Marseille
Marseille
June 21, 1991
In the spring of 1946 I was one among millions of young people who had just been released from military service. I had spent years as a combat photographer, filming in Burma and China. I was bewildered. I had no idea what to do. I didn't even know if I could still make films. During all this time, whenever we filmed something, we sent the film to some remote destination and usually
that was the last we ever heard of it. It was a weird feeling.
Robert Flaherty was living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. I had known him briefly when I was at school in England. So I went to see him. That visit changed my life. He not only saw me, he hired me to go with him and Francis, his wife and partner, to Louisiana to start making a new film that was to become his last major film, Louisiana Story.
I had never worked with anyone even remotely like this. He was obsessed with the act of filming. There was nothing that he liked to do more than hold a camera in his hands and shoot film. To look through the lens and explore what was before him. To try one way, then another. Sheer delight followed by the uncertainties of looking at the results. Not always a delight. Often an agony but look he would. Over and over again. I have never known anyone who looked at his rushes as much, and with such minute attention as this extraordinary man. If the results were not what he wanted, we learned from these mistakes and started over again. Sometimes this was a costly procedure. We filmed the drilling of the oil well beautifully in daylight. It was fine. Nothing wrong. But as we neared the end of fourteen months of filming, Mr. Flaherty kept going back to look at this splendid footage and the more he looked, the less he liked it until one day, when we were running out of money and time and patience, he announced to me that we would reshoot the whole sequence but this time, at night! I thought he was crazy but we did it and he was right.
Flaherty worked with a tiny crew, not to save money so much as to allow him to feel free to change his mind about what to film and when. You can't reasonably keep a whole movie production crew standing around while you spend a whole day filming a spider making it's beautiful web under uniquely beautiful light conditions. We were a small band working long days for months at a stretch. Often we were filming by sun up and working till late at night, preparing for the next day.
Occasionally Mr. Flaherty would talk with me about film making. Most often he spoke about the making of Moana where he worked out his approach to the structure of sequences; something that I think has been ignored by film historians and theoreticians. He also spoke of the problems of distribution of films.
He said "if you think making a film is difficult, wait till you try showing it!" He was speaking of distribution in Cinemas. There was no other way of seeing films. You either made it in the commercial cinema system or you were out of luck. There was no alternative. I remember him musing out loud "we should be able to see what we want to, when we want to, where we want to...at a reasonable price". Is this possible? It is certainly possible in the field of literature...books; and it is possible with music on records and now on CD's. It is still next to impossible with Documentary films unless you deliberately aim at a mass audience, which Flaherty and many others were not willing or able to do.
Is it possible to make a Documentary film designed to be shown primarily in Cinemas to a relatively small audience? My feeling is that it is at best very rare. Of Flaherty's work, only Nanook made it and he had a very hard time getting funding for the four subsequent films that he was able to complete; Moana, Man of Aran, The Land and Louisiana Story.
If, and it is a very big IF, you are willing to compromise andaccept video as a way of making, or of seeing films, then some solutions are at least in sight. If you are not willing to make these concessions then you will have to depend on organzations such as this to provide funding and hope for showings on the big screen in art theaters and at festivals that attract the more elegant tourist trade.
Personally I have made my peace with the TV box and have recentlybeen very impressed by developments in video projection. Three years ago I started working in Video©8 full time. Valerie Lalonde and I have recently completed our first Video©8 production, "Les Oeufs a la Coque". I hope to show you a fragment after this talk.
I came to this because I could no longer afford to film, even in 16mm. I wanted to experiment. I always want to experiment. To do what I did with Flaherty and later, with Robert Drew. To try different approaches; to story telling, to observation, to image making. I found it more and more difficult to get funding and to be shown. I have nothing against television: they do what they do and I am not part of that mainstream; I never will be and that is fine by me. My position is that there should be funding available for off beat work and there should be ways to reach a modest audience. I think this program can help maintain a level of creative thinking and working. I think that this is a temporary problem and that when we develop the appropriate distribution organization and the appropriate technologies we will be self sustaining.
There are many pitfalls and booby traps to be avoided. We need to think hard about what can be done. I spent five years as chairman of the media panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, in the USA. We had a wonderful panel including Willard- van Dyke, D.A. Pennebaker, Fred Wiseman, Collin Young and others; we worked hard at giving away money to talented, creative people...but we seldom felt good after we were done. We didn't really know what we had done!
Funding is fine, but there are other things you can do to
achieve the same goals. We created "media centers" in the different regions of the USA, furnished with equipment designed to make it easier and cheaper for any one to make films and videos.
In my personal work, the technology of Video has made it so cheap that we can now afford to experiment and the major problem is now distribution. I am a perpetual optimist. For me there is always a solution to our problems just around the corner. Admittedly, I have usually been wrong. I thought that TV would solve all the problems of the independent film maker. Then I thought that Cable TV would change everything... Now, eternal optimist that I am, I think that the cassette and the video player will solve our problems. But something has to be done to change the current distribution system so that tapes can be just as available as books or records. Then we will have achieved Robert Flaherty's dream. These are the kinds of problems that can properly be addressed by organizations such as this. I am well aware that there are other technologies on the horizon but I am now old enough to be impatient. Let's get on with it!
