Subject to Reality

Women and Documentary Film

Shilyh Warren

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051371
• Categoría: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoría: Arts de la scène

Revolutionary thinking around gender and race merged with new film technologies to usher in a wave of women's documentaries in the 1970s. Driven by the various promises of second-wave feminism, activist filmmakers believed authentic stories about women would bring more people into an imminent revolution. Yet their films soon faded into obscurity.

Shilyh Warren reopens this understudied period and links it to a neglected era of women's filmmaking that took place from 1920 to 1940, another key period of thinking around documentary, race, and gender. Drawing women's cultural expression during these two explosive times into conversation, Warren reconsiders key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary and their lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. She also excavates the lost ethnographic history of women's documentary filmmaking in the earlier era and explores the political and aesthetic legacy of these films in more explicitly feminist periods like the Seventies.

Filled with challenging insights and new close readings, Subject to Reality sheds light on a profound and unexamined history of feminist documentaries while revealing their influence on the filmmakers of today.

CHAPTER 1

Filming Among Others

Frances Flaherty and Osa Johnson

In this chapter, I revisit the work of Frances Flaherty and Osa Johnson and write new pages into the story of women’s documentary filmmaking, especially during the early years of both cinema and anthropology. Johnson and Flaherty worked collaboratively with their more famous husbands, which has effectively erased their contributions as producers, writers, actors, directors, and promoters of their films. Their lost labor is indicative of the efforts so dear to me in Subject to Reality, which asks what it means to recuperate the forgotten matrilineal legacy that has shaped the lives and work of numerous women filmmakers. For Johnson and Flaherty documentary filmmaking was a collaborative endeavor in the interstices of their private and public lives. They built their domestic narratives, global families, and family wealth around “contact films”—ethnographic fictions about their encounters with racial and cultural difference. In turn, these stories, picturized through the veracity machine of documentary, colluded with both patriarchy and white supremacy.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illustrated lectures about exotic lands, often those in the colonial contact zones, and their “savage” or “primitive” peoples drew significant audiences to vaudeville theaters.1 Burton Holmes, a pioneer adventurer who had started out giving lectures with lantern slides, coined the term “travelogue,” which he defined as “the gist of a journey” that should “delight the eye” and “charm the ear.”2 As Ellen Strain and Fatimah Tobing Rony have observed, the late nineteenth century was a heightened moment of “visual frenzy,” in which the colonial subject claimed the world as image and thus as object that could be fixed, conquered, and offered back up to the empire as possession.3 As the decades progressed, performance, photography, and cinema would all be claimed by entrepreneurs and entertainers who largely adopted the “colonial gaze” without question. Optical technologies in particular held sway in the new climate of scientific positivism, such that films and photographs that largely trafficked in racial stereotypes became the logical evidence justifying white supremacy. This history entwined with the coeval development of documentary filmmaking, which would benefit from both currents: its ability to travel the globe and its status as authentic evidence. The “reality” of documentary, its enmeshment with the colonial gaze, and its tendency to suppress the labor of women would all be aspects of the form that women throughout the decades would inherit and continue to grapple with.

In this chapter I begin to excavate the entwined histories of these “regimes of power and knowledge,” in Alison Griffith’s terms, as together they shaped the cinematic contributions of Flaherty and Johnson. Both women worked in the looming shadows of their more famous husbands, and yet each woman played a significant role in their joint careers. Osa Johnson was vital to all of the films credited to her husband, whether she was cranking the camera or serving pie after a night of filming wildlife from hidden blinds in the Borneo jungle. Similarly, Frances Flaherty’s letters reveal that she was instrumental to Robert’s career; she generated ideas for projects, networked with potential funders and collaborators, and promoted his work and travel while he was away.4 Yet both women receive only the occasional production credit. Osa Johnson and Frances Flaherty deserve recognition for their pioneering work in ethnographic-entertainment documentary, a kind of filmmaking intimately structured by ideologies of gender, race, and realism. Their collaborative work with their husbands projected visions of far-flung places to audiences hungry for “authentic” images of the exotic. In subsequent chapters I will tell you more about how these early pioneers—and the complex legacy of gender and race that their stories animate—are vital episodes in the overarching narrative of women’s documentary filmmaking.

