THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT: Black Women, Their Pain & Their Art

Avant-garde film is hard to talk about, whether it’s in a review or an academic endeavor. No one can truly nail what a work of this kind is saying unless the director came forward with a statement. If they chose to do so. However, art is meant to be interpreted in various ways by various people, all bringing their perspectives of art and the world together in order to give something its due. Not only are these films fascinating in how they often use a complex set of images and sound to convey a meaning, but the readings people take from them only increase their worth, artistically, not financially.

I don’t claim to be some erudite art scholar, but when dealing with The Giverny Document, the most recent and Locarno Film Festival-award winning short by artist Ja’Tovia Gary, it’s hard not to have one’s artistic sensibilities tested. Using a variety of techniques that go from combining analog film with digital editing, to archive footage with viral videos, Gary went above and beyond to perfect a passionate abstract study of black womanhood.

Woman on the Street

The easiest way to dissect the film is to see it as having three parts that cut back and forth from one another, making a thematic whole. These parts include segments where Gary goes on the streets of Harlem, New York to interview the locals, a glitchy montage filmed in Claude Monet’s Giverny garden and spliced together with several other mediums (which is in fact her 2017 project called Giverny I [Négresse Impériale] edited into this full picture), and archive footage of Nina Simone’s performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival.

It’s that first part that’s the most accessible due to its documentary nature, and a casual one at that. The artist simply asks one question to her black female subjects, and builds off of the answers given to her: “Do you feel safe?”. That could be in their body, in the world, or in general. Every answer provided from the interviewees is enlightening.

What’s of immediate note is the generational gap in the responses. Those ranging from teenagers to young adults either say they feel unsafe, or have concerns about their safety regularly. Elaborating further, some go on to mention being catcalled or stalked by random lecherous men, or going to functions in a violent neighborhood. The older women on the other hand often consider themselves safe, either by way of their belief in God or proclaiming themselves to demand respect.

It’s not out of the question to believe that the girls and young women have access to understanding the pressures of racism and misogyny combined against them, and encountering them daily only strengthens their awareness to a fear. The older ones likely had all their life to learn from experience, and don’t have the same reactions to those ills. This isn’t to illustrate some divide between the generations, but rather a bridge to show the complexities of being a woman of color. From what little we learn of the interviewed personally, one being an immigrant from Sierra Leone, and another turning out to be pioneering lightweight-boxing champion Marian “Lady Tyger” Trimiar, the unifying thread of these life experiences are built on having to do a lot of work to feel comfortable in their own skin.

Disrupting the Beauty

In the second and third portions of the film, the most striking aspects of Gary’s artistry come out in full effect. As mentioned, it consists of Gary appearing again in a blue sundress, wandering through Monet’s garden. Anyone familiar with the legendary French painter will be enamored by just seeing the environment he based many a masterpiece off of in this film, and seeing old film clips of him at work intercut with it could be equally neat. They won’t be comforted for long.

Stan Brakhage-style animated inserts of paint and leaves glitch through the frame, clips of assassinated Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton, discussing the importance of education pop up through the mix, and all sound and visuals cease when we’re made to see and hear a harrowing piece of media: the FaceBook Live video by Diamond Reynolds, filmed seconds after her boyfriend Philando Castile was gunned down by a Saint Paul, Minnesota police officer. Her distress, cries, and prayers for him to are haunting.

The images and sounds fuse into one another constantly, playing over each other in fragments or simultaneously, with picture-in-picture or thin static-like strips. All of this media clashing serves to deliver the message that as lovely as the Giverny gardens are, they inspired art that’s meant to soothe, not provoke. By cutting violently between Hampton, Diamond’s video, the animations, and Gary in the gardens, we see the full spectrum of the case for painful and shocking art born out of anguish and frustration. It must shown on the same ground as any Monet painting, but more disruptive to shatter all those safe sensibilities.

Nothing More than Feelings

Nothing makes better evidence for the claim of pain influencing and even propelling art than the Nina Simone segment. It’s her performing Morris Albert‘s song “Feelings,” a pop tune from the 1970s that’s often synonymous with the most cheesy and meaningless music of the time, even in its time. For a tune about wishing one had no emotions after losing love, it felt empty and cliched. Even when Simone started playing it at Montreux, she mimicked a robot early on, and paused to call it a shame to write such a song (“I’m not making fun of [Albert],” she exclaims. “I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that!”)

What follows is the virtuoso at her most vulnerable, genuine sadness in her voice as she continues to sing the lyrics, looking to the audience as she sings her own lyrical additions, about wishing she hadn’t lived so long. There’s also two instrumental breaks where she goes on Bach levels of polyphonies, adding a powerful swell of texture to the trite standard. All as those animations from the garden play beside her. A reflection of the art that once invaded a space, now coming together.

In the end, what we know that’s been documented of Simone’s life comes through. Her pain is real, and it comes through not only in this performance, but that whole night if you watch the entire concert film (which I advise you should). I’ve always been in support of archival footage in film art. The potential to transform and recontextualize a source is endless, and Gary made a masterful work out of the ability. The Giverny Document demands attention, and even if the attention it does receive ends up in the limited availability of a museum, the format cannot be more appropriate.

Have you seen any great avant-garde films lately? Should experimental works be more welcome in film critic circles?

 The Giverny Document made its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival on August 10. For future screening or installation information, check the director’s website here.