June 21, 1991
In the spring of 1946 I was one among millions of young people who had just been released from military service. I had spent years as a combat photographer, filming in Burma and China. I was bewildered. I had no idea what to do. I didn't even know if I could still make films. During all this time, whenever we filmed something, we sent the film to some remote destination and usually
that was the last we ever heard of it. It was a weird feeling.
Robert Flaherty was living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. I had known him briefly when I was at school in England. So I went to see him. That visit changed my life. He not only saw me, he hired me to go with him and Francis, his wife and partner, to Louisiana to start making a new film that was to become his last major film, Louisiana Story.
I had never worked with anyone even remotely like this. He was obsessed with the act of filming. There was nothing that he liked to do more than hold a camera in his hands and shoot film. To look through the lens and explore what was before him. To try one way, then another. Sheer delight followed by the uncertainties of looking at the results. Not always a delight. Often an agony but look he would. Over and over again. I have never known anyone who looked at his rushes as much, and with such minute attention as this extraordinary man. If the results were not what he wanted, we learned from these mistakes and started over again. Sometimes this was a costly procedure. We filmed the drilling of the oil well beautifully in daylight. It was fine. Nothing wrong. But as we neared the end of fourteen months of filming, Mr. Flaherty kept going back to look at this splendid footage and the more he looked, the less he liked it until one day, when we were running out of money and time and patience, he announced to me that we would reshoot the whole sequence but this time, at night! I thought he was crazy but we did it and he was right.
Flaherty worked with a tiny crew, not to save money so much as to allow him to feel free to change his mind about what to film and when. You can't reasonably keep a whole movie production crew standing around while you spend a whole day filming a spider making it's beautiful web under uniquely beautiful light conditions. We were a small band working long days for months at a stretch. Often we were filming by sun up and working till late at night, preparing for the next day.
Occasionally Mr. Flaherty would talk with me about film making. Most often he spoke about the making of Moana where he worked out his approach to the structure of sequences; something that I think has been ignored by film historians and theoreticians. He also spoke of the problems of distribution of films.
He said "if you think making a film is difficult, wait till you try showing it!" He was speaking of distribution in Cinemas. There was no other way of seeing films. You either made it in the commercial cinema system or you were out of luck. There was no alternative. I remember him musing out loud "we should be able to see what we want to, when we want to, where we want to...at a reasonable price". Is this possible? It is certainly possible in the field of literature...books; and it is possible with music on records and now on CD's. It is still next to impossible with Documentary films unless you deliberately aim at a mass audience, which Flaherty and many others were not willing or able to do.
Is it possible to make a Documentary film designed to be shown primarily in Cinemas to a relatively small audience? My feeling is that it is at best very rare. Of Flaherty's work, only Nanook made it and he had a very hard time getting funding for the four subsequent films that he was able to complete; Moana, Man of Aran, The Land and Louisiana Story.
If, and it is a very big IF, you are willing to compromise andaccept video as a way of making, or of seeing films, then some solutions are at least in sight. If you are not willing to make these concessions then you will have to depend on organzations such as this to provide funding and hope for showings on the big screen in art theaters and at festivals that attract the more elegant tourist trade.
Personally I have made my peace with the TV box and have recentlybeen very impressed by developments in video projection. Three years ago I started working in Video©8 full time. Valerie Lalonde and I have recently completed our first Video©8 production, "Les Oeufs a la Coque". I hope to show you a fragment after this talk.
I came to this because I could no longer afford to film, even in 16mm. I wanted to experiment. I always want to experiment. To do what I did with Flaherty and later, with Robert Drew. To try different approaches; to story telling, to observation, to image making. I found it more and more difficult to get funding and to be shown. I have nothing against television: they do what they do and I am not part of that mainstream; I never will be and that is fine by me. My position is that there should be funding available for off beat work and there should be ways to reach a modest audience. I think this program can help maintain a level of creative thinking and working. I think that this is a temporary problem and that when we develop the appropriate distribution organization and the appropriate technologies we will be self sustaining.
There are many pitfalls and booby traps to be avoided. We need to think hard about what can be done. I spent five years as chairman of the media panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, in the USA. We had a wonderful panel including Willard- van Dyke, D.A. Pennebaker, Fred Wiseman, Collin Young and others; we worked hard at giving away money to talented, creative people...but we seldom felt good after we were done. We didn't really know what we had done!
Funding is fine, but there are other things you can do to
achieve the same goals. We created "media centers" in the different regions of the USA, furnished with equipment designed to make it easier and cheaper for any one to make films and videos.
In my personal work, the technology of Video has made it so cheap that we can now afford to experiment and the major problem is now distribution. I am a perpetual optimist. For me there is always a solution to our problems just around the corner. Admittedly, I have usually been wrong. I thought that TV would solve all the problems of the independent film maker. Then I thought that Cable TV would change everything... Now, eternal optimist that I am, I think that the cassette and the video player will solve our problems. But something has to be done to change the current distribution system so that tapes can be just as available as books or records. Then we will have achieved Robert Flaherty's dream. These are the kinds of problems that can properly be addressed by organizations such as this. I am well aware that there are other technologies on the horizon but I am now old enough to be impatient. Let's get on with it!