{"id":1202,"date":"2012-09-24T01:00:52","date_gmt":"2012-09-24T01:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?p=1202"},"modified":"2013-02-12T02:52:46","modified_gmt":"2013-02-12T02:52:46","slug":"my-memorial-day-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?p=1202","title":{"rendered":"My Memorial Day Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Memorials have been on my mind for the last few months\u2013\u2013ever since I missed George Stoney’s funeral and memorial.\u00a0 I had a good excuse\u2013\u2013I was in Sweden teaching an intensive course and a quick return home was out of the question.\u00a0 Still I have felt a recurrent sense of sadness and guilt that I missed both events.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a> It was really because of George that I had a chance to teach some of my first courses.\u00a0 He had been teaching a year-long course on the Documentary Tradition but had become involved in something else, and this gave me my chance to take over (with at least\u00a0his tacit approval).\u00a0 I taught it for a couple of years as an adjunct, and our styles proved to be quite different.\u00a0 His course was filled with eager undergraduate filmmaking students; when I took it over, most of them fled to be replaced by Cinema Studies graduate students.\u00a0 Obviously, I was grateful\u2013-and that gratitude has only deepened with time.
\nWhile the world of a New York documentary is fairly small and reasonably friendly, it has its own quite independent spheres.\u00a0 They overlap and intersect but not as much as one might think.\u00a0 New York is filled with Stoney’s disciples, some of whom have written remarkably on his life. (Judith Helfand, for instance)<\/a>; but my mentors were Jay Leyda, D. A. Pennebaker and Peter Davis. George and I were friendly, but we saw each other infrequently and only in passing.\u00a0 However, we had been running into each other more often in recent years\u2013\u2013particularly at the IFC’s Stranger than Fiction series where he was a regular. Of course, we would always say hello and often talk for a few minutes.\u00a0 He’d update me on the latest film he’d completed or the one he was just starting (his quiet productivity was always dizzying).\u00a0 I admired the way he kept coming to the IFC even after he was in a walker.<\/p>\n

One memorable moment came at the Visible Evidence Conference in August 12011.\u00a0 The reception was in George’s honor; and when handed the microphone, he mentioned that he was getting old enough so that he had become an advocate for choosing one’s time to die.\u00a0 I remember thinking that I hoped he would pursue his advocacy through film rather than through example, but in that respect I was perhaps naive.\u00a0 (People have been quiet about the exact circumstances of his death.) Certainly it didn’t seem as if his last hurrah was imminent: we talked on the phone\u00a0 later in the fall. A few decades ago George had shown a film that he paired with Lorentz’s The River<\/em> (1937)–in which dams were shown to be a ecological problem rather than a solution.\u00a0 I couldn’t remember the title but George supplied it (The Flooding River<\/em>, 1972) and was still in touch with the filmmaker (L.P. Brower).\u00a0 I paired the two films in my spring course on Documentary and the Environment.<\/p>\n

This past weekend was filled with memorials of different kinds.\u00a0 Saturday, Sept 22nd, in particular.
\n\"\"<\/a>A one-day conference, ‘Cinema and the Legacies of Critical Theory’, International Conference in Memory of Miriam Hansen, unfurled at Columbia University’s Deutches Haus on the 22nd.\u00a0 Miriam and I co-chaired the Columbia Seminar on Film and Interdisciplinary Interpretation for about 10 years, and her work on Babel and Babylon<\/em> coincided with my own work on early cinema.\u00a0 We had a warm, productive and at times even intense relationship that inevitably faded when she moved to Chicago and faded even further when she got sick and I assumed parental responsibilities.\u00a0 So I attended the conference and decided to take a few pictures even though I was rather indiscreet with my 35mm Canon camera compared to others with their iphones.\u00a0 In fact, I only took photos on Friday evening (Sept 21) at the opening “reception,” which nonetheless included a stealth panel.
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The conference brought together a range of colleagues and friends from all over the country as well as from abroad.\u00a0 So here are a few images.<\/p>\n

