Juli is working on a series dedicated to the Artist Development Fellows. For all things Artist Development Fellowship-related, visit this page or search “artist development fellow” under tags. For more information about the grant, which is sponsored by the OFA, click here.
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Alexander Berman ’10 intended to shoot a documentary about the ecological problems surrounding Kamchatka, Siberia (the Russia Sarah Palin can see from her backyard). But instead he ended up with a different film altogether, spending three weeks in the Siberian wilderness with a group of reindeer herders, climbing Siberian mountains, and riding military tanks.
Last semester, Berman was awarded the Office for the Arts Artist Development Fellowship along with a Davis Center Goldman Grant to make a documentary about the ecological problems facing a developing area. However, as soon as Berman got to Kamchatka, along with a camera crew that consisted of his mother (translator) and his brother (tech/sound), he knew he wasn’t going to be making the film he had planned. Berman became fascinated by a group of people called Evens, descendents of the Mongolians, who live in the far east of Russia.
During the Stalin era, the Evens were relocated and commissioned to pursue cultural projects, including herding and domesticating reindeer. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, all subsidies for this kind of cultural work disappeared, and the entire lifestyle of the Evens people collapsed. Berman stayed with one family, who ran a garage of former military all-terrain tanks that were used to ship goods up and down the peninsula. Yet the people of the town still maintained a reindeer herd, as it had become a source of ethnic pride. So what Berman was attempting to document was a kind of salvage ethnography, a study of people reaching into the past and trying to salvage a history, to salvage a culture for themselves in a changing world.
During our interview last week, Berman tried to summarize what his documentary is about. “It’s about I think, trying to recapture your past; it’s about the social traumas that any minority group undergoes in an alien culture. These questions particularly in the Soviet Union and post Soviet Russia of how do minorities deal with identity issues and how do they develop their own self-sufficiency in a hostile culture is very interesting.”
Berman had always been interested in shooting a documentary in Russia because his parents were Russian immigrants, and although he’d been to Moscow and St. Petersburg, he’d always been drawn to Siberia. He said, “The far, far east of Russia is so alien and there is so much romanticism. It’s like the Wild West for America, except so remote, and still a frontier. I consider it to be one of the few remaining frontiers in a developing country left.”
With some of the money from his grants, he bought high definition equipment to shoot the documentary. This is notable, as his is the first ever HD project shot at Harvard by an undergraduate. Some highlights of his experience and of his documentary were the capturing of reindeer in the herd, and the hunt he went on for mountain goats on a volcano.
But when Berman talks about his documentary, he isn’t talking about a documentary in the strictest sense. Throughout the filming process, he invited his subjects to participate in decision-making, prompting them to do or say certain things, letting them review his footage as he continued shooting. In fact, Berman believes that documentary necessarily crosses the lines between fiction film and documentary.
“It was a kind of participatory cinema – subject and filmmaker participate to create a project. I was shooting an ethnofictional film – because there were certain moments when I would collaborate and ask, can you talk about this. So there was authorial intervention. I’m not shy about that. There’s a big debate in the film world of how much intervention there should be in documentary. Usually documentaries attempt a form of ‘cinema verite’ – where the camera watches and moves around. I’m interested in fiction filmmaking myself – fiction coming out of reality. So it’s shot like a fiction film. It feels seamless.”
Berman stands by his project because he believes that filmmakers should pursue what they believe in. “You get very few chances in film, so you have to make the film you really want. You have to know that this is going to be one big opportunity for a good percentage of your life.” His attitude and dedication to his art form informed his decision to scrap his original project for one that he really felt compelled to pursue, as well as many of his “directorial” decisions.
“People have accused me of aestheticizing these people’s lives. But whenever you put a camera in front of someone, it’s always going to be a pictorial representation of reality. I don’t see too much distinction between documentary and fiction. It’s the creation of one vision ultimately, and that’s what makes it art and not just science or a study.”
And that’s the sense I get from Berman. This is a young man with a very formulated artistic vision. It’s inspiring to see such development in a young artist. He’s already won prizes from the OIP Photo Contest for stills of his film, and is planning on submitting his work to festivals as soon as it’s done editing. In regards to the OFA Fellowship, he said, “This was a chance for me as a filmmaker to enhance my portfolio and to be able to apply to film school or apply to bigger grants like the Fulbright or the Rockefeller. With this grant under my belt, I wouldn’t have otherwise had this opportunity.”
The film will premiere on January 29th at the Harvard Film Archive in connection with his class, Digital Sensory Ethnography.
