Me parece que este documental tiene cosas interesantes, pero siento una manipulación muy evidente
ya que la narración de Gardner es muy explicativa y me hubiera gustado que la imagen tenga mas fuerza
por si sola, tiene muy buenas tomas y se logra ver a los documentados en acción, pero nunca se nos permite
escucharlos si no a través del narrador.
Me pareció muy interesante ver como viven con esa presión y ese intercambio en la guerra, me hizo refleccionar
sobre la idea que tenía de sociedades que viven en un ambiente menos influenciados por occidente, me doy cuenta
de que no es mas bonito ni pacifico de lo que nosotros vivimos hoy en día.
Robert Gardner was born in 1925 in Brookline Massachussets, and is one of the most famous ethnographic filmmakers in the world. Over the zears he has been making athnographic films, teaching, writings on documentary films and ethnography and supporting filmmakers and their projects. His film focus on specific people and specific places, including Niger, Ladakh, Sudan, Eritrea, and New Guinea.
Robert Gardner is seeking the unknown, images, the haunting moments and new flavours of beauty. In the past forty years, his approach and style in filmmaking have proviked much discussion among anthropologists. He was criticized on many occasions: " Those who are strongly concerned with a single identity for the discipline of anthropology, and a well-maintained frontier post which marks out hostile neighbouring states called Art and Science, cannot be comfortable with people who move freely between them, with either several passports, or the 'wrong' one." (Peter Loizos)
Dead Birds is a film about the Dani, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Irian. “When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had an almost classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they focussed their energies and based their values on an elaborate system of intertribal warfare and revenge. Neighboring groups of Dani clans, separated by uncultivated strips of no man's land, engaged in frequent formal battles. When a warrior was killed in battle or died from a wound and even when a woman or a child lost their life in an enemy raid, the victors celebrated and the victims mourned. Because each death had to be avenged, the balance was continually being adjusted with the spirits of the aggrieved lifted and the ghosts of slain comrades satisfied as soon as a compensating enemy life was taken. There was no thought in the Dani world of wars ever ending, unless it rained or became dark. [...]” (R. Gardner). Dead Birds has a meaning which is both immediate and allegorical. In the Dani language it refers to the weapons and ornaments recovered in battle. Its other more poetic meaning comes from the Dani belief that people, because they are like birds, must die.
Gardner established film at Harvard as a subject of university concern when he taught the first courses dealing with the subject while still a graduate student. For forty years he was Director of the Film Study Center which he founded in 1957. While working alone or with collaborators, he has encouraged innovation and experimentation in all aspects of film. Gardner was, for ten years, the Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and also served as Chairman of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department. Outside the University and apart from his own filmmaking, he undertook in the early seventies a major commitment in television by producing and hosting nearly one hundred, ninety-minute programs for a commercial broadcasting station. Each program presented an interview with a significant figure in the arena of independent filmmaking. This series represents a concentrated history of important experimental and documentary filmmaking of the 1960's, 70's and '80's. Following his retirement from teaching and administration at Harvard, Gardner established a small cooperative called studio7arts in Cambridge Massachusetts. There he collaborates in the production of films, videos, DVDs and books with a number of prominent writers and artists such as, Sharon Lockhart, Samina Quraeshi, Susan Meiselas, Alex Webb and others. Two new books are in progress including one of photographs made by Gardner and 7 photographer friends. Both will be published in 2009 by the Peabody Press at Harvard. Two new films are in preparation and expected to be ready for screening by the beginning of 2009. Gardner is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is also the recipient of numerous film awards and prizes including the Flaherty Award twice. In 2005 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Anthropological Association.
"I'll confess, I always wanted to be a poet. I knew tons of poets. They were who I gawked at, admired, hero-worshipped, everything."
Despues de ver estos dos documentales y otros y de Jean Rouch me parece que es de los documentalistas que mas me han aportado. Les Maitres Fous es increíble, desde como introduce a esta tribu en la ciudad, su cámara se mueve perfectamente con sus intenciones y el valor de cada cuadro es preciso. Al ver a aquellos hombres comenzar su ritual no queda muy claro hacia donde nos quiere llevar Rouch, pero conforme agarra fuerza el ritual todo hace sentido e invita a una reflexión. Me gusta mucho como termina diciendo que tal vez ellos conocen rituales que aún nosotros no conocemos, no los pone como una especie rara y diferente, es gente que trabaja como cualquier otro, comen y juegan como los demás.
Justo cuando vi el documental festejamos en el calendario judío
"Yom Kipur", el día del perdón, y creo que tiene muchas cosas en común, al principio confiesan sus pecados y a través del rito son perdonados. Creo que cada persona tiene su propia forma de hacerlo, pero al hacerlo en grupo pienso que tiene más fuerza ya que se necesita del otro para ser puro de nuevo.