Frances Flaherty

Historiographies of documentary often begin by referencing the early influence of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). “This picture was to have greater consequences than any previous non-fiction film,” writes Lewis Jacobs in 1979.5 Nanook of the North “is considered one of the first great documentaries,” echoes Patricia Aufderheide in 2007.6 In the unlikely story of Nanook—a film made by a mineral prospector in one of the most remote and coldest places ever captured on film—scholars have rooted out many of the form’s best intentions as well as its worst habits. For as much as Nanook brings aesthetic reverence to scenes of real life, the film greatly manipulates audiences into believing that the dramatic story of an indigenous man against the brutal forces of nature is a faithful representation of Inuit life near the Hudson Bay in the early 1920s. In contrast to the other “father” of documentary, Dziga Vertov, Flaherty more specifically signals the ethnographic origins of documentary: the romantic desire to capture disappearing worlds and endangered cultural practices. Contemporary ethnographic filmmakers Lucien Taylor and Ilisa Barbash observe, “Nanook was remarkable not just for its style but also for its subject matter and approach to its subject. Never before had a non-Westerner been brought alive on the screen with such sympathy and humanity.”7 Robert Flaherty thus leaves us a complex legacy, which bears closer analysis, especially because his body of work has so significantly shaped the ethnographic and gendered history of documentary film studies.

Though he was never trained as an anthropologist, Robert Flaherty shared a fascination with indigenous people and the ethnographic impulse that defined a wide range of visual media from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1920s when he made Nanook. Like so many visual representations of exotic peoples and places, Nanook of the North enthralled audiences when it screened in the summer of 1922. Though several distributors initially turned down Nanook, assuming erroneously that the public was more interested in “seeing people in dress suits,” the film surprised virtually everyone when it had a blockbuster run during its first week of screenings in New York.8 At a time of increasing modernity and globalization in North America, audiences seem to have craved visions of a (mythical) simpler time when humans enjoyed greater attunement with nature and its rhythms. As Frances Flaherty put it: “When Nanook and Nyla and little Alleggoo smile out at us from the screen, so simple, so genuine and true, we, too, become simple, genuine, true. They are themselves: we, in turn, become ourselves.”9 This wry description of Nanook enriches our emotional understanding of the film. Frances Flaherty’s labor—the work of promoting the film—is therefore also a unique kind of affective labor; she translates this new visual form and the unfamiliar others it introduces into a familiar humanist narrative of mutual recognition.

By now it is well-known that Robert Flaherty contrived virtually every element of the story in Nanook, from the names of his actors to their familial relationships, down to their clothing, modes of travel and hunting, and the domestic scenes he offered to viewers as “life and love in the actual Arctic.”10 In retrospect his blatant disregard for “truth” fomented a crisis in the ontological status of documentary: if Nanook marks the origins of the tradition, and Nanook is an artful lie, heavily invested in exoticizing indigenous people, then what does that say about documentary—a form of filmmaking supposedly exemplary of the truth principle of photographic realism? Perhaps most pointedly, Rony has deciphered the implications of this Eurocentric ideology at the very heart of the documentary tradition and certainly throughout the Flahertys’ body of work. She describes Nanook as emblematic of a “taxidermic” impulse, which “seeks to make that which is dead look as if it were living.”11 For Rony, Nanook embodies an imperial and romantic ideal preoccupied with its longing for primitive authenticity, and which in turn requires massive artifice to reconstruct its object: “vanishing races.”12 Others have also intensely criticized the film for its stereotypical representation of native Others as noble but uncivilized, backward but charming, wise about nature but naïve about modernity. Perhaps more than any other film, Nanook of the North consistently appears and reappears throughout documentary studies—haunting our archives and our scholarship with its stark reminder of the colonial and fictional legacy of documentary. Yet, very little has been said about Frances Flaherty’s role in promoting this form of representation in Nanook. For example, her use of words like “genuine”, “true”, and “simple” partially signal her gendered contribution to the ethnocentric worldview that shaped the Flahertys’ work. Frances’s affective, material, and analytical labor, notable, for example, in her press promotion of the film, receives little recognition throughout documentary studies, which has tended to foreground the more obvious material labor of directors, who were mostly men.

