The Giverny Document (Ja'Tovia Gary, 2019) (Patreon)

A good work of art is often about something. It has an idea about a given topic and perhaps makes a series of propositions about that topic, hopefully in a creative way. But one way that a work of art can achieve greatness is by not simply being about something, not just identifying a given issue and pointing to it, over there. Rather, a great work of art often enacts problems, arranging itself as a kind of field where crises of meaning can occur in real time. Great works of art are not demonstrations of already-settled thesis statements. They are material struggles, philosophy in action.

In this regard, The Giverny Document is indeed a great work of art. In it, Ja'Tovia Gary is grappling with one of the defining problems of art itself, but one that has a uniquely acute valence in our time: aesthetics vs. politics, or more specifically, whether creative effort is an indulgence for the privileged few. The Giverny Document addresses the depiction of nature and landscape, the history of that depiction, those bodies who have been excluded from that depiction, and various options contemporary artists have for correcting those omissions.

Expanded from an earlier short work entitled Giverny I (Neégresse Impériale), the new film contains multiple categories of sound and imagery, at first connected through concatenation and then, eventually, woven together with layered digital editing that superimposes an intrusive matte image upon an original ground image, in various forms (crosses, stripes, prison bars, etc). The original film contains images like the one seen above, shot in Giverny, where Monet painted his most famous canvases. Into these lush European landscapes, Gary introduces the African-American models who could never have appeared before Monet himself.

Appearing at various rhythmic intervals in the film are silent passages of film strip with pieces of grass and other natural material attached to them. They serve as a particular counterpoint to the lush Giverny sequences. One immediately recognizes them as allusions to Stan Brakhage's Mothlight, and in fact, they may actually be excerpts from Mothlight. I have seen the film twice now and I am still not sure. Nevertheless, Gary's point seems clear enough. What Monet was to painting, Brakhage is to cinema: a form of pure rendering of the natural world, virtually sealed off from the mundane social conflicts of the day. Something timeless and transcendent.

Gary begins to "break down" the walls of the garden of the aesthetic rather forcefully. In particular, she begins interlacing video footage and, most significantly, the harrowing audio, of the traffic stop that resulted in the murder of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old African-American who complied with all police commands and alerted the officer in question that he was in possession of a firearm, one that was fully registered and that he was within his full legal rights to have. Castile's girlfriend Diamond Reynolds recorded the entire event, even as she is attempting to help the dying Castile and narrating the events as they unfold.

Gary uses the Castile material to interject into, and comment upon, the landscape material from the other sources she employs. For African-Americans, she seems to argue, there is no such thing as "space" in an of itself, neutral, universal, transcendent. It is always saturated with a politics of racial predation, the fact that white supremacy and its power structures control  spaces and the bodies that can occupy them.

 But unlike a more simplistic work, The Giverny Document isn't a condemnation of "white male aesthetics," as though work like Monet's or Brakhage's is somehow passé or, worse, irresponsible, a luxury we can no longer afford. Instead, Gary seems to be staging a dialectic. By showing us just how beautiful it can be when black people are afforded access to these spaces of aesthetic contemplation, she reminds us that the Aesthetic itself is not a privilege but a right. Gary is using Monet and Brakhage to her own ends, politicizing them, because those artists and the traditions they represent are as much hers as anyone's. Again, only white supremacy would say otherwise.

The Giverny Document makes this point clear by incorporating a performance by Nina Simone, as she takes Morris Albert's 1970s banality "Feelings" and détourns it, making it both a commentary on the bland emotions expressed by the song itself, and her own, very different feelings as a politically aware woman of color.

Providing an overarching framework for The Giverny Document, Gary takes to the streets of Harlem, cinéma vérité style, to interview black women as they pass by. She addresses them in public space to ask them a basic but crucial question. Do they feel safe, in their bodies and out in the world? The answers are varied, but the process of introducing this problem so directly adds another dimension to The Giverny Document, enriching it and, to my mind, making it a full-fledged essay film. 

This is an incisive study of the crisis of "existing while black (and female)" in 2019, how the problem is hardly new but is always evolving and taking on slightly different, and differently disturbing guises. In order to adequately tackle such a complex topic, Gary essentially mapped it as a discursive space, exploring its various intersections and avenues, and then placed herself in the middle as a sort of curious researcher. The Giverny Document is great art in the form of intellectual cartography.