I continued to feel its after effects all weekend. Ken characterized the sensation produced by his Nervous Magic Lantern as ecstasy, which is perhaps one reason why not a few people called him the Madman of the Cinema (always in a tone that conveys respect, wonder and appreciation, I should add).

When asked, Ken saw the Nervous Magic Lantern generating a powerful tension between the audio and the visual. “The sound is gravity,” he asserted the the Q & A. “The image is crazy, liberating.” This allowed for individual, nonstandardized responses. Certainly the sound track is readily accessible and and offers an apparently simple audio record of movement through the subway. As a long-time New Yorker, I have had a wide-range of reactions to, sensations of and experiences in the subway. Some are very much along the lines of D.A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (1958). There are times when the subway is a delight, when I am never happier to be a New Yorker as I am wisked through the city via this transportation system used by all the city’s denizens, from Wall Street brokers to the homeless. I feel that the subway, populated by peoples whose roots are from all over the world, is almost my second home. But there are other moments, often late at night when I have descended into the subway and felt I was descending into a hellish world of too bright florescent light. The light pierces my eyes and the people seem remote, foreboding–– as if one has taken a bad trip. That is the feeling I had watching Times Squared. It made me wonder what my reaction would be to Jacob’s Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise (2005), a somewhat similar performance using “This is accompanied by industrial sound and music provided by John Zorn and Ikue Mori.”

Afterwards Ken participated in a Q & A:

After the screening: Ken Jacobs at Yale

Ken repeatedly emphasized his debt and inspiration to abstract expressionist Hans Hoffmann (1880-1966). “His works gave me horrible standards to live up to.” He’d encounter Hoffman in the village: “I considered myself unworthy of speaking to him.” And yet he did–though never mentioning his interest in film except on one occasion when he “stupidly” told Hoffmann that he was working with film and that “I think film is the art form of the century.”

A critic on WetCanvas suggested some ways in which Hans Hofman’s paintings directly inspired Jacobs:

Hofmann believed fervently that a modern artist must remain faithful to the flatness of the canvas support. To suggest depth and movement in the picture – to create what he called “push and pull” in the image – artists should create contrasts of color, form, and texture.

Nature was the origin of art, Hofmann believed, and no matter how abstract his pictures seemed to become, he always sought to maintain in them a link to the world of objects. Even when his canvases seemed to be only collections of forms and colors, Hofmann argued that they still contained the suggestion of movement – and movement was the pulse of nature.

These became Jacobs’ preoccupations as well.

Asked “What cinema is?” Ken immediately replied that “Cinema is thought.” At the same time he finds in cinema both an erotic fascination and an intellectual fascination. If one substitutes the term “somatic” or perhaps “optical” for “erotic”–it might be easier to accept but it also feels as if Jacobs’ passion for what he shows us has a strong erotic or visceral component for him.

Ken Jacobs Gets a Question.

Ken Jacobs also distributed “Notes for a Nervous Magic Lantern Performance.” I asked him if I could add them to this blog and he agreed. So here they are:

Caught in New Haven: The Blizzard of Feburary 8/9, 2013

Posted by chamus on February 10, 2013

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Charles Musser, New Haven. Leave a Comment

It needs to be commemorated. 34″ of snow in 24 hours.

Ron Gregg escaped to New York, but we were caught in New Haven. On the morning of February 9th, single lanes were open only on major thoroughfares. Entrances to the local news station and the Whitney Humanities Center (where I work) were sealed by snow drifts. After digging out the front steps, I took a tour then returned to home base and grabbed a camera. By the time I got back to my office, they were digging out.

Lyon Street after the storm.

Elm Street, just off the Green.

Digging out the Whitney Humanities Center

A photo of John Carlos by neighbor Chris Randall

And these are taking by housemate Caicai Zhang:

Threese and John Carlos at the New Haven Green.

It is always interesting to see the stores that somehow manage to open up quickly (or as in the case of Gormet Heaven, never close). For many people, of course, no work means no pay. Dunkin’ Donuts was open, but John Carlos complained that they had no donuts (there were no deliveries, of course)–so they gave him a cookie.

At Dunkin’ Donuts

I’ve been working on two catalog essays for art exhibitions. They’re further distractions from ever finishing a book, but I am not complaining. Done right, they’re intellectual challenges. Early in 2012, I was approached by Casey Blake on behalf of the New-York Historical Society and was asked to write a contextualizing catalog essay for an upcoming exhibition on the 1913 Armory Show curated by Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt. One suspects the kind of piece they had in mind: cinema as a modern art that embodied the fragmentation of time and space.

Lois Weber’s film Suspense (1913)

Therefore: Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912).

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1911)

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)

Instead, I began to wonder about the impact of emerging feminism on the Fine Arts and how it might compare to what was happening so dramatically in the motion picture industry, where women were moving into directing and starting their own companies. It turns out that a lot was happening in the New York art world when it came to feminism but no one has paid much attention to it. The Armory Show was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which had an all-male membership. The Woman’s Art Club and other organizations were not amused. Predictably the situation was complex and fluid and many feminists had work in the Armory Show, including Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, who showed her sculpture The White Slave (1913), made especially for the International Exhibition of Modern Art.

Eberle’s The White Slave (1913)

My essay “1913: A Feminist Moment in the Arts,” offers a new perspective on the Armory Show. So look for Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt, eds., The Armory Show at 100: When New York Exploded into the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2013). The New-York Historical Society exhibition is opening in October 2013.

