Content area
Full Text
READING THE WATER: LECTURES ON HOME VIDEO ECOLOGY FROM THE GULF OF MAINE
Directed by Niklas Vollmer
University Film and Video Association Conference, University of North Texas, 2007
We are all born into families, and if we are lucky, we die from within them, too- cared for and supported to the end and then mourned and remembered.
In between entry and exit, we remain as part of a family, even if we have set ourselves, or been set apart, from mother and father, brother and sister, son and daughter.
To observe the shared traits and distinctive characteristics of a family, to listen to what is spoken and left unsaid, offers audience members the chance to gain insight into the eternally challenging but hopefully loving possibilities of family life.
Such work acts as a mirror of sorts; in watching three male generations in Niklas Vollmers family, an audience member inevitably projects onto Nik and his family one's own familial experiences. We see alternate possibilities to our own stories and compare the characters we know most intimately and the relationships we have with them against the framework of family established by Douglas, Niklas, and Tannus Vollmer, and also by extension we compare those we know to the wives and mothers absent from the frame.
In Reading the Water. Lectures on Home Video Ecology pom the Gulf of Maine, the characters we observe, listen to, and grow to know are not fictional agents; neither are they represented by an omniscient narrator. Instead, the author of Reading the Water is a member of the family represented, and it is his father and his son, his relations with them and theirs with him, that we see played out on the screen.
Reading the Water can thus be seen as working within the style of nonfiction film best known as personal documentary. Although the most celebrated personal documentaries, such as Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1990) or Su Friedrich's The Ties That Bind (1985), have been produced by, and about, people and Issues either misrepresented by or otherwise absent from traditional documentary, there has also been a strand of personal documentary made by filmmakers whose voices have traditionally been amplified far and wide- white, male filmmakers. In films by Ross McElwee and...