Jaguar me parece un filme muy analítico, vemos como tres amigos de un pueblo rural se encaminan a la ciudad,creo que Jean no solo habla de esos tres casos particulares si no de el ser humano en general, se nota una investigación sobre la vida en esa región, sus costumbres y sus preocupaciones.
En cuatro décadas, Rouch rodó más de 120 films en todos los formatos, se ocupó de los indígenas, hizo retratos antropológicos o de personalidades, intentó identificarse con un africano para dar su visión de los parisienses en "Poco a poco" y participó con cineastas de la nouvelle vague en el film de episodios "París visto por...". Pero la gran mayoría de sus obras son bellos cuentos documentales referidos al Africa y a su gente. Los cinéfilos franceses sólo lo descubrieron en 1959, con "Yo, un negro", que había ganado el premio Louis Delluc. También fue galardonado en Venecia (por "Los maestros locos", 1954, sobre los ritos de posesión, y "La caza del león con arcos y flechas", 1965). Entre 1987 y 1991, además, fue presidente de la Cinemateca Francesa, y desde allí promovió las cinematografías periféricas. Su último film fue "Un sueño más fuerte que la muerte".
“Jean Rouch es el motor de todo el cine francés de los últimos diez años, aunque poca gente lo sepa. Jean-Luc ha salido de Rouch. De algún modo, Rouch es más importante que Godard en la evolución del cine francés. Godard va en una dirección que vale sólo para él, que desde mi punto de vista no es ejemplar. Mientras que todos los filmes de Rouch son ejemplares, incluso los fallidos”. (1)
Con estas palabras, Jacques Rivette afirmaba con absoluta rotundidad en el curso de una de las clásicas entrevistas-río de Cahiers la importancia del cine de Jean Rouch. Su lugar central, de guía de un cierto cine francés que se aventura en la modernidad. No es extraño que fuese Rivette -que acababa de rodar L’Amour Fou (1968), filme que se desdobla para acoger el reportaje de su propia filmación- el que hiciese esta reivindicación, ni que se produzca en un momento -1968- donde en la propia Cahiers se produce una interesante reflexión en torno a la influencia del “directo” en la ficción cinematográfica (2), que igual no estaría de más revisar ahora que el tema ha devenido un cliché de la crítica actual. Pero un giro curioso se cuela en lo que dice Rivette, ese “aunque poca gente lo sepa” que para mí no tiene tanto que ver con la minoritaria difusión de su cine, como con la actitud del propio Rouch de rechazar cualquier posición de centralidad. Una forma de hacerse a un lado para abrir sus filmes a todo tipo de desplazamientos que habita su cine al menos desde Jaguar (1954-1967) o Yo, un negro (Moi, un noir, 1958), y que es extensible a una trayectoria que sobre todo a partir de los años 70 -con excepción, quizás, de Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet (1974)- se desenvuelve silenciosa pero continuadamente en los márgenes del sistema cine.
Not much has been written about ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch's documentary The Human Pyramid (1960) in comparison to the interest aroused by Chronique D'Un Été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), the product of his collaboration with sociologist Edgar Morin. While most of his earlier documentaries were filmed in Africa, Chronicle of a Summer is set in Paris in the aftermath of the Algerian war and just before the explosion of social riots that came to dominate that decade. Chronicle of a Summer does not follow an established structure but is driven in an unpredictable manner by its characters and their reactions to the camera. It is arguably Rouch's best-known work, and has been widely discussed in the context of documentary filmmaking for its innovative cinematic techniques, its choice of scenario (the rough, urban streets of Paris during a significant historical moment) and for being the first film to define itself using the termcinéma-vérité.
Rouch' s documentaries are often inspired by a specific context that he wishes to capture; while in Chronicle of a Summer this is Parisian society in the aftermath of the Algerian war, in The Human Pyramid it is the issue of racism seen through the eyes of young black and white students attending a Lycée on the Ivory coast. The Human Pyramid, while possessing some of the same characteristics of Chronicle of a Summer, has a more poetic almost dreamlike atmosphere; it is also much more raw and less structured, especially considering most of it was left in the hands of the kids. For these reasons, The Human Pyramid is simultaneously more and less complicated than its successor. It is simpler because its themes are only moderately connected to society at large, as the world of these teenagers is somewhat separate to socio-historical reality, and more complex because this 'unreality' encompasses multiple layers of meaning. The Human Pyramid recalls some of Rouch's other documentaries made in West Africa, such as Les Maîtres Fous (1955) or Les Homes Qui Font La Pluie (1951), in which the element of the magical and the ritual plays a significant role. At the same time, it departs from his earlier work, and its results undoubtedly influence the approach taken by him and Morin in filming Chronicle of a Summer.
