BAM’s Flaherty Selections Underline the Cinema of Migration

Mass migration is endemic to the modern world, but its experience is not easily or well represented in cinema. This weekend, BAMcinématek puts some faces to the waves of humanity with its first-ever showcase of films — four in all — from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Culled from the nonfiction conference’s 2008 edition, the tightly curated series at BAM, called “The Age of Migration,” presents lives ceaselessly mapped and remapped from within and without, on journeys spanning from the Rio Grande and the high seas to Istanbul and Iraq.“Ideas about migration are so abstracted and so politicized that one of the more direct ways into understanding it is to look at the individual lived experience,” the guest curator of this year’s Flaherty Seminar and director of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival for the past 10 years, Chi-hui Yang, said.Leading off the selection on Friday is one such chronicle of lived experience, this one among Mexican-Americans in the late 20th century: “Calavera Highway,” a new film directed by Renee Tajima-Peña. In the film, Armando Peña (the director’s husband) visits his many brothers up and down the West Coast and into Texas, with his mother’s ashes, and mysteries, in tow. The respective fates of the Peña siblings demonstrate the push and pull between dispersal and common bonds, while the family’s background in migrant labor and protests intersects with American social history.“God Is My Safest Bunker,” directed by UC-Berkeley journalism grad Lee Wang, is another documentary in a traditional vein, depicting the Halliburton-contracted “third-country nationals” in Iraq who hail from the Philippines and elsewhere.But Mr. Yang has also included selections that straddle formal boundaries as well as national ones. “Cargo,” a kind of diary at sea by Laura Waddington, might more commonly be found in an experimental film program. Her Chris Marker-esque voice-over (minus the sardonic tone) relates her journeys on a giant cargo ship, a floating no-man’s-land whose sailors never see more of a country than its loading dock.“What interests me with this program is looking at films that cross the line, where these different categories are mixing and blending together,” Mr. Yang said. “Where between documentary and experimental, and documentary and narrative, too, there’s an ambiguous territory. That ambiguity is where some of the greatest truth can come out.”Screening with the 29-minute “Cargo” (on a Sunday program with “God Is My Safest Bunker”) is an ambitious short, “The Form of the Good,” by James Hong, that mashes up Plato’s myth of the cave with American military gunship footage. Elsewhere, the Swiss filmmaker Ursula Biemann’s “Black Sea Files,” a split-screen dossier of facts and impressions relating to a BP oil pipeline stretching across Turkey, is another reflexive work — in this case one that grapples for a hold on the industry’s many ramifications for the area and its inhabitants. Ms. Biemann’s triangulations and qualifications can be inertly academic, but they confront the difficulty of representing complex, far-flung socioeconomic phenomena in short works of film.The better-known filmmakers in the program take on a different light in the program’s context. “Casa de Lava,” directed by Portugal’s Pedro Costa (the subject of a retrospective last year at Anthology Film Archives), depicts life in the blackened-earth environs of a Cape Verde volcano. Mr. Costa, who participated in this year’s Flaherty Seminar, reportedly called the 1994 work a kind of “zombie film,” both for its story of a Portuguese nurse (Inês de Medeiros) repatriating a comatose Cape Verdean worker (Isaach De Bankolé, who would become a favorite of Jim Jarmusch), and for the numbed disorientation among its displaced characters. Also familiar in the program is the recently rereleased “The Exiles,” Kent MacKenzie’s documentary of 1961 that follows a group of American Indian migrants as they struggle with poverty and loneliness in Los Angeles. Neither is a documentary, but both could be called nonfiction examinations of social groups.An annual, and welcome, tradition of the Flaherty Seminar is to program a film by its namesake, and this year’s choice proves fascinating amid the globalization-era selections. Mr. Yang’s selection, “The Land,” made in 1942 by Flaherty for the government, is about farmers struggling to recover from the Great Depression. The film is torn between dismay at the plight of haggard migrant workers and awe before the agricultural machinery that helped displace them. Flaherty’s earnest pans up and down barns, crop furrows, threshers, and grimly staring farmers provide a counterpoint to the slate’s digital-era offerings, and point to the long history of migration.The Flaherty Seminar will do some migrating of its own through traveling programs besides the BAM selection. Anthology Film Archives will host a number of special “Flaherty NYC” screenings starting on October 13, while the Museum of Modern Art continues its well-established post-seminar program of highlights next June (after the 2009 seminar).The phenomenon of migration even affected some the original participants in this year’s Flaherty Seminar, where all these films were originally shown.“One of the filmmakers I invited, Bahman Ghobadi, wasn’t able to come because he couldn’t get a visa to attend the United States,” Mr. Yang said. “But instead we had him participate via Web cam. It was actually very fitting, because he himself wasn’t able to migrate because of this idea of a border, but he was able to be present in a different kind of way.”Through September 24 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).

BAM’s Flaherty Selections Underline the Cinema of Migration

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