What Remains (Part 1)

Where is the Sun is a portrait of Dr. Sidney Correll, an American missionary and filmmaker, who worked across to the world from the 1930’s to the 1980’s. During this time he founded the United World Mission, now one of the largest Christian missionary organizations in the world. With a 16mm camera, he documented the progress of the Missions from Cuba, Africa, India, to the Philippines with the intent of creating promotional films that would raise money in the United States for future Mission endeavors. In the creation of these films, what he documented was a world amidst change.

Visually, Where is the Sun is set within the world of Dr. Correll’s films. As a filmmaker and grandson, I took up the task of transferring Dr. Correll’s existing 160 reels to high-definition video. Initially my interest was to preserve the films and make them available for viewing, but the world of Dr. Correll began to fascinate me. He was both a witness to and a very active force in the history of the Cold War, but the history he documents does not easily fit into preexisting historical narratives and in fact often resists such a form without internal contradictions. For example, Dr. Correll meets Camillo Cienfuegos on the streets of Havana on January 2 nd , 1959, the day Cienfuegos led the guerrilla faction that overtook the presidential palace. The moment is documented with Dr. Correll’s 16mm camera. Dr. Correll and Cienfuegos celebrate together at the end of the Revolution’s bloodshed. Here In this moment a missionary, who constantly vilifies Communism in his films, meets a young rebel leader, and one who was to become the first martyr for a Soviet aligned Cuba only a year later. That same year Dr. Correll’s Mission was expelled from the country by Fidel Castro, a man he called “honest” and “the greatest thing to happen to Cuba” in his ‘1959 Film Report.’

The video, although ostensibly a portrait of Dr. Correll, is an essay on the strange, underrepresented role of the religious imagination during the Cold War. As an essay its form and logic are heretical towards traditional forms and logic. The work exists as a series of episodes with Dr. Correll and his camera as a wandering protagonists. His dreams and his reality are approximated, embellished, and brought to life. His fascination with Communism becomes a fetish. The way in which he films orphans like his own children becomes heroic. He, along with the history of his time, is treated as a myth. The mythology includes ideas of humanism, passion, charity, and order. Excepts from the memoirs of Dr. Correll himself, along with those close to him play an important role in the creation of the myth. The memoirs are often times real, but come mixed with fictional accounts. A single narrator reads these accounts and at times adds historical context.

Night Two (SATURDAY):

Him + Her – Van LEO
Akram Zaatari
Produced by: The Arab Image Foundation
2001

A nude portrait of a grandmother, proud of posing nude facing a local
photographer, is a pretext to a visit to the Armenian/Egyptian
photographer Van Leo. Originally named Levon Boyadjian, Van Leo was
born in Jihane, Turkey in 1921 to an Armenian family that eventually
moved to Egypt in 1924, where he opened a studio in Cairo in 1947. He
is very much a good example of the photographer-craftsman, although he
is one of few photographers from that period who considered themselves
artists.

This is a portrait of a studio photographer, but it is also an attempt
to look at the photography of the 1940s and 50s from a critical
perspective, not a nostalgic one. It is a documentary that puts
traditional portrait photography and video face-to-face. It is a
dialogue between two media; crafted black and white print and the
electronically colored and manipulated screen, to comment on the
transformations in art practices and terminologies, and to evoke some
of the social/urban/political transformations that took place in Egypt
over 50 years of its recent history.

HOT
Gintaras Makarevičius
1999
"A disused factory canteen of the 1960's or 70's. A clear example of
this period has inspired the idea to revive and reconstruct the memory
of the real people who worked in that factory. I catered authentic
dishes of the 60's and 70's and invited the people who worked at the
factory to have lunch at the canteen, to hear their stories about that
time. The four toasts that were made during that lunch became the
basis for editing this video. The original idea of a meeting of
concrete people in a concrete place and their confrontation with the
past contained the promise of nostalgia, but the toasts revealed
issues that are relevant today – social instability. The toasts have
been juxtaposed with the archive footage of opening the same factory
canteen. It is an example of creating history and ideology – shapes of
thinking."

As You See
Harun Farocki
1986

" My film As You See is an action-filled feature film. It reflects
upon girls in porn magazines to whom names are ascribed an about the
nameless dead in mass graves, upon machines that are so ugly that
coverings have to be used to protect the workers eyes, upon engines
that are to beautiful to be hidden under the hoods of cars, upon labor
techniques that either cling to the notion of the hand and the brain
working together or want to do a way with that. My film As You See is
an essay film. The contemporary opinion industry is like a huge mouth,
or maybe a paper shredder. I compose a new text out of these scraps
and thus stage a paper-chase.

My film is made up of many details and creates a lot of image-image
and word-image and word-word relationships among them. So there's a
lot to chew on. I searched for and found a form in which one can make
a little money go a long way."