Una película de Robert Flaherty, en la pampa, filmada por Sergei Eisenstein, para Victoria Ocampo, a espaldas de Waldo Frank

Victoria Ocampo meets Sergei Eisenstein in New York, in 1930. He is on his way to Hollywood where he plans to make a film and she is there to meet Waldo Frank and discuss the project of the journal Sur. Ocampo invites the filmmaker to come to Argentina make a film about the pampas. The aim of this article is to reconstruct the relationship between the writer and the filmmaker in order to support the hypothesis that we might identify some traces of that project in the film Eisenstein engages with when his trip to Argentina fails: ¡Que viva México!.

O SORRISO DE NANOOK E O CINEMA DOCUMENTAL E ETNOGRÁFICO DE ROBERT FLAHERTY

Resumo A partir de uma leitura renovada do filme Nanook of the North (1922), de Robert Flaherty, tomamos o sorriso de Nanook como guia para rediscutir questões cruciais, que estão na base das discussões epistemológicas tanto do cinema quanto da antropologia: o problema da verdade/falsidade e ficção/realidade, o modo de produzir o conhecimento, a encenação da vida social, o ilusionismo e o anti-ilusionismo das representações sociais, os modos de representação do outro, o problema da indexicalidade das imagens como marcas de suas vinculações com o mundo.

Filming Among Others

The first chapter explores the foundations of documentary’s anthropological strain in the pseudo-ethnographies of Frances and Robert Flaherty and Osa and Martin Johnson, filmmaking couples working at the intersection of ethnography and nonfiction entertainment in the ’20s and ’30s. Both women worked in the looming shadows of their more famous husbands, and yet each woman played a significant role in their joint careers. Their gendered labor included a kind of emotional translation for films that projected visions of far-flung places in the world to audiences hungry for “authentic” images of the exotic. Thus, these early pioneers--and the complex and compromised legacy of gender and race that their stories animate--are vital episodes in the overarching narrative of women’s documentary filmmaking.

Documentary and its doubles

This chapter provides a critical overview of the history of documentary cinema, arguing that it gradually lost sight of its early inspiration in the cinema of the Lumière brothers, adopting many of the features of fiction film production and modelling itself increasingly on didactic texts and journalism. In the sound era, British documentary films made under the aegis of John Grierson, despite his celebration of the ‘actual’, turned towards mass education and an idealised vision of collective humanity, and away from recording actual events in human lives. Italian Neorealist fiction films and changes to camera technology in the post-war period inspired a return to these objectives, but this found little space in television, which remained firmly fixed on journalism, entertainment, and public issues. Reactions took many forms, including experimental documentaries, social advocacy, biography and autobiography, and films exploring the relationship of film to reality, as in the work of Jean Rouch and Errol Morris. The rise of observational films gave promise of a return to the more modest aim of giving audiences shared access to what the filmmaker had witnessed, despite the challenges of manipulative ‘reality’ television and designer-packaged documentaries. The essay refers to a host of influences and commentaries, including those of Edward Said, Bill Nichols, Dai Vaughan, Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, Colin Young, and Grierson himself.

Casting Relatives

This chapter briefly situates approaches to early cinema reenactment and embodied spectatorship (Allison Griffith, Kristen Whissel, Mary Ann Doane) as well as the reception for reconstructions of past events (Miriam Hansen and Dan Streible). It reflects on the notion of social representativity prevalent in 1930s cinema as well as the reasons why the choice of actual members of a family may or may not matter in reenactment (Joris Ivens, Robert Flaherty, and Georges Rouquier). The chapter focuses on attempts to address the limits of reenactment through genetic links or an overemphasis on literalness: Orson Welles’s Four Men in a Raft (one of the episodes [1942] projected for It’s All True and reconstructed in 1993); Leslie Woodhead and Bud Greenspan’s Endurance, the reenacted biography of Haile Gebrselassie the Olympic runner, cast with many of his family members; and Zhang Yuan’s Sons, where an entire family reenacts the period prior to the internment of the father for alcoholism.