Andrew Gingerich is a filmmaker whose work explores notions of family, dissociated identities, regional allegiances, and the boundaries of fiction. He lives and teaches in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
I believe in the importance of art as a social good, and in the value of its accessibility to all people.
Like most of our world, the film industry was built on a foundation of discrimination, and that systemic bias continues today. Film sets and production offices can be particularly unfriendly places for women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community; I’ve lost count, for instance, of my female friends who have abandoned careers in technical film production because they felt so excluded on set. Their departure—and the departures of those who have had similar experiences—is a devastating loss to an industry that is infuriatingly slow to change. Feminism is not only for women; race justice is not only for people of color; equality is not only for the oppressed. Making art and building classrooms that embrace and celebrate diversity benefits us all by inviting us to participate in a world that is larger and more complex than ourselves and our own experiences.
This isn’t just a question of encouraging diversity in the
production process, either: issues of representation spill over into course
design. Although I do my best to screen work by artists outside of the
institutionally selected cinematic canon, the fact remains that most filmmakers
who have seen significant material success (in Hollywood, but also in
independent and avant-garde film) are a distinctly homogenous bunch. This is
something students can and should be discussing with their peers in class, and those
discussions introduce a host of questions:
How
should we appreciate the genuinely valuable works of these filmmakers, knowing
that their success came at the expense of other artists who were systematically
silenced by institutional discrimination?
What
do our aesthetic preferences tell us about ourselves? Are the aesthetic preferences
of the contemporary film industry and audience inherently prejudiced against
certain identities?
How
do these concerns illuminate greater issues in our society at large?
What
is our responsibility as artists making work today?
I don’t often explicitly introduce such
discussion topics because I find my students are more willing to engage with
them if they arise organically, from other conversations—which they frequently
do. In those situations, my responsibility is to step back, make some room in
the schedule to accommodate what usually becomes a much longer discussion, and
occasionally ask a guiding or clarifying question. This content can be
difficult to cover, particularly for students of privilege who haven’t yet had
to confront the ways in which their advantages might come at a cost to others, but
engaging with these problems as early as possible in their academic careers has
the potential to make them more mindful citizens—not only in the context of
their art practice and education, but also in their lives more broadly.
Of course, there are more direct ways I try to make my classes
more welcoming to students who may have felt excluded in the past. My experiences
teaching at a community college and an access university have given me ample
opportunities to work with a diverse population of students who often need
additional support to succeed in class: something as simple as allowing some
flexibility in assignment due dates and building in-process critiques and conferences
into long-term assignment schedules can make a world of difference in the
academic trajectories of nontraditional students who work or have families to
care for, and for incoming first-generation students who don’t have a frame of
reference for exactly what is expected of them in college.
As should be the case, this work is never done. In addition to making
my courses more accessible to nontraditional and first-generation students, I hope to find ways to further decolonize my approach to teaching, rely less on
lecture, and encourage adventurous collaboration between students.
There’s an argument amongst filmmakers that a film degree isn’t “worth it:” a student could use the money they would otherwise spend on tuition to rent film equipment and teach themselves how to use it. This argument makes some sense but presupposes that a film education’s worth lies in equipment access and technical training.
I entered film school in pursuit of technical skills, but my seven years of study and five years of teaching have shown me the greater value of exposure to a group of peers and collaborators, immersion in critical discussions about film and art, and the expectation of a continuous creative practice. I couldn’t have sought those things out on my own because I didn’t know I needed them.
It’s relatively easy to teach someone how to make a movie,
but a filmmaker’s understanding of why they make their art is much more meaningful.
In my classes, I strive to balance the technical instruction students expect
and the critical context they may not know they need. Often that context is
found by peeling apart layers of subtext and metatext that define a film’s artistic
and social significance. I urge my students to consider what films are about:
what they’re trying to say, and what they might accidentally be saying without
meaning to. We can learn a lot by asking these questions of our work, and by applying
the same criticality to the films we screen in class, we can understand them in
entirely new ways.
Cinema is steeped in the same biases that shape our society. I’m uncomfortable with the overwhelmingly white‑, straight‑, male-ness of the cinematic canon and I do my best to screen work by constituents of various minorities, but the fact remains that most successful filmmakers (in Hollywood, but also in independent and avant-garde film) are a distinctly homogenous bunch. This is something students can and should contend with in class, and it introduces a host of questions. How should we appreciate important and innovative artwork made at the expense of artists who were systematically silenced by institutional discrimination? Are the aesthetic preferences of the contemporary film industry and audience inherently prejudiced against certain identities?
Finding value in structured critique
Critiques are an imperfect practice, but also an essential step in the creative process. Offering and receiving constructive critique is perhaps the most important foundational element of any creative education. Most incoming students are uncomfortable participating in open-ended critique sessions, so I encourage the use of a framework—a simple procedure to facilitate discussion that doesn’t rely on a complex set of rules.