I’ve also been working with Robin Jaffe Frank, who recently left the Yale Art Gallery to become Chief Curator and Krieble Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum, taking her show Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland with her. Robin has been employing Josh Glick, a recurrent figure on this blog. In fact, Josh is writing a couple of essay for the catalog and we are planning to co-author another.

Josh Glick and Robin Frank

My own essay “Cameras at Coney, 1940-1962″ starts from –but in fact concludes with–three films that feature Coney Island: Weegee’s New York (1948), Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953) and Valentine Sherry’s Coney Island, USA (1952). Weegee and Engel were prominent photographers whose still work often featured Coney Island in the 1940s. Coney Island, USA was shot by still photographer Carrol Siskind (Aaron Siskind’s brother). A version of the following photograph by Morris Engel appeared in the recently launched daily newspaper PM on July 21, 1940.

Morris Engel’s Coney Island Embrace

The very day of its publication, Weegee went to Coney Island and took a large number of photographs, one of which appeared in the July 22, 1940 issue of PM.

Coney Island, July 21, 1940. Weegee’s photograph appeared in PM in following day.

I’ve been doing research at the ICP (International Center of Photography), which has Weegee’s papers. It’s a great place to work!

The ICP archive and reading room.

As always, that has to do with the people who run it: Claartje van Dijk and Chris George. Chris George also runs the wonderful Weegee blog. Why are archivists always among my very favorite people?

Chris George and Claartje van Dijk

This posting seems likely to have further updates.

Research Associate Claartje van Dijk

Memory on the Brain

Posted by chamus on January 18, 2013

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Alan Berliner, Alzheimer's disease, documentary, First Cousin Once Removed, Gerry Williams, Stranger Than Fiction, Thom Powers. Leave a Comment

Alan Berliner & Thom Powers @ STF

January 15th, 2013: Stranger Than Fiction at the IFC. Alan Berliner discusses his fabulous new film First Cousin Once Removed (2012). The cousin is Edwin Honig, a poet and translator who taught creative writing at Brown–an extraordinary, complicated man who could not forget one incredibly painful incident of his childhood (the death of his younger brother) –even as he is overwhelmed by dementia at the end of his life. It might, in fact, be the last memory he has until his memory is all gone. First Cousin is a film about memory and loss of memory, providing evidence that one can forget to the point that one never knew. A dense and complex film that I should watch more than once before writing too much. Alan offered a series of insightful comments and I only can hope that someone recorded them. At some point I just took out a pencil and scribbled down a few of his remarks. As he put it, “I have memory on the brain.” “Whatever the subject of my films, they contain layers and layers of subtext that are always about memory.” Despite Cousin Edwin’s frailties, Alan remarked that ” Everytime I met Edwin, it was a duet. He was in many ways the co-author of the film.”

First Cousin celebrates a man’s life and achievements by insisting on his complexities and flaws. Afterwards, Alan remarked that “poets are special citizens in our culture. They are beacons of truth as translator of experience, by making the invisible, visible.” It is a touching assertion that few Americans would stand by, but one that has a powerful credibility in the wake of First Cousin and its amazing excerpts of Honig’s poetry.

As Alan remarked, “Memory is not what happened but what you remember happened.” And, he confessed that when working on this film and other things, he has to write things down or he forgets. Me, too. And I realize that this blog is a record of things I would like not to forget–like this evening. In fact, those who occasionally encounter this blog may notice that it stopped for quite a few months. This happened because someone broke into our house and stole everyone’s still camera (that and jewelry, nothing else). With the loss of our camera–its own aid to memory, I stopped. And then when we bought a new one, I was out of practice and would forget to bring it with me. Although I brought it to Alan’s screening, I almost left it at home.

Dan Steible

Anyway, here are a few more records of the evening. The theater was full but not with so many people that I knew. I still miss seeing George Stoney at these events. In fact, I thought a lot about George on this occasion. Someone at NYU finally told me what I had wanted to know. Faced with his failing eyesight and other physical ailments, George finally decided he had had enough and simply stopped eating. Two weeks later he was dead.

Carole Chazin and Alan Berliner

I also brought two students down from Yale. In a way, they stand in for the two sides of my teaching.

Josh Glick, Alan Berliner, Eunju Namkung

Eunju is making a documentary as her senior project on the people who live and work in the Yale library. So Alan’s documentary resonated. Should we be too surprised that he urged her to see Alain Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde (1956). Agreed. It was one of several documentaries she has seen on libraries in preparation for making her film. Josh is immersed in writing his dissertation “Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977,” a project in which he was often interviewing important figures in the last years (or months) of their lives. Of course, public history is also very much about public memory.

Alan’s film resonated with me in a very personal way in that I made a documentary about an inspirational figure and surrogate father in my life, the studio potter Gerry Williams. I made An American Potter more than 35 years ago but we have, of course, remained close. Gerry has also been struggling with Alzheimer’s disease and was moved to a nursing facility since I last saw him. There is a scene in Alan’s documentary when he brings his son to visit Honig. I had already brought John Carlos to visit Gerry as well.

Visting Gerry Williams, December 26th, 2012.

Visiting Gerry Williams, December 26th, 2012.

Charles Musser

cultural historian/filmmaker/professor

Errol Morris and Chris Choy @ Yale

Shelley Stamp Visits My Film Historiography class

On the Road: Charlie, the traveling filmmaker

Two Kinds of Cinema/Two Sets of Collaborators

Caught in New Haven: The Blizzard of Feburary 8/9, 2013

Two Catalog Essays: The Armory Show and Coney Island

Memory on the Brain

CCC

BBB

AAA

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Meta