By the time of Chronicle, Rouch is more familiar with the impact of the camera on the milieu, and, rather than simply filming a designated ritual or event, is often responsible for provoking the action: “Rouch, the observer of rituals, crossed the line to become a creator of rituals in his own right”. (1) Some of the characteristics that Chronicle and Human Pyramid have in common are: Rouch exposing himself personally on camera; setting out the parameters of the 'experiment' within the first scenes; incorporating the screening of the film to the actors in the final cut; and including the 'before' and 'after' of the story. All these elements, nevertheless, are handled very differently in the two films, and Morin's influence is also to be taken into account. While Rouch's work is permeated by what Jean-André Fieschi calls “slippages of fiction”, The Human Pyramid is by far his more fantastic project. There is a sense of freshness in the film, due to the fact that it is open for anything to happen, and it is this freedom and flexibility that gives it its richness. While in Chronicle of a Summer Rouch and Morin are constantly present guiding the events, in his previous film, “once the project started, the director simply filmed it.”
Cinema verite is a term so frequently used that it is sometimes forgotten that the main instigator of both the label and the style was the ethnological filmmaker Jean Rouch... Rejecting both the idealism of Robert Flaherty and the didacticism of Joris Ivens and John Grierson, Rouch aimed for the immediacy of television, without its superficiality. He believed that the camera's intervention stimulated people to greater spontaneity, expression and truth without asking them, as in the American Direct Cinema, to act as though the camera was not there.
Three young men from the Savannah of Niger leave their homeland to seek wealth and adventure on the coast and in the cities of Ghana. This film is the story of their travels, their encounters along the way, their experiences in Accra and Kumasi, and, after three months, their return to their families and friends at home. The film is part documentary, part fiction, and part reflective commentary. There was no portable sound synchronized equipment in the early 1950s when Jaguar was shot. Instead, Rouch had the main characters (his friends and "accomplices") improvise a narrative while they viewed the film, which was itself improvized along the way. The resulting soundtrack consists of remembered dialogue, of joking and exclamations, of questions and explanations about the action on the screen.
Short-term, rural migration to the cities is common to much of contemporary Africa. Here we meet Lam the herdsman, Illo the fisherman and Damoure, their unsettled but literate friend. The three trek for more than a month south through Dahomey to Ghana, crossing the land of the Somba people (whose nudity shocks them), eating coconuts "more delicious than cheese," and delighting in the ocean with its waves and starfish. Eventually they part ways. Damoure and Illo go to Accra and Lam to Kumasi, where they find jobs as dockworker, foreman for a lumberman, and cattleherder for a city butcher. Having made their separate journeys, they meet again in Kumasi with a fourth friend, and set up an open-air stall, Petit a Petit, in which they hawk everything from alarm clocks to pictures of Queen Elizabeth.
Financially successful but homesick, the friends decide to leave the excitement, turmoil and bewildering complexity of the city to return home to Niger before the rains. Lam rejoins his herd, enriched with a new umbrella and a lance; Illo, "magician of the river," catches a hippo and distributes everything he has brought from his journey to his family; and Damoure admires anew the beauty of Niger women.
Yet although life in the village resumes as usual, Illo, Lam and Damoure have been "jaguars" in the city: sophisticated "keen young men" with fancy hairdos, cigarettes, sunglasses, money, and knowledge of the urban world. The film raises, but does not answer, questions about the meaning of this experience and the transformations it may entail in the lives of the returned youths. Jaguar, Thomas Beidelman has written, "does succeed in catch ing the flavor of what it must be like to pass to and from a modern city and a rural village in Africa . . . Jaguar could be an eloquent document on the process of social change."
The flavor, it might be added, is very gay. Rouch has pointed out that Jaguar does not attempt to reveal the misery and pain of the annual migration, or the boredom of village life in the dry season (eight months of the year) when young men, no longer warriors as in the past, have nothing to do. Few men, in actuality, become "jaguars" in the carefree style of Damoure, Lam, and Illo. For most, the city is a struggle. Yet jaguar is nonetheless a vivid portrayal of the ideal of migration, a fantasy imparted through the improvised actions and spirited commentary of the characters. In this film Rouch has developed a form one might call "ethnographic fantasy," with an authenticity and reality as important, although quite different, from that of Rouch's own monograph on rural migra
Este documental me pareció muy cómico. ¿Quien esta tras las rejas, los hombres o los animales? Las expresiones que logra capturar Haanstra son excelentes, la música es muy buena y ayuda mucho para marcar el tono del filme, es sencillo y divertido.
