American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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format, I make that clear—but since the filmmakers discussed generally call themselves “filmmakers” and their films and videos “films,” I have not attempted to maintain a distinction between film and video except when the difference is germane to a particular discussion. Also, I use the terms personal documentary and autobiographical filmmaking interchangeably.
SUBJECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
My focus on ethnographic film and personal documentary precludes my dealing in depth with a good many facets of Boston-area and even Cambridge filmmaking. In a few instances, I was unable to access films that I know are relevant to my discussions of personal documentary. I could not find a way to see either Jeff Kreines’s The Plaint of Steve Kreines as Recorded by His Younger Brother Jeff (1974) or Mark Rance’s Death and the Singing Telegram (1983), as well as other early work by Kreines, Rance, and Joel DeMott—all three of whom were students at the MIT Film Section.21 This counts as a considerable limitation to American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn , one that I am embarrassed by. Filmmaker-teacher John Terry should also have been part of these discussions, but by the time I was aware of his connection with the MIT Film Section and began to learn about his films, this volume was already too extensive and too far along in the publishing process: I must be satisfied to come to grips with Terry’s work and influence at a later time.
The two most famous documentary filmmakers living in Cambridge as this is written—Fred Wiseman and Errol Morris—receive no attention here. Wiseman’s films do provide a kind of ethnography of institutional life in modern America. Nevertheless, his films are not ethnographic in the usual sense of the term, and, beyond the implications of Wiseman’s choices of subject, they are some of the least personally revealing films in the documentary canon. And while Wiseman’s home base has been Cambridge since the beginning of his career, he does not seem to see himself as part of the community of filmmakers that has developed in Cambridge over the decades and has functioned in a wide range of ways as a mutual support system for independent work:
| MACDONALD: | Fred, was there something in the Boston area, or in Cambridge in particular, that helped you move in the direction of documentary filmmaking or that helped you become the kind of filmmaker that you’ve become? | |
| WISEMAN: | Nothing that I can think of.22 |
Errol Morris’s expressionist approach to often bizarre, nearly surreal subject matter is distinct from the development of ethnographic documentary (though clearly there are ethnographic dimensions to a number of his early films: Gates of Heaven [1981], for example, and Vernon, Florida [1978]) and from the evolution of personal documentary (though Morris’s voice in some films—The Fog of War [2003], for example—reveals a good bit about his personal passions). My commitment in American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn is to bring attention to underrecognized and/or less understood filmmakers and films. Like Wiseman, Morris does not lack for attention from reviewers, critics, and even scholar-filmmakers: Charles Musser and Carina Tautu’s Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch [2011] is an engaging feature-length interview with the filmmaker.
The many accomplishments of documentary filmmakers who have worked under the auspices of WGBH must also be the subject of another scholar’s investigation. The same is true of the contributions of a variety of individuals, including John Terry, who worked with Pincus and Leacock at MIT (Made in Milwaukee, 1979, and many other films); Richard Broadman (Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston, 1978; The Collective Fifteen Years Later, 1985; Brownsville Black and White, 2002), Abraham Ravett (The North End, 1977; Haverhill High, 1979), Jane Gillooly (Leona’s Sister Gerri, 1994; Today the Hawk Takes One Chick, 2008; Suitcase of Love and Shame, 2012), Juan Mandelbaum (Our Disappeared/Nuestros desaparecidos, 2008), and Alla Kovgan (Nora, 2008).
This study also largely ignores many forms of filmmaking and electronic media arts that have been produced at MIT and Harvard. I know nothing about the MIT Media Laboratory, which came into being in 1980 after the demise of the Film Section. Nor do I discuss the many accomplished animators who have been connected with the Carpenter Center (Robert Gardner claims that “almost every animator of moment in American and European animation has taught at Harvard”).23 And the Visual and Environmental Studies filmmaking program at Harvard has produced many accomplished filmmakers who are not discussed here—instances include Darren Aronofsky, Andrew Bujalski, Mira Nair, and Jehane Noujaim—despite my having considerable interest in some of them.
Finally, with one important exception, I say almost nothing about avant-garde cinema, a dimension of film history that much of my earlier writing has explored, even when filmmakers have had some connection with Cambridge, including, for example, Radcliffe graduate Abigail Child, who began her career as a documentary filmmaker and has become a prolific avant-garde filmmaker and video artist and a member of the senior faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There is also Cambridge resident Rebecca Meyers, who has worked at the Harvard Film Archive and more recently for Robert Gardner’s Studio7Arts—Meyers’s exquisite depictions of the subtleties of daily experience have obvious documentary elements. Of course, my not writing about these (and other) Cambridge- and Boston-area filmmakers (prolific diarist, Anne Charlotte Robertson; Robert Todd, Luther Price, teacher-filmmaker Saul Levine) means no disrespect for their work. I have written about some of their accomplishments elsewhere and hope to explore others in the future.24
The exception is Alfred Guzzetti. In addition to Family Portrait Sittings, his pioneering contribution to the personal documentary, Guzzetti has collaborated on ethnographic films, on films about the Nicaraguan revolution; and his Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard was published in 1981 by Harvard University Press. During all this time, however, Guzzetti has been making contributions to avant-garde film and video, beginning with Air (1971) and continuing into the 1990s, when he began producing a remarkable series of video works that combine documentary elements with personal revelation in a manner more in tune with the avant-garde traditions of personal film than with personal documentary. I have included a full chapter on this dimension of Guzzetti’s work because attention to it is long overdue and because the unusual breadth of his career has allowed him to have considerable impact on his filmmaker colleagues and on filmmaking students at Harvard for forty years.
Perhaps it goes without saying that the following chapters are a function of my personal admiration of the filmmakers and films I do discuss. While I try to be an honest and painstaking and reasonably thorough scholar, at least within the parameters set up by this book, I cannot pretend to be a detached scholar. I am not, and have no desire to be, merely an observer or an analyst of what has gone on in documentary during a particular time in a specific place. Cinemagoing and the process of developing some sense of the history of the wide world of cinema have invigorated my life, providing me with experiences that have been not merely pleasurable, but formative—and as the years have gone by, re-formative—in my thinking about cinema, myself, and the world. Many of the films I discuss here have had and continue to have—to use William James’s provocative term—immense “cash value” for my work as a film history teacher. It will be obvious that my admiration of the filmmakers I discuss and of their particular films is not unalloyed; nevertheless, the writing in this volume—and this has been true of all of my writing—is essentially an ongoing act of gratitude.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Any long-term project in film history requires the assistance of many individuals and organizations. My designation as an Academy Scholar for 2012 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences came at a most opportune time, providing both financial and moral support for the completion of this project. But American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn required an extensive period of germination.
In order to see the films I’ve written about, I depended on the consistent generosity of Documentary Educational Resources, and in particular of Cynthia Close, executive director at DER during most of the time when I was researching and writing. Thanks also to current Executive Director Alice Apley and Director of Design & Media Frank Aveni. A good many films by filmmakers I wanted to explore are not in distribution, and the Harvard Film Archive was very helpful in making many of these