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Victoria de Grazia, Mary Ann Doane & Laura Mulvey<\/p><\/div>\n

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Organizer Andreas Huyssen<\/p><\/div>\n

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Tony Kaes and Martin Jay<\/p><\/div>\n

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Tom Gunning and Iris Cahn<\/p><\/div>\n

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James Schamus & Giuliana Bruno<\/p><\/div>\n

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Pamela Wojcik<\/p><\/div>\n

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Soyoung Yoon & Iris Cahn<\/p><\/div>\n

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Glimpsed out of the corner of my eye<\/p><\/div>\n

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***<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I moved to New York in 1972 when being a reader of the Village Voice<\/em> was crucial to one’s identity as a New York and a free thinker.\u00a0 Jonas Mekas had his weekly film column and, by the time I had settled in, Alexander Cockburn had his “Press Clips”: radical art, radical politics.\u00a0 (New York City was a much grittier place in those days–in danger of going bankrupt.)\u00a0 Today’s Village Voice<\/em> bears almost no resemblance to that exciting mag–and Cockburn’s assault on the media’s handling of Nixon and Vietnam were inspirational pieces that we read and discussed while working on Hearts and Minds<\/em>.\u00a0 Alex C was a larger than life figure, and his long run at the Voice<\/em> largely coincided with my 20s. A lot of people slipped back into a more conservative politics in the late 1970s and 1980s, but Cockburn was part of what prevented that from happening to me.\u00a0 In contrast, I wasn’t much of a reader of The Nation<\/em>, so I did not follow him very regularly there.<\/p>\n

I came to Alex’s memorial to better understand the trajectory of his life and out of respect.\u00a0 I’ve known Leslie Cockburn from college where we traveled in some of the same circles, and Alex’s brother Andrew through Leslie and through film.\u00a0 We share friends, two of whom were there: my college roommate Warren Bierwirth and Lizzie Lennard, who tinted the photographs for Before the Nickelodeon<\/em> and several covers of my books. So again I snapped a few photos to mark the event.<\/p>\n

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Prelude<\/p><\/div>\n

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Warren Bierwirth listens.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Lizzie Lennard<\/p><\/div>\n

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Tariq Ali, author of
The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

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Noam Chomsky author of
Occupied Media<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

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Kevin Alexander Gray
Civil Rights organizer & Counterpunch<\/em> contributor<\/p><\/div>\n

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Lizzie Lennard, director of
The Stein Family: The Making of Modern Art<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

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Najla Said author and star of
Palestine<\/em>, a one-woman show.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Leslie Cockburn<\/p><\/div>\n

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Andrew Cockburn<\/p><\/div>\n

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***<\/p>\n

\u00a0Bill Miles has long been one of the nicest, unassuming filmmakers in the New York documentary community.\u00a0 I’ve been a fan of\u00a0 his documentary series\u00a0 I Remember Harlem<\/em> (1981), one of the great portraits of New York City (or one portion of it).\u00a0 It showed the complexity of Harlem as it changed over time.\u00a0 I’ve seemingly had reasons to re-view it once at least once a decade. I always made a point of seeing his films, and we’d chat each other up at miscellaneous gatherings like the book party for Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video<\/em> back in 2000.\u00a0 Those encounters became less frequent but never stopped.<\/p>\n

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Bill is not well and I only learned of his tribute at the last minute.\u00a0 It coincided with the Cockburn memorial, to which I had already committed. \u00a0 Hard choices, I guess–but one can read about it in the Amsterdam News<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Harder still is the cummulative losses that this weekend of gatherings underscored.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Memorials have been on my mind for the last few months\u2013\u2013ever since I missed George Stoney’s funeral and memorial.\u00a0 I had a good excuse\u2013\u2013I was in Sweden teaching an intensive course and a quick return home was out of the question.\u00a0 Still I have felt a recurrent sense of sadness and guilt that I missed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[30,31,256,32,25,33,35,34,27,28,26,36,37,29],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1416,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions\/1416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}