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
_______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list [email protected] https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