With few exceptions, a work of art must stand on its own without
the artist intervening to explain their intentions or their process. To this
end, the Critical Friends Group model is a useful starting point. In my simplified
implementation, students present their work to the class without prologue,
apology, or explanation, then listen while the class discusses the work as they
encountered it—things they liked, questions they had, ways the piece could be
improved—and only at the end of the critique does the presenter directly engage
with the group, usually to ask and answer clarifying questions. This approach
ensures that nobody feels the critique is a referendum on the presenting
student, and it encourages taciturn (or sleepy) critique groups to grapple
directly with the work in greater detail.
The possibilities of radical collaboration
Much of my research relates to what I call “radical collaboration,”
an abject dedication to the process of making work jointly with other artists,
and an exuberant rejection of any claim to individual authorship of that work. My
own forays into radical collaboration allow me to escape my customary practice
and contribute to work drastically different from the work I usually make. Such
opportunities can be particularly beneficial in encouraging more adventurous
work from students who are still establishing their own creative identities but
may also feel constrained by work they’ve made in the past. I’ve done some collaborative
exercises in recent courses (they tend to make for amusing writing games), but
I hope to further expand on these principles and introduce more ambitious
collaborative processes into my courses.
In Notes on One-Person Shooting, Joel DeMott discusses the
pitfalls of making documentary films with multi-person crews and
cumbersome, highly-visible equipment. The “machine-ridden”
filmmaker, surrounded by “extraneous materiel—lights, booms,
radio mics, cables, cases of back-up gear” is inevitably distracted
by the technical minutiae of filmmaking, and forgets—or is
fundamentally unable—to forge a genuine relationship with their
subject. She dubs this cyborg-like, overladen filmmaker the
“Technical Monster.” Such a presence is understandably
intimidating to any documentary subject because the machines, lights,
and technical crew invade and alter the space. They make the
subject’s home feel less their home, and they present an
insurmountable barrier between the maker and the subject.
DeMott’s proposed solution to this problem is,
perhaps ironically, a technical one: recent advancements in film
stocks and camera technology allowed filmmakers of the early ’80s
the freedom to shoot without the assistance of a support crew,
operating the sound and camera themselves. This method of production
allowed filmmakers to be more agile and, most important to DeMott, to
give primacy to their relationship with their subject, rather than
the relationship with their crew. This is surely a noble goal, but I remain skeptical that a reduction in the scale of the production and
the visible complexity of the equipment actually solves the problem
of an alienating, anxiety-inducing Technical Monster, or that this
problem should be solved.
16mm cameras of the type used by DeMott and Jeff Kreines in production of their film Seventeen weigh in excess of ten pounds and are painted completely black. They perch, gargoyle-like, protruding forward from the operator’s shoulder, who then presses their eye to the eyepiece and (traditionally) squeezes their other eye shut while making a sort of involuntary grimace that suggests either deep concentration or extreme pain. The lens of the camera reflects and distorts whoever it points at, a mechanical cyclopean eye. The digital revolution has further shrunk the documentary filmmaker’s tools, but the form factor remains roughly the same: the technical monster may be getting smaller and lighter, but it is alive and well.
Fig. 1: Two filmmakers demonstrate their camera grimaces: Joel DeMott (left, c. 1980) and Ross McElwee (right, 2009).
The fact of the camera is hard to ignore, but subjects seem to do it almost instinctually. DeMott observes that “if a movie crew begins following people who are not actors, they will try to act as if they’re unconscious of the fact.” She’s referring to the type of large-scale productions that make use of multi-person crews, but the same criticism could just as easily be leveled against single-shooter films in which subjects self-consciously ignore the camera and speak to the filmmaker, in their best imitation of what a conversation between the two of them would be like if there wasn’t a giant black box pointing its unblinking eye at them from a distance of “a foot-and-a-half to three feet” (DeMott 6). In a sense, as DeMott argues, this close positioning of the camera is a gesture at honesty: “The filmmaker is there. And playing unaware is inconceivable when you can reach out and slap someone.” On the other hand, the brazen presence of a camera makes self-consciousness an immediate and ever-present concern.
It isn’t just that the camera cuts an imposing silhouette; the awareness of a camera of any size, position, or proximity is a powerful catalyst. We are cognizant of the power cameras possess, and in an era of ubiquitous imaging technology, we understand that the implications of a small camera are the same as the implications of a large camera: this is being recorded.
Fig. 2: Interrotron, the two-headed monster.
