DANA GORDON
This essay was written for the 1990 retrospective exhibitions of Dana Gordon’s films at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, Barcelona; Filmoteca Espanola, Madrid; Arsenal Kino, Berlin; Dusseldorf Film Institut; Filmmuseum im Stadmuseum, Munich; and the National Film Museum, Brussels.

        by Richard Peña,
                        Program Director,
                        The Film Society of Lincoln Center,
                        April, 1990,
                        New York, New York


At a screening of Dana Gordon’s films back in the early Eighties, filmmaker Ken Jacobs remarked to Gordon that his (Gordon’s) films would only be understood in ten years. Jacobs’ amazingly prescient remark provides a good introduction to Dana Gordon’s work, for in so many ways the films of Dana Gordon anticipate so much of what was most interesting and vital in the American avant-garde cinema of the Eighties.

With few real exceptions, the history of independent filmmaking in America can be fairly strictly divided between two major currents: one which emphasized a notion of film as political critique, and one which sought to expand the boundaries of film form and language, a current which is usually called "experimental" or "avant-garde." In the explosion of independent film activity that was the Sixties, both of these currents, the political and the avant-garde, grew into formidable forces, with separate, parallel sources for funding, means of distribution and venues for exhibition. While both currents saw their principal enemy—the Hollywood feature—as being the same, there tended to be little dialog or even awareness between members of these alternative currents, even if more often than not audiences were often shared. Unlike Europe or Latin America—where figures such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Glauber Rocha, and Solanas/Getino could be found—the union between radical form and radical politics dreamed about in the Sixties in America at least would have to wait.

With this in mind, one can perhaps begin to appreciate the freshness and provocativeness of a work such as PARADISE SPY (1977-78), to date Gordon’s longest and most complex work.  Shot over the course of a trip to the Mexican Yucatan, the film is composed of a series of shots each of which has been printed six times. In Part One, each shot is presented twice in silence; Part Two repeats the same order of shots as Part One, only includes alternating musical tones over each shot. In Part Three, the same group of shots already presented in Parts One and Two reappear, only now they are presented according to their duration, going from the longest  to the shortest. The first in each pair of shots is presented silently, the other with a musical tone background.

Although the above description seems to put the film squarely into that genre of avant-garde filmmaking which became known as the "structural" film (a genre in which images and sound were arranged according to some preconceived structure or concept), to see the film merely as being part of this trend would ignore a whole series of other concerns foregrounded by the filmmaking.  One must first really look at the images themselves: images of a young American filmmaker’s travels in the Third World.

The coolness of the structural film is immediately opposed to the subjective heat of the diary format. Moreover, especially as each image comes to be repeated several times, one becomes increasingly sensitive to the implications of the act of filmmaking itself.  Despite Gordon’s own personal politics, he is still a white American who has the power to travel to Mexico and indeed film what he will; the "man with the movie camera" suddenly takes on a class and national identity.

The title itself, PARADISE SPY, seems to extend this dialectic.  One common description for so much of the Third World (and especially Mexico, which has come to depend so much on tourist dollars) is as a kind of paradise, a place seen as unspoiled by the modern and offering a full panopoly of pleasures. Yet at the same time the unsullied nature of the Third World and Latin America is emphasized, there is also a more treacherous aspect: the possibility of revolution, of radical social and political move-ments which threaten to change forever the relationship between Third World nations and the foreign metropolises which control their destinies. As the machinations of the First World in the Third are for the most part clandestine, thus we have the idea of espionage, of "spying," and indeed it’s no accident that so many contemporary spy novels use Latin America or other parts of the Third World as settings, for control of these regions has become, especially with the shutting down of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, of increasing importance.

The dichotomy evidenced by the title PARADISE SPY extends throughout the entire formal structure of the film. In Part One, in which pairs of identical shots are seen in silence, there is a split between film as a record of immediate sensual experience and film as a processed, industrial artifact. Especially given the purposeful roughness of much of Gordon’s shooting, our first impression upon seeing his images is of watching a kind of "home movie" compilation; the first in each pair of shots asks us to partake in the filmmaker’s memories of his travels. Yet the immediate repetition of each shot suddenly pulls us away from that romantic identification with the camera eye; rather, the mechanical, industrial nature of the film medium, which could lead to perfect reproductions of that initial shot not just once but innumerable times, is emphasized.

Part Two, which features the same series of repeated shots only now each one is accompanied by an alternating musical tone, underlines the filmmaker’s ability to manipulate our understanding of each image. The swelling, exhuberant tone we first hear is challenged and indeed replaced by the more subdued, somewhat mournful sound placed over each shot’s repetition. As in Chris Marker’s experiment with alternative narrations in his LETTER FROM SIBERIA (1958), Gordon shows how the meaning of each image can be created, albeit in a more subtle sense than Marker.

Finally, in Part Three, which re-orders the images according to shot duration and features one image presented silently followed by its repetition with a musical tone background, Gordon points to how these images, which at first seemed so randomly selected, can in fact coalesce to form something like a narrative. The re-ordering according to shot duration can be seen as a parallel to the process of narrative structuring which goes on in a political thriller, for example; an initial exposition is then followed by a series of increasingly short scenes, as tension mounts and the object of our investigation comes into view. Yet Gordon provides us with no solution to the mystery; what’s revealed instead is the process of investigation itself, and the mechanisms by which a filmmaker can guide a viewer through that process. Through the transition from silence to sound in each set of repeated images, each shot is made to seem to be part of a larger narrative, the beginning and end of which must be provided by the viewers themselves. It is through these narrative choices—the ways in which each viewer will link each image to a bigger story about Mexico, Latin America and the Third World, that notions of political identity will be expressed.

If Dana Gordon's work does not seem "political" enough, it is perhaps because it scrupulously avoids the didacticism which has unfortunately come to characterize so much political filmmaking of the documentary or fiction vein.  Rather, his work seeks to create dialog, to ask viewers to question and even to challenge the sounds and images they normally accept so readily.