Olivia Wyatt's STARING INTO THE SUN (Experimental Documentary)

The Nightingale - Friday, 8pm
Having been continuously inhabited since before the record of history began, the diversity of the human experience in Eastern Africa is difficult to comprehend in anything other than abstract terms. Ethiopia is a country made up of 85 million people and over 80 distinct cultures with just as many indigenous languages. So what better way to learn about the country and its people than through a travel documentary, right? Wyatt's film portrays 13 different tribes but, as travel documentaries go, it gives a distinct lack of contextual information. We get subtitles telling us the location and name of the people featured in each section, and we become acutely aware that these are just labels and not definitions. We observe the visual and aural uniqueness of each segment, but there is no narration to lead us along the way. Differences in clothing and hair styles are lingered upon by the camera, and almost ever scene features singing, whether it is part of a wedding celebration, a chant during a ritual feeding of hyenas, or a multiphonic song to ease the stress of manual labor. Because we don't get a translation of what is going on, this makes the viewing experience more like being a foreigner in a strange country for the first time, and less like a reader of Lonely Planet. Structurally, this is both refreshing and disorienting. Sights and sounds from one village blend into those from another, and our learning about Ethiopia occurs in real time. The details of each tribal member become of lesser import than the greater societies from which they are born, and the diversity of the country is realized in our inability to define it in broad strokes. You won't leave the screening with a handful of facts about the country, but your mental image of Ethiopia will be sharper and closer to the real thing. Also screening is Wyatt's SEEKING THE SPIRIT (2010, 10 min, video), a powerful but gentle portrait of the congregation of the Celestial Church of Christ and their annual month-long worship ritual on Rockaway Beach in New York City. The practitioners, most of whom are immigrants from Benin, practice their unique form of Pentecostalism between the hours of Midnight and 6am. Their leader and prophet explains their beliefs to us in voice-over, and the black and white images of white-clad men and women gesticulating almost as if possessed remind us of the power of belief. (2010, 60 min, video) JH - Cine-File.info