Hello Photo

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

In her startling, exquisitely shot Hello Photo, documentarist Nina Davenport turns the conventions of the travelogue inside out. She takes us to India and abandons us there, leaving us to believe what we see through her eyes. Her movie replicates the experience of being a traveller and thus a voyeur, of taking in sights without necessarily understanding their meaning.

Davenport seems less interested in cracking the enigma of India than in savoring it …Her hunger makes her unashamed, like the eager children who find the eye of her camera the next best thing to sweets.

"Hello Photo takes its title from their greetings, and its method from her persistent visibility. It's a film about seeing and being seen. It's about making a spectacle of yourself — as a Western woman armed with a movie camera — and being part of a spectacle; in the theater of the street, under a circus tent, on a movie set.

Davenport uses images of Bombay filmmakers at work and the comments of two film stars who philosophize about the nature of fame, to frame her own enterprise, and to comment on it both directly and ironically. In a country intoxicated with cinema, Davenport is just one more moviemaker. Yet she's undeniably an outsider, subject to the scrutiny that brings her. And what she's after is something quite different from her Indian counterparts; popular Indian cinema is spangled, artificial, and gleefully dramatic, a true manifestation of myth.

In contrast, Davenport's vision is poetic and free form, attuned to the beauty and strangeness of real life. Instead of being staged, her drama is found in the details of a broken stone wall and a sky full of bats that are really kites. More than just found, it is aggressively pursued - seized in the faces of people carried on a wave of madness or religious ecstasy, in the look of a blind boy whose expression is as remote and mysterious as the moon."

(notes by Linda Dubler, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

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Parallel Lines

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 10:57:00 GMT

Parallel Lines
Buy Now: $340.00

Filmmaker Nina Davenport searches for points of intersection between loss and meaning, suffering and hope, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Drawing on the conventions of the road movie, Davenport interviews strangers as she journeys across the country, finding that, despite their differences, many Americans dealt with the national trauma by referencing personal loss and longing.

After the attack, Davenport decided to drive from California back to New York City, where her apartment had looked out upon the Twin Towers. Along the way, she visited national monuments and sites of historic trauma, from the Grand Canyon to Los Alamos, from the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. The people she encounters at random along her way home share their own personal stories of loss, and with astonishing candor: a woman tells of losing custody of her children, a veteran describes his battle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a cowboy reveals that his mother murdered his father. Outside of Selma, Alabama, she encounters an elderly black farmer named Lee Shanks who shows her a photograph of his house crushed under a giant tree: “A tree fell on this house. I was in here.”

Davenport argues that each of her subjects is like Lee Shanks, crawling out from under the wreckage. The title refers not just to the Twin Towers themselves and the dividing lines of the Interstate, but also to these individual story lines paralleling the nation's tragedy.

Touching on a wide range of subjects, from the meaning of love to the horror of the atomic bomb, this poignant film is both a classic American road movie and a timeless portrait of American identity–the open road revealing heartache, humor, surprise, but, above all, the drive to endure. Finally reaching “Ground Zero” in New York, she meets a still photographer who seeks, like her, to record reactions to the site. He admits that his camera provides him with personal distance from the destruction. Like the photographer, instead of facing the trauma directly, Davenport seeks to “examine its reflection, the ripples outward across the American landscape."

"... an affecting personal documentary that proves there's still some heart left in the American Heartland...Without promulgating an agenda, a portrait emerges of a fallibly human populace including retirees, veterans, lonely singles, and folks struggling financially— precisely those usually absent from media portrayal.
—Variety

"... funny, unabashedly entertaining, and personal, none of which are approaches that seem overly popular among doc makers right now."
—Indiewire

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

2nd Place - Documentary, East Lansing Film Festival, 2005

"September 11th Remembered in Film," Brooklyn Arts Council, NY, 2007

Best of Festival, Riverrun International Film & Video Festival, Winston-Salem, NC, 2005

Camden International Film Festival, Maine, 2005

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2005

forumdoc.bh.2005 - Documentary and Ethnographic Film Festival, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

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Documentary Educational Resources - Filmmaker / Davenport, Nina / All Films

Hello Photo

Parallel Lines