The Giverny Document (Single Channel)By Ja'Tovia Gary

"Do you feel safe in your body?" (Preface: I've been struggling with this post for a while now, wishing I could rewatch the film, knowing I wouldn't be able to convey its power or importance. But, I also want the few readers of this blog to know of and seek out this piece which will be screening again, along with another live Q&A, via NYU's Orphan Film Symposium/Orphans Online@7pm ET on May 28th, 2020)


To me, Ja'Tovia Gary's The Giverny Document (Single Channel) internalizes the complex, fraught histories of black female bodies and assures that these bodies have thrived and will continue to thrive-- that they beyond thrive: that they live, that they care and, in the ultimate act of defiance, that they love.



I sank into the film's frenetic rhythm and aesthetic-switching as ideas flowed together,  a horde of intersectional themes lapping at one another. Visually the film is crafted collage-like with different styles spanning genres/media in a way that recalls Arthur Jafa's school of transcendent editing. Modes included hand-manipulated celluloid (reminiscent of Stan Brakhage), woman-on-the-street interviews (nodding to Chronicle of a Summer but changing the questions from ones of happiness, "Are you happy?" to ones of safety: "Do you feel safe in your body? In the world?"), to more recent forms of image-making in cell phone footage (Diamond Reynolds FB live images following the murder of her boyfriend Philando Castile), a meme of Joseline Hernandez, and what seemed to be drone strike surveillance via wiki-leaks. The film also drops in calm, serene images from Claude Monet's garden, in the title town of Giverny. Gary sits within the garden's lush green setting silently, passively posing until her and her artistic manipulations interject, silent no more.


Archival footage of Nina Simone's Montreux Jazz performance, specifically of her rendition of the normally heartless song "Feelings," anchors much of the film. Simone performs with an erratic intensity, forcing her audience to clap, to participate, to show themselves, making viewers uncomfortable with her active, emotional demeanor. She challenges her watchers to encounter her humanness, a challenge also posed throughout Gary's piece. Gary also seems to be challenging herself as an artist, learning how to use the medium she is working in to subvert a history of control, reinforced by the lingering cameraman in the background of Simone's video trying to best capture an angle of his "subject." Simone ends the song with a resounding reinforcement that her feelings are real, they are life and nothing-- no machine, person etc.-- can take them away from her: "I'll always have my feelings, nothing can destroy them 'cause I know that that is all there is..."



The Giverny Document (Single Channel) asks, as mentioned in the Hammer Museum Q&A between Gary and curator Erin Christovale, "Who gets to take up space?" A question possibly answered by Simone and Gary: feelings do not take up space, the spirit exists beyond the physical and it is these frontiers where life, change and love exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq8enWX1zHw

Streamed live w/Q&A via Hammer Museum
Online Programs
April 22, 2020