Zoo es un documental narrativo, vemos a las primeras personas que entran en el zoológico, niños emocionados, ancianos, jóvenes y adultos dirigiendose a las jaulas donde están los animales y observar su comportamiento, como comen y que es lo que hacen, la admiración y sorpresa que genera en el publico, interactuando así una entre animal y hombre o entre animal y animal pensante.
Bert Haanstra, directór danés nacido en 1916. En 1962 se exhibe su película "Zoo" en la que hace una reflexión de quien es el que está encerrado, se apoya conociendo el lenguaje cinematográfico. Creo que es interesante saber que en este docu fue la primera vez que usó una cámara escondida.
Haanstra spent the following two years working on two wonderful shorts. One was Zoo, a touching and humorous look at the way people and animals behave. This was the first time that Haanstra used a hidden camera. He said: "observing people and animals when they don't know you're there is fascinating. I bonded with them". Making a film of this kind required tact and integrity, and Haanstra and his team were aware of their responsibilities throughout and respected the privacy of their subjects.
Haanstra said that Zoo “was the key to making The Human Dutch. I ended up making these type of films for lack of a good comedy scenario and out of fear of being exaggerated. In the documentaries approach I avoided implausible storylines. In a way I played it safe. I had already developed a routine and felt comfortable with that genre. But it was much more difficult to attract large audiences. Making a blockbuster documentary was unheard of, but it worked!"
In Zoo, Haanstra and cameraman Anton van Munster filmed people with a hidden camera to see how people behave in different situations and environments, without the self-consciousness created by the camera. They concealed the camera in a huge shopping bag, and hid their equipment in bushes, and built sheds with one-way glass. Haanstra observed the Dutch with compassion and wit, and they emerged as people with a sense of sorrow and joy, religion and individualism and, above all, freedom.
Sans Soleil transcurre en espiral, después de unos días de haberla visto, me queda mas claro, no tiene un orden lógico pero no es desorden, creo que propone mucho a nivel montaje. Los fragmentos de momentos no son en otros tiempos, todo pasa en el momento que Marker lo captura y me parece genial que haya escogido estos dos lugares para así crear una reflexión sobre la imagen y la cultura visual que hay en el mundo, porque viendo "Sans Soleil" siento que visité toda la cultura visual sin importar el lugar. Sans Soleil sólo se parece a sí misma, Chris Marker no se parece a nadie y la búsqueda por ese camino está abocada al fracaso y por eso no intento entender la película como lo hago con otras. Dejando que las imágenes pasen por la mente y te afecten es suficiente.
El sonido y la musicalización me parecieron muy buenos y muy elocuentes en cuanto a la estructura (aunque no la he descifrado aún) de el filme. Creo que el sonido junto con el montaje le dan un toque irreal en el sentido del tiempo, es como si Chris Marker entendiera como funciona nuestro cerebro en cuanto a imágenes y lo hiciera de esa forma, para mí Sans Soleil son recuerdos. El director no está presente en las imágenes, pero está ahí ofreciéndonos su mirada, su punto de vista amplio y de diferentes perspectivas. El comportamiento de la cámara es propia del documental, aunque la edición lo hace muy refractado.
¿Que valor otorgarle a cada imagen? ¿Deberíamos clasificarlas y encerrarlas en un solo valor? No creo, pienso que cada imagen de este documental que pasa por nuestra mente tiene una importancia propia y cuando con la ayuda del montaje, hay una conexión entre los fotogramas, se crea otro valor que queda solo en el tiempo.
Fragmento de "The Koumiko Mystery" Pelicula filmada en Tokyo en 1964.
The image is only partial; it requires the soundtrack to complete the circle of understanding. And that is part of the program of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1982), a fictional documentary that questions our ideas of appearance, memory, and history. Marker is not after glib solutions; he's not here just to state that appearances are deceiving. For the narrator of his own movie is a fictional newscaster reading letters from a cinematographer who doesn't exist. The images are real, the soundtrack is created. Each tells its own truth.
An elusive figure to Americans, Chris Marker was one of the seminal figures of the French New Wave, a Left Bank intellectual who helped create the climate that nurtured Godard, Rohmer, and the other enfants terribles. He's primarily a documentarian, but the basis of his aesthetic is the power of montage, and to serve it he's made films that are nothing more than compilations of stills, including a science-fiction movie about the destruction of Paris (La Jetée, 1963). He's also a committed leftist who in the late sixties became part of a filmmakers' collective that, unusually enough, survived to become a real workers' film group.
