The 64th Flaherty Film Seminar 2018 – The Necessary Image

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christina Phoebe’s work explores the possibilities of ‘and’ rather than ‘either/or’. She is interested in creating spaces for the personal and collective to playfully meet, through sharing of memory and experiences, past, present, and future. Growing up in a diasporic family, her work has included exploring her grandmother's house, drawing, and filmmaking as nesting. She is currently finishing post-production of her first feature-length film, ‘amygdalià’, and was 2018 George Stoney Fellow at the Flaherty Film Seminar. Select works of hers have been featured at the Greek Film Archive (Athens), 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture, YNKB (Copenhagen), Flux Factory (NY), and Jeu de Paume's online Le Magazine, among others. Recent personal and collaborative texts of hers have appeared on VisAvis; Voices on Asylum and Migration, ArtsEverywhere, and the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. She lives in Athens, Greece

Notes

1 ‘The image is based on a still from Robert Flaherty's 1922 film Nanook of the North and it depicts Flaherty's protagonist, who was an Inuit named Allakariallak, holding a harpoon even though the Inuit portrayed in the film were using guns at the time. In his 1971 book Give or Take a Century the writer Joseph E. Senungetuk, an Innupiat from Northwest Alaska, has summarized this stereotype as part of a long tradition of depicting indigenous people as “a people without technology, without a culture, lacking intelligence, living in igloos, and at best, a sort of simplistic ‘native boy’ type of subhuman arctic being” – In short, a practice of freezing indigenous people in a simpler past as opposed to a complex present.’ – Statement of the Flaherty Board of Trustees (24 June 2018). https://www.facebook.com/flahertyseminar/ (24 June 2018).

2 Full statement available on the Flaherty Seminar Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/flahertyseminar/ (24 June 2018).