GLANCING OUTWARD: NOTES ON THE NEW HISTORICIST FILM

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“History, like pornography, couldn’t really begin until photography was invented. Before that, every account of events is merely somebody’s panting prose fiction. Have you ever read Herodotus’ description of a crocodile? It is the Fanny Hill of zoology.” -Hollis Frampton”I began with the desire to speak with the dead.” -Stephen GreenblattI. GATTEN’S BYRD: AN INTRODUCTIONThe purpose of this essay is to make some general observations about a recent development in avant-garde film and video that I will refer to as the emergence of the New Historicist Film. As a foundation for what is to come, I would like to recount a brief story that has become well known to adherents of avant-garde cinema through filmmaker David Gatten, who, for almost fifteen years, has been working on an as-yet-unfinished series called The Secret History of the Dividing Line (1999-). In these films, of which four of a projected nine have been completed, Gatten takes as his subject William Byrd II of Westover, an 18th-century plantation owner and politician who, among other achievements, led an expedition to map the original dividing line between the states of Virginia and North Carolina. He also owned the largest library in the colonies, which consisted of over 4,000 volumes ranging in topics from history to politics to the sciences. Upon his death in 1744, the library was auctioned off, and the bulk of the titles eventually passed to Thomas Jefferson, becoming the basis for the Library of Congress and a major site of the transmission of European ideas into the Americas.Byrd was certainly one of the more fascinating public figures in early American history, but his personal life proved just as absorbing. For decades, he kept a secret diary, written in a code of his own devising, consisting of thousands of entries that are nearly identical in their delineation of a rigid, almost slavish devotion to routine. In his spare time, he enjoyed taking walks in his garden, reading Hebrew and Greek in the original, and organizing his library. Byrd’s eldest daughter, Evelyn, was extraordinary in her own right. As a young woman, she fell in love with an Englishman, presumed by scholars to be Charles Mordaunt, an association forbidden by her father on political grounds. After a long-distance correspondence that lasted years and a thwarted stateside rendezvous, Mordaunt was drowned at sea, leaving Evelyn heartbroken. On one of their regular garden walks, Evelyn made a pact with her best friend, Ann Carter Harrison, that the first to die would visit the other and divulge the secrets of the afterlife. At the young age of 29, Evelyn died of a heart attack (or a broken heart, as the legend goes) and became one of Virginia’s most famous ghosts, with hundreds of reported sightings. 1The story of the Byrds, to which I will return later in this essay, seems like an unlikely topic for a series of avant-garde films, but due to their elegant black-andwhite cinematography, conceptual rigor, and unique synthesis of rival aesthetic paradigms, the Dividing Line films have come to signal an emerging tendency that I call the New Historicist Film. In this essay, my goal is to describe certain affinities between a number of films and videos that refract themes common to avantgarde cinema, such as personal subjectivity, myth, and the nature of the cinematic experience itself, through the prism of historical narrative. New Historicist Films draw from diverse subjects and seemingly unrelated disciplines in an effort to understand the present through an inquisitive, often oblique examination of the past. Taken together, these films represent a turn from the diaristic, first-person impulse of the avant-garde to the world “out there,” as it has been represented in primary documents, literary texts, and historical scholarship. In particular, this essay will compare and contrast the works of four filmmakers-Gatten, Rebecca Meyers, Deborah Stratman, and Erin Espelie-although this list is by no means exhaustive or exclusive. …Â