Marker the intellectual, the theorist of montage, and the leftist are all evident in Sans Soleil, whose intellectual breadth seems ostentatious at first but eventually coheres. The film opens with the voice of a woman who's reading the letters she's received from the fictional Sandor Krasna, the continent-hopping cinematographer who has supposedly shot the footage we'll be watching. She punctuates her reading often with "He said" or "He went on" but makes no comments other own — she's the vessel of another consciousness, one that's warning us to beware of every separate and detached subjectivity. As she talks, the film's first images appear on the screen: we see children playing. She reads from a letter that describes this as Sandor's perfect image of happiness, and the film then takes a circuitous route to fulfill that image. Her voice continues to accompany each shot, describing, anticipating, or explaining.
Krasna begins by confessing his failure to invest the image with any feeling that might communicate itself to an audience. He talks about trying to combine it with other images (a deliberately clichéd shot of American militarism), about surrounding it with black film leader ("So if they don't see the image, at least they'll see the black"), but nothing has worked. This is the setup for the parade of images to come — images that resemble a random amalgam of documentary and touristy footage, images that concern themselves with rituals and, increasingly, with other images.
Krasna is repeatedly drawn to Japan. His travels there give him a feeling of the excitement of returning home; for him, the unseen shaper of the film, Japan lives through images and rituals that not only obscure cultural realities but also hold the key to them. In the early footage, Krasna finds the symbols that echo throughout the film. At a shrine for cats, a couple pray for their pet, not dead but lost — someone must pray for it now so that it will find its way to the afterlife when it does die. Their prayers, to the god who lives among the shrine's feline figurines, cross space and time, as does, later, the image of another cat. This one is on a rooftop in an Icelandic town that has been covered by the ashes of a volcano. It's a friend's film of a town Krasna had visited before the eruption (though we see none of the photographs he says he took there); these "objective" images, with spires and roofs that have barely escaped being covered, have replaced his own more subjective memories. His letter comments, "It's as if the year '65 had disappeared."
A film in which coups and cats jostle for space must be the product of a peculiar mind. Marker is using these images not to reflect but to fashion a mind, the fictional Krasna's. The first part of the film, Krasna's collection of visual memories, prepares for the second, which examines the value of those memories, the ability of memory to plumb appearances and write history. Marker's creation of an invisible character becomes a profound examination of how we store the past.
As one of Krasna's shots picks up a right-wing speaker atop a truck outside a Tokyo department store, he is reminded of when he first saw the speaker, at a demonstration protesting the construction of a new airport during the sixties. He shows some of the footage of the violence at that demonstration and then, in the present, a memorial demonstration at the same site. Later, a video artist, a friend of Sandor, runs these images through a machine that distorts them, colors them, so that they are only momentarily recognizable. Yet the swinging of police truncheons is clear and unmistakable. The machine offers a way to make the artist's subjectivity concrete, and yet the image retains its essential integrity. The machine lets "every image construct its own legend."
When Krasna see the strange Icelandic landscape created by the volcano, he imagines it as the scene of a science-fiction movie he will create, Sunless, in which a man from the fortieth century returns to earth to discover the history of some songs by Mussorgsky, the "Sunless" songs. These still exist in the visitor's time, but nobody knows what they mean anymore, so he has been sent into the past to unlock their secrets. The people of the future have no common ground with the music. They hope their explorer can do for them what Krasna's friend's machine can do: supply the subjectivity that allows a viewer (or a listener) to connect directly with an objective image (or song).
It would take a book to unravel all the strands of Marker's work. He's a master editor, and his images and sequences rush by propulsively, often with playful connections: Japanese girls dancing; rituals for the repose of the souls of broken dolls and later for broken scraps of things; prayers for departed animals at a Tokyo zoo followed by a giraffe being clumsily shot in Africa; Krasna attempting to get women of some African islands to gaze back at his camera as he records them; a sequence of faces that stare out at the viewer from Japanese television. In one spectacular sequence, Marker edits footage of a Japanese train, a cartoon of a train, and video-treated images of samurai, horror, and sex films that isn't just a virtuoso display but a key to Krasna's perceptions.
Sans Soleil ends almost where it begins, with Krasna's happy children. Yet now it's no longer a clichéd image but a bond between an audience and a filmmaker. Marker ends his film a little after Krasna ends his. As Krasna's final images are treated by the video machine, the soundtrack pronounces him "free of the lie that had prolonged the existence of those images." Just then there is a shot of a hand pulling a plug out of a console; the screen goes blank. Marker may be free of these images, but he's not finished.
