March
8, 2002
Filmmaker
Jill Godmilow to Present What Farocki Taught March 11
In 1969, German filmmaker Harun Farocki produced Inextinguishable
Fire, a half-hour inquiry into civilian responsibility for
the development of Napalm B, the jellied gasoline made by Dow
Chemical that was dropped on targets during the Vietnam War. Napalm
burns at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and sticks to skin, even under
water.
In 1991, filmmaker Jill Godmilow saw Inextinguishable Fire
for the first time during a Farocki retrospective. Regretting
that she and everyone in the United States had not seen the film
many years earlier—it was never distributed in the United
States— Godmilow set out to draw attention to it. She reshot
the film frame by frame, in English instead of German and in color
instead of in black-and-white. Her recreation, What Farocki
Taught, which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in
1998, was called "intellectually rigorous and emotionally
frightening, a ferocious, committed, important historical/political
tract for the amnesiac '90s." Godmilow will screen What
Farocki Taught and lecture on the film Monday, March 11, at
7 pm in Gamble Auditorium. The event is sponsored by the Mount
Holyoke Film Studies Program, the Mount Holyoke College Purington
Lecture Fund, the Five College Lecture Fund, the Five College
Film Council, the Hampshire College Film and Video Program, the
Smith College Art Department, the Amherst College English Department,
the University of Massachusetts Interdepartmental Film Program,
and the Mount Holyoke College Film and Video Collective. Back-to-back
screenings of Godmilow's Far From Poland (1984) and
Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1995) will be held at Gamble Auditorium
Sunday, March 10, at 1 pm.
Godmilow shot Inextinguishable Fire at the University
of Notre Dame, where she is a professor in the Department of Film
and Television. She recreated its austere dialogue and newsreel
footage, its setting at a generic Dow Chemical lab, and the intertitles
by which Farocki offered political commentary. She even superimposed
Inextinguishable Fire's original footage over her
own, archiving Farocki's film within her own work.
Rather than showing actual footage of human suffering from napalm,
Godmilow recreated Inextinguishable Fire's indirect
demonstrations of the weapon on insects, plants, and lab animals,
a nontraditional documentary technique that Farocki prefaced in
his opening narration: "How can we show you the damage caused
by napalm?" he asked. "If we show you pictures of napalm
damage, you will close your eyes. First you will close your eyes
to the picture. Then you will close your eyes to the memory. Then
you will close your eyes to the facts. Then you will close your
eyes to the connections between them."
Framing What Farocki Taught with a prologue and epilogue
she narrated herself, Godmilow extends Farocki's argument
that war images help us sympathize with suffering but do not help
us understand our role as creators of it. She asks us to consider
our role in global production (and possibly in suffering), if
not at Dow Chemical, then at Kmart. "I think the first 'location'
you have to occupy, in order to oppose national policy, is an
understanding of where your own labor goes. Who uses it and what
is it used for?" she explains. "Then you have to move
your labor out of a system that produces napalm, or even, if you
are a university professor, out of misinformation itself. So yes,
it's always an individual matter first, requiring self-alienation
from systems of thought and production. The film actively encourages
audiences to think about their own labor."
A producer and director for more than three decades, Godmilow
has earned a substantial reputation in film and video making,
especially for her work in nonfiction. Her Antonia: Portrait
of a Woman (codirected with folksinger Judy Collins in 1973)
received an Academy Award nomination and the Independent New York
Film Critics' Best Documentary Award. Far From Poland (1984),
about the contradictions of the Polish Solidarity movement, was
heralded for breaking new ground in the documentary genre. Its
radical deconstructive approach and juxtaposition of fact and
fiction led to the genesis of Godmilow's feature film, Waiting
for the Moon, a feminist/modernist "fiction" about
the lives of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. The feature-length
Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, directed by Godmilow in 1995, reinterprets
Ron Vawter's famous theater piece on the lives of two infamous
gay men who died of AIDS in the late 1980s. The film was featured
at film festivals in Toronto, Berlin, Melbourne, Sydney, Montreal,
Jerusalem, and Galway.
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