Who knew an academic conference could be so exciting? I have come to acknowledge that I am not an academic, but a film curator who is an interloper in academia. I derive genuine pleasure from reading dissertations, but I know that's not the world for me. When SCMS came to LA I didn't intend to crash the whole thing, but I ended up doing just that, and it was an excellent trip of a weekend. The Westin Bonaventure was teeming with film dorks for SCMS's "Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past," and I arrived just in time for Amy Beste's "Instructional Film" panel on Thursday afternoon. Afterwards, drinks ensued at the bar. I saw a bunch of people I didn't expect to see, met a bunch of people I didn't expect to meet, and I started to realize that this was going to be a lot more fun than I'd expected.
Friday I had non-conference obligations all day, so I only made it to a queer caucus party at Akbar that night, always fun to see academics swimming outside of their natural habitat. But Saturday was a conference whirlwind and it was good. It started out with an extremely enlightening panel moderated by Michelle Puetz called, "The Avant-Garde and the Archive." I love it when experimental film geeks spout off stuff like anecdotes about Peter Kubelka describing what would happen if all avant-garde film was transferred to digital media and for some reason it all crashed at once and how the universe would experience a "collective stroke." Same goes for talk about the "disarticulation of materials" in referring to looking at avant-garde film on digital formats (I love that term). One of the most relevant parts of this panel for me was a discussion of the importance of putting pressure on museum curators to exhibit film on FILM, to add film to museum collections and to contribute to the preservation of films by supporting archives (especially informal ones like Canyon and Filmmakers Cooperative). God knows I have struggled within such institutions to legitimize film as art. And part of this discussion was the importance of encouraging filmmakers to raise the bar and value their work, as a painter would a painting or a sculptor a sculpture, the importance of raising standards around film as art. Now, I have always found it ridiculous when a video artist sells a copy of her video to a gallery for thousands of dollars. But in reality it's no more ridiculous than a painter doing the same with a canvass, or, more accurately, a printmaker with a print, and god knows it often makes about as much sense. But the primary issue here to my mind was recognizing the reality that some of our film distributors are functioning as archives without being recognized and receiving protections, financial and otherwise, as such.
The next event I attended, "New Approaches in African Documentary," was super exciting, primarily because it centered around Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Tèno, whom I greatly admire, and he was there for the panel. What was appalling and terribly disappointing is that I was one of only a handful of participants, the audience sometimes outnumbering the presenters. Both of the papers were presented by white women. Both of them were interesting and pretty kick-ass academically. But it's a curious phenomenon and I wondered about the connection between white women academics from the US who study the Global South in particular. (Indeed, one of the papers, Kristin Pichaske's, was entitled "Black Stories, White Voices.") The moderator encouraged us to think of documentary as archive, an interesting perspective, particularly considering the panel I'd just come from, but also to think of it within an African context. Tèno pointed out that today in South Africa as well in much of sub-Saharan Africa, production is largely the same, it is still white producers who are creating stories, often, "reiterating the Heart of Darkness trope." Tèno's Le Malentendu Colonial was the subject of much of our discussion and its subtle critique of a "civilizing mission" transformed into a "saving mission," one of humanitarian charitable causes. Relatedly, he shared how the doc came out in Europe at the same time as Darwin's Nightmare and how that film by white Belgians got all the play, while his was ignored.
The next panel of my afternoon was equally if not even more exciting that the first two. Zeinabu irene Davis and Karen Bowdre moderated an incredible table of stellar filmmakers of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, or the LA Rebellion Filmmakers, on a panel called, "Understanding the Past and Future of African-American Media." Barbara McCollough, Cauleen Smith, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Billy Woodberry (the only filmmaker I'd not heard of, as well as the utmost entertaining of the bunch) all showed clips from their work and talked about the historical moment they were part of and where things are at now.
This was followed by parties and drinks and meetings and reunions and dinners etc. The next day the LA Marathon prevented me from getting to more panels, but I did get in on more visiting with out-of-town friends and frankly I'd consumed enough information to feed me for a while anyway. Being at this conference confirmed both that I have made the right decision in not joining academia and that academia ain't half bad.
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