{"id":466,"date":"2011-10-06T13:40:46","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T12:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/?p=466"},"modified":"2012-02-06T22:14:09","modified_gmt":"2012-02-06T21:14:09","slug":"mosori-monika","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/2011\/10\/06\/mosori-monika\/","title":{"rendered":"Chick Strand on Mosori Monika"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this brief excerpt of an interview I did with Chick Strand in 2008, the filmmaker discusses the making of her early film Mosori Monika<\/em>. It was a pleasure to spend a few hours in her company, and I\u2019ve been wanting to present a programme of Chick\u2019s films in London for many years. It\u2019s finally happening now thanks to the preservation project undertaken by Pacific Film Archive in collaboration with Academy Film Archive. Chick died in 2009 and it\u2019s a great shame that this screening couldn\u2019t take place during her lifetime \u2013 she was a wonderful filmmaker and her work is deserving of far more attention than it has received so far.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI had a Degree in Anthropology. I was going to San Francisco State to get my MFA and then my PhD and I thought, \u201cOh man, I\u2019m 30 fucking years old and now I\u2019ve got two kids \u2026 I don\u2019t want to listen to these old farts ever again!\u201d So I came down to Los Angeles to go to film school at UCLA.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve only made one which I would call \u2018ethnographic\u2019 and it\u2019s Mosori Monika<\/em>, although that statement has slipped from my lips because I believe it, but everything\u2019s ethnographic. The fact we\u2019re sitting here drinking out of blue cups \u2013 somebody could make a big deal of it, right? It\u2019s all ethnographic \u2013 the artefacts we leave behind. I went there with the idea in mind that it was going to be an ethnographic film, using that methodology more or less. I never believed that an ethnographic film would ever take the place of the written word, but that it would sort of introduce people who\u2019d watch the films and then studied the culture to actually seeing the people move around, you know? I was so sick of the black and white photographs of guys with spears and all that stuff \u2026 But you cannot be objective, totally objective, I couldn\u2019t help myself juxtaposing what was actually being said by an Indian woman \u2013 translated \u2013 over a picture, over an image \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though I shoot documentary style, it isn\u2019t, because I don\u2019t set out to do that and I don\u2019t weigh it out in any certain way, although I\u2019m so nosey \u2013 \u201cTell me about your life?\u201d \u2013 but I couldn\u2019t understand this Warao Indian woman I was filming one bit. There was a guy who spoke Spanish and English that was part of the trio of us that went down to Venezuela, totally paid for by UCLA, then he had a translator that spoke Spanish and the Indian language, and then there was the Indian woman. I said, \u201cTell me about your life,\u201d and then he left her talking for about 20 minutes. I\u2019d say, \u201cJorge, is she telling about the life?\u201d and he asked and the guy says, \u201cYeah, yeah!\u201d I had no idea what she was talking about, no idea at all, but we translated it immediately so I could somehow get some images that went along with it. Of course it\u2019s a lie because if she\u2019s talking about when she was young you can\u2019t really show it, you have to be symbolic about it in a way.<\/p>\n

\u201cMargaret Mead hated it. The Flaherty Seminar was going on and she was still alive, and it was just at that time when I was seeing ethnographic films a lot. That was very interesting because one of the things that sort of influenced me to be a little more humane about what I was doing, a little more digging in, was her film called Trance and Dance in Bali<\/em>, where the guys are flaying themselves. You never got the feeling of what it was like to be one of those guys, never<\/em>, it was just like going to the zoo \u2026 It was absolutely wonderful that these people went out there with cameras and filmed all this stuff and tried to preserve the cultures, at least on paper and then film, it was really remarkable. In a sense, that film and many others like Nanook of the North<\/em> influenced me with ethnography and all my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This interview with Chick Strand was conducted on 15 March 2008 for the forthcoming book \u201cCritical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond\u201d. Initial research for this project was funded by the British Academy. <\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks to Mark Toscano and May Haduong (Academy Film Archive), Mona Nagai (Pacific Film Archive), Dominic Angerame (Canyon Cinema) and Charlie Bligh (BFI) for making the LFF screening possible. Thanks also to David James for the images. <\/em><\/p>\n

Link to more info on CHICK STRAND here<\/a><\/p>\n

INTIMATE VISION: THE FILMS OF CHICK STRAND screenings :-<\/p>\n

Sunday 23 October 2011, at 2pm, BFI Southbank NFT3
\nThursday 27 October 2011, at 9pm,\u00a0BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\n

Link to book tickets for CHICK STRAND here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this brief excerpt of an interview I did with Chick Strand in 2008, the filmmaker discusses the making of her early film Mosori Monika. It was a pleasure to spend a few hours in her company, and I\u2019ve been wanting to present a programme of Chick\u2019s films in London for many years. It\u2019s finally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":478,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions\/478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}