May 28, 2020: On the final evening of the Orphan Film Symposium, after a screening of her new film The Giverny Document (single channel) artist Ja’Tovia Gary joined in conversation with Terri Francis (Director of the Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University). Watch the recording of their discussion (with the filmmaker in Dallas, the scholar in Bloomington) below.
The Giverny Document remains in its festival run and is now also a three-screen museum installation, The Giverny Suite. These are also part of flesh that needs to be loved, a sculptural installation whose exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York was cut short by the pandemic. Although we can’t replay the movie seen as part of Orphans Online, this trailer from jatovia.com illustrates the work well.
https://vimeo.com/367817467
Before watching the May 28 conversation, reading this description of the work also explains why this timely, multi-register film was apt for the symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration.
Ja’Tovia Gary with Finn Jubak
Notes on The Giverny Document (single channel), 2019
a film by Ja’Tovia Gary, 41 minutes
Filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, The Giverny Document (single channel) is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. The film makes use of archival material from a variety of sources—some of which has been transformed through direct animation techniques—collaged with contemporary footage shot digitally and on 16mm film.
The film explores the power of performance to invoke creative virtuosity while simultaneously navigating and subverting capitalism’s claims to the body as a space of commodified production. A central metaphor is that of water. The film begins and ends with footage of three bodies of American water: the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River, and Niagara Falls. This material was drawn from an educational film produced in the 1960s focusing on the beauty of America’s natural landscape, and is presented in the film fully transformed through animation techniques of masking, scratching and painting. The animation presents symbolic imagery meant to invoke the orishas Oshun and Yemeya, water deities of the Yoruba people of West Africa representing both an idealized and feminized nature as well as the ferocious and deadly power of water.
The multivalent nature of the orishas parallels the multiplicity of water as an image, life and death in one. The film deals with the symbolic weight of the Atlantic Ocean as the site of mass trauma, the grave of untold numbers of enslaved Africans killed during the Middle Passage. This “body” of water is a changing body, bringer of life and death. Following an art-historical tradition that stretches back centuries, the female body is compared to the “body” of the landscape, Mother Nature.
Expanding upon this web of bodily metaphors, the film transitions from water imagery to footage of a Black female body in the Giverny gardens, and verité-style interviews revolving around Black women’s bodily safety. Black women are interviewed casually on 116th Street in Harlem, in the style of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961). Instead of “Are you happy?” they are asked “Do you feel safe?” What emerges is a recounting of experience at the micro and macro scales: a cataloging of everyday misogyny and violence in the form of catcalling and other unwanted attention, coexistent with a meditation on Black female subjectivity.
Other footage comes from Haiti, Syria, Iraq, and from Diamond Reynold’s infamous Facebook livestream of her husband Philando Castile’s death at the hands of a Minnesota police officer. As a collage, the film associates freely across time and place, drawing from a variety of source material and cinematic styles. What kind of toxic climate is at work here—is it something in the water? The film explores this question at all scales, linking the Black female’s bodily autonomy with larger issues of oppression, migration, and trauma.
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Ja’Tovia Gary is an artist and filmmaker whose work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed.
Recorded May 28, 2020.
Postscript, Juneteenth 2020.
Seeing this film — with its motif and theme expressed in the question to Black women “Do you feel safe?”– in the moment of May 28 made it feel nothing less than prophetic. By then the video of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police had been circulating for a third day. Protests against yet another death of a Black man in the custody of a white police officer had already grown beyond precedent. These became not only demands for justice in a case, but sustained attacks on systemic racism across institutions. Soon principles of the Black Lives Matter movement were (are) being supported by millions marching worldwide.
There’s much work to be done. On May 28, 2020, an overwhelming number of things could have been said, and much was being felt in the moment of palpable change. Would this rage lead to hope? Words here cannot do justice to the moment. I can only say that having Ja’Tovia Gary’s film and the wisdom of the words and spirit that she and Terri Francis brought to the difficult moment were vital. Inspiring. I am grateful.
Here’s hoping that the painful confronting of systemic racism leads us to actions that change the world, one in which we can always say, feel, and know the truth that Black lives matter.
— Dan Streible