If Nanook haunts the history of documentary, constantly reasserting itself as the ur-text of ethnography, what explains the relative absence of Moana in these patrilineal narratives? In fact, it was not Nanook but the Flahertys’ subsequent film, Moana, about the idyllic existence of beautiful people in the Samoan islands, that gave rise to the use of the term “documentary” as a way of distinguishing nonfiction films from fictional ones. When the Scottish filmmaker (and another documentary patriarch) John Grierson saw Moana in 1926 he raved about the film’s poetic imagery, its beauty, and its rapturous representation of nature: “I think Moana achieves greatness primarily through its poetic feeling for natural elements,” he wrote.13 However, it was Grierson’s observation that Moana “being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value” that has made the greatest mark on documentary studies.14

The origin story of the term “documentary” is often told; however, remarkably little has been said about Grierson’s emphasis on Flaherty’s gorgeous cinematography and skillful visual narration in Moana. Nor have documentary scholars, highly attentive to Nanook and Flaherty’s other “man against nature films,” (Man of Aran [1934] and Louisiana Story [1948]), paused to reconsider either Moana or the gender imbalance at stake in the focus on “man” against nature for themselves.15 In my story, however, Moana opens a new conversation about hidden gendered labor at the conceptual and material birth of documentary film. Recentering Moana destabilizes the patriarchal history of documentary filmmaking in a number of ways because Moana, far more than Nanook, is a film that brings to the surface the collaborative labor and significance of Frances Flaherty, who shares credit on the film as co-writer, co-director, and co-producer.

Indeed, from the beginning of their relationship, Frances saw her marriage to Robert as a strategic partnership and was highly involved in his filmmaking. Flaherty biographer Robert Christopher calls Frances “a significant architect” of his career as a writer and filmmaker.16 With “Bob,” Frances felt she had come up with a “beautiful new scheme of life.”17 In her diary, Frances described her partnership with her husband as a deep commitment to him, but also as a means of fulfilling her own dreams. Bob, she wrote, was “the instrument of my desires, such a nice healthy, interesting, convenient ‘tool’ … surely as my nature and gifts were complementary to his, I could be a real and valuable partner.”18 As Christopher has observed, however, Frances’s career as writer, publicist, photographer, and editor alongside her husband has been obscured in most works devoted to Flaherty. Like so many women of the twentieth century who collaborated with their husbands, Frances Flaherty’s legacy has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves.19

Throughout their early years of marriage and before Nanook, Frances’s cooperation with her husband took place largely behind the scenes. Raised in an affluent and cultured household, Frances had benefited from an elite education and experiences abroad. She saw her literary and social skills as the exact and necessary complement to her husband’s wild and unschooled talents in photography and exploration. She transcribed his notes, archived his diaries and photographic materials, and took dictation for his writing projects. In the early years, as he slowly began to attract media attention for his expedition photography, Frances wrote and coordinated his publicity materials and coverage. She used her contacts in the world of publishing to secure a book contract for expedition notes that she also edited. In early 1915, during their first year of marriage, Frances worked on the written narrative that would accompany film footage of his expeditions.

Frances Flaherty was both ambitious and optimistic. She was determined to make a life of “profit and pleasure” from her husband’s talents, about which she was certain and fiercely protective. “I am willing to slave to the bone for it, i.e. for my ambition for him,” she wrote.20 Indeed, throughout their decades of marriage, art, and travel, Frances Flaherty would make many sacrifices for her ideal of a powerful partnership. She endured years of separation, financial uncertainty, and the more profound injustices of their long-distance intimate lives. Nonetheless, her work has rarely been highlighted in terms of “women’s documentary filmmaking.” Frances’s ethos and vision, especially related to the representation of Others and the translation of their humanity to an audience at home, are key examples of women’s suppressed labor in the long history of documentary filmmaking. Despite the fact that Frances was not the technical creator of Robert’s films, her gendered labor—affective, reproductive, and as the “emotional translator” of her husband’s work—were key to their mutual collaborations.21

If her visible work on Nanook was largely that of a producer and promoter of the film, and her invisible labor shaped the ethos and reception of the work, her role in Moana (and all their later films) was more direct. In a much later interview with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner, Frances describes the journey that took their entire family to Samoa to make Moana in the late 1920s. The reception of Nanook had been so positive that, as Frances explained, Paramount gave Robert complete license and support as long as he brought back “another Nanook.”22 A friend named Frederick O’Brien had just published the bestseller White Shadows in the South Seas, and recommended that they visit a particular Samoan island—“the village was beautiful; the people were beautiful”—and assured...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Two Real Moments
• 1 Filming Among Others: Frances Flaherty and Osa Johnson
• 2 Anthropological Visions Inside and Out: Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead
• 3 Strangely Familiar: Autoethnography and Whiteness in Personal Documentaries
• 4 Native Ethnographers and Feminist Solidarity
• Conclusion: When the Walls Come Down
• Notes
• Index