Errol Morris has attempted to sidestep this issue by developing the “Interrotron,” a modified teleprompter that displays the interviewer’s face in line with the camera’s lens. The result of conducting interviews with this particular Technical Monster is that the subject maintains direct eye contact with the camera/viewer, but more importantly, the edifice of a giant device that demands the subject’s undivided attention pushes every other condition of the setting to the periphery: “For the first time, I could be talking to someone, and they could be talking to me and at the same time looking directly into the lens of the camera. Now, there was no looking off slightly to the side. No more faux first person. This was the true first person” (Morris). In this way, subjects are encouraged to forget everything except their relationship to the interviewer. And yet, this comes at the cost of forcing an even more aggressive confrontation with the machinery of filmmaking.
Beyond posing
simple procedural questions (“How am I expected to behave?”) the
fact of a camera raises the
stakes of the interaction because
it implies the
scrutiny and judgment of an unknowable
audience. This is
particularly problematic for the subject, who is denied vital
information about the expectations their audience has for them. As
Erving Goffman explains, the performances we all craft in everyday
life rely on our understanding of our audience:
We can appreciate the crucial importance of the information that the individual initially possesses or acquires concerning his fellow participants, for it is on the basis of the initial information that the individual starts to define the situation and starts to build up lines of responsive action. The individual’s initial projection commits him to what he is proposing to be and requires him to drop all pretense of being other things.
(Goffman 11)
If this is true, the problem posed by standing in front of a camera is an interesting one. We perform in different ways for different people in different settings: we are, in effect, different people to our boss, our family, and to strangers in the airport; but how do we perform when the audience of our performance is potentially everyone? Subjects still seek to dramatize and idealize themselves through the methods Goffman describes, but they are denied the opportunity to “accept minor cues as a sign of something important” about their performance, which serve as checks on their behavior (Goffman 51). This can sometimes have the effect of increased self-consciousness, as the subject substitutes cues from their real audience with the imagined reactions of an audience of their own construction; rather than adapting the performance based on feedback from an actual audience, they regulate their presentation of self based on their limited inferences about the film’s eventual viewers.
It
might be this anxiety that is the cause of some
of the more performative and self-conscious moments in Seventeen.
When
Buck insists that he can’t hear anything more about Church Mouse’s
injury, and yet seems unable
to speak
about anything else, it may be because he recognizes that his
distress is dramatically important—thus appeasing the Technical
Monster standing three feet away from him—and that it presents him
as being a loyal and caring friend, a quality that the film’s
audience will surely find admirable.
As is the case
with much social performance, these
performances are frequently transparent to an audience: “The
arts of piercing an individual’s efforts at calculated
unintentionality seem better developed than our capacity to
manipulate our own behavior, so that … the witness is likely to
have the advantage over the actor” (Goffman
8–9). Still, Goffman
cautions that “an honest, sincere, serious performance is less
firmly connected with the solid world than one might at first
assume,” and
that a skillful, convincing performance is not necessarily a more
accurate one, only a more practiced one (71).
These
unpracticed
performative moments are significant because they allow us insight
into the subject’s process of crafting
a universal front that
they feel comfortable presenting not within the confines of a specific setting, but to the entire world.
In
this way, the Technical Monster provides a completely novel space for
subjects to work through their identity on a grand scale. Confronting
the Technical Monster, coming into conflict with the inconsistencies
between
performances crafted for
other situations,
and working integrate those
performances into an unproblematic self fit for a global audience is
an act of courage—and possibly hubris. It is not uncommon for
documentary subjects to misjudge their audience and come off as
unintentionally unsympathetic or transparent. These misjudgments can
be intentionally exploited by filmmakers, such as in Errol Morris’s
Gates of Heaven, in
which Phillip Harberts is depicted as deluded, self-important, and
preoccupied with what appear to be meaningless accolades. This surely
would not have been the intent of his performance, but it could be
argued that his inexperience with performing in this setting has
revealed something
about
his motivations than he would
have preferred to keep hidden
from public view.
This dynamic can also alert audiences to their own
position in relation to the work. In Cannibal Tours, the
condescending tone of the German tourists as they discuss the
lifestyle of the Iatmul people is not merely an indictment of their
colonial arrogance; it implicates the viewer as well, because the
tourists, assuming Western audiences share the same attitudes and
will not judge them harshly, feel completely comfortable having this
conversation while a camera is pointed at them.
Short of using hidden cameras and filming subjects without their prior consent, it seems unlikely that a solution can be found to the problems of self-consciousness and “unconvincing” performances, and that it is likely impossible to stop a camera from altering what it sees. Instead, I would suggest that these performances, though often unpracticed, are no less genuine than any other social performance, and may even offer greater insight. If we are defined by the collection of diverse and sometimes contradictory performances we practice, watching someone face down the Technical Monster and attempt to reconcile those conflicts to perform as a fully-integrated self allows us to glimpse the hidden machinery that constructs these fronts.
Works Cited
DeMott, Joel. Notes on One-Person Shooting. N.d. TS.
