director's statement

My work as a film / video maker engages with the production of historical memory, and the intersections and disjunctions among personal, collective, and national memories. Specifically, I have been working through the creation of a visual essay form that uses a historical moment to open onto a contemporary landscape, creating a layered cinematic approach to history and politics. The Samantha Smith Project is a 51 minute piece that I’ve been working on in various forms and stages for the past four years. Broadly speaking, the piece is an experimental documentary about the end of the Cold War, historical nostalgia and amnesia, Russia, and America.

The film takes as its point of departure twin framing stories that I’ve tried to braid together. The first narrative is the story of Samantha Smith’s historic journey to the Soviet Union in 1983 as a child diplomat and official guest of her high profile “pen pal” in the Kremlin, then-Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov. The second is a parallel personal narrative of travel to Russia: In 1989, I was a participant in a pilot exchange program with a Soviet high school (part of a government initiative that was very much connected to Samantha Smith’s legacy of child diplomacy). My family hosted a Soviet high school student for a month, and later in the year, I spent a month living in Moscow. Fifteen years after my original trip to Moscow, I returned to Russia with a camera to spend eight months living in Moscow.

I was interested in the historical framework of the late Cold War period (beyond the personally motivated exploration of the political climate of my childhood), because, as a historical moment, it can be seen as a locus of erosion. As the binaries and polarizations of Cold War containment culture discourse collapsed onto themselves, the late 80’s became a site of destabilization, yielding a kind of hyperrealization of historical narrative (which in turn could be seen reflected in and externalized by personal narrative). As such, this historical terrain seemed to me a fruitful one in which to situate an exploration of the production of cinematic visual memory and filmed history, both on the level of national official discourse (state propaganda in particular) and on the level of individual personal memory. Using the experience of the late 80’s as a prism, I hoped to look at contemporary Moscow in transition, as well as to recontextualize the legacies of Cold War diplomacy. Ultimately, I anticipated that the narratives of Cold War child diplomats (Samantha Smith’s and those of the Russian exchange participants) could frame a broader investigation of present-day Moscow, US foreign policy, and the manufacturing and dismantling of “enemies” to advance political agendas (an investigation newly relevant in today’s charged climate of post-9/11 xenophobia).

Formally, I’ve taken as my point of departure the exploration of the following theoretical concerns: the juxtaposition of past and present, filmmaking as an act of reframing history, the interplay between archival footage and contemporary cinema verité footage, the relationship between documentary and staging, the collision of Hollywood fantasy with real politics, and the reinterpretation of archival and propaganda images (especially in the context of communist / post-communist society). I’m interested in creating films that use hybrid formal strategies (re-enactments, collage techniques etc.) and combine visual textures (including digital video, Super 8, found footage, television, and downloaded images) to create alternative modes of documentary expression, films that mine both the more traditional vocabulary of ethnographic / observational film and that of experimental film. I ultimately hope to combine elements from different strategies in pursuit of carving out an alternate discursive space for visual memory, suggesting new ways of representing and interrogating history in film / video. By interweaving footage of different genres/textures from different historical periods, my work attempts to create a vocabulary that can address interstitial spaces in history and representation.

My original plan in Russia was to explore the changes that had occurred in post-Soviet Moscow through a documentation of my meetings with the fifteen Russian participants of my high school program. I had imagined that the filming of their lives in a contemporary setting would create a counterpoint to the historical investigation of the past, and I hoped to have conversations with my Russian peers about how they remembered their childhood / adolescent experiences of first encounter with the US – specifically issues of personal and national nostalgia as focused through the lens of the late Cold War period. Understanding my generation in Russia to be uniquely poised between being old enough to remember the Soviet system well and young enough to be comfortably integrated into the fast-paced hypercapitalism of the New Russia, I expected the discussion around these questions to generate a complex and nuanced space of reflection.

Ironically, I quickly learned that my generation of young Russians currently finds itself in a moment of being singularly and systematically unreflective about the past – not least of all because they have the most at stake in the idea of moving forward. It’s often said of post-war Germany that it took a full generational cycle before young people felt free enough from the weight of their national history to finally begin to investigate what had happened during the war, to write and make films about Germany’s past. Similar statements have been made in describing the US in the 1970’s – after the overwhelming 60’s came a decade where it became difficult to talk about anything. So in retrospect it makes sense that, after the huge shock of the immediate post-Soviet 90’s (years characterized by searing political talk shows assessing the damages of the past, volumes of writing on history, a mushrooming of political parties, and profound socioeconomic instability), Putin’s Russia is guarded, protective of its tenuous stability, politically disengaged, and aggressively anti-nostalgic. It should hardly have surprised me that no one – especially no one my age – has very much to say about the 80’s.

Ultimately, I only succeeded in meeting two of the fifteen Russians I had hoped to find. However, as part of my documentation process, I had filmed a complete record of all my phone calls as I attempted to track down my fifteen subjects (starting only with home phone numbers from 1989), called wrong numbers, talked to parents, tried and failed to arrange meetings with people who, for the most part, did not remember me and did not seem at all interested in the project. Back in the US, as I screened my footage from Moscow for other people, I noticed that people consistently responded most strongly to the images of the frustrated phone calls, and gradually I began to work with this material as a way to start to address directly the idea of failure in the piece. As I struggled to come to terms with my personal experience returning to Moscow, the phone call material took on increasing resonance, speaking to the idea of failure on multiple levels: failure of my “project,” failure to communicate (psychologically, culturally, linguistically, and acoustically), otherness / foreignness as a kind of failure, and of course the broader theme of the failure / erasure of historical and personal memory.

A Russian speaker would immediately discern that I make grammatical mistakes when I speak Russian, and a savvy interpreter of body language might also catch me hesitating when I actually have no idea what has just been said to me. I like the idea that the telephone makes explicit the idea of forced identification, and, as a documentary filmmaker, I especially like the idea of holding myself up as a specimen, a subject of the same uncomfortable scrutiny as my documentary interview subjects, or the young girls in the re-enactment / audition material.

Language and cultural assimilation have played a recurring central role in my work process, which is part of why I found the thread of the failed phone calls a potentially rich territory to work around. This project has been the third film I’ve made which has had a language learning / cultural immersion component built in to the work process. My first long-form piece, For Beijing with Love and Squalor (1997), was filmed after I had spent four years studying Mandarin and over a year living in China. Reconstruction (2001) involved a period of about eight months spent living in Bucharest, and in that case the Romanian language-learning process was concurrent with the filmmaking. So the decision to live in Moscow for an extended period of time (as well as to re-learn my nearly forgotten high school level Russian) was a natural one: the daily struggle to live in another country and learn to communicate (literally) with the people around me helps me think through many of the ideas about otherness, identification, and culture with which my artistic practice engages.

While many of these concerns about language, culture, history and memory have informed my work for some time, I began The Samantha Smith Project specifically hoping to be able to explore these ideas in a much looser, less narrative context than I had been able to in the past. In many ways, Reconstruction shares the theoretical preoccupations of the current piece, but in working on it I felt frustrated by the idea that its experimental gestures and formal elements always operated in service of a dominant linear narrative structure. By working through a less conventional non-linear structure of narrative threads that nest within other narrative threads, my work has developed in a new and fruitful direction.