David
Zeiger: When
I saw La Ciudad, it was one of the more exciting film experiences
in the last 10 years for me. And I think the film was a tremendous
breath of fresh air in the world of independent film today.
This
is a very vibrant, living, breathing world, but David did [something]
that is radical in its approach, revolutionary in its approach:
he went against what's become a fairly significant tide in the
world of independent film, specifically in the film schools which
is the mantra of "film what you know." Meaning make films about
your own life. Which is the reason nowadays you see a lot of films
about young white guys trying to get laid, showing up at Sundance.
[audience laughter] That's not the film that David made.
His
film really is a tremendous event in film, and something that
all of us need to cherish and need to be part of making it the
biggest event it can be. So what we'll do in this discussion,
I think, is talk a lot about the film itself and why you made
it, and what has happened since with it. I'm going to ask some
questions, we'll have some dialogue up here, but then as soon
as possible, I want to open it up to all of you to contribute
and to ask questions.
DZ:
Let me open by simply asking you to kind of give us a little bit
of a background to yourself and what led you to make La Ciudad.
David
Riker: Okay. Before I do that, I wanted to say that this is
the first time in the two years that the film has been out, that
I've had the chance to have this kind of discussion. And I wanted
to thank R&R, because it is a very isolated experience, you know,
as a filmmaker who's trying to make work that is engaged, it's
very difficult to be in touch with other-- for me it's been very
difficult to be in touch with other activists, artists. And I
am very grateful to be here.
I started making La Ciudad in 1992, after more than 10 years of
working with a camera in a context that was both agitational and
also one that was directly linked to social movements. My starting
point was as a young boy with a still camera, very young, taking
pictures of my mother and father.
Recently I went through all of my negatives, from the time that
I was 9 or 10 years old, and the main thing that I noticed is
that the camera angle changed, as I got taller. [audience laughter]
But I was photographing my family for years. And the camera became
a part of my identity, or my life, but there wasn't a clear understanding
of what it was.
When
I was 17 or 18, I began to become politicized. I was living in
London and I started to learn about the tradition of still photography
that was also engaged or committed, and people who had seen the
camera as a tool to document life as it actually is, with a belief
that simply documenting life as it is was contributing to changing
it. I went to university, when I was 18 and I was very involved
in the student movement at that time -- this was 1981 -- I became
involved in the anti-militarist movement and the movement against
the nuclear arms race in the United States at that time. Reagan
and Thatcher had been elected and the US was deploying new first
strike missiles in Europe, and I was very active in the peace
movement.
I
remember telling my photographer teacher at university, "I haven't
got any time to photograph. I'm in these meetings all the time."
[audience laughter] And he told me, "Photograph the meetings."
And it really, it was very simple advice but it helped.
I
began to document meetings, people, you know, sitting around making
banners, and placards, and then demonstrations, and over a period
of about four years, I documented this peace movement everywhere
that I could.
It
brought me to American military bases all over the world, it brought
me to families that were strange bedfellows: some middle class
families that were worried that their children would not have
a bright future if there was a nuclear war, working class families
that had seen their own communities radically transformed by the
arrival of new military bases.
And
so I found myself now using the camera as a tool, but I had a
conflict that I think is common to a lot of people, which is that
I didn't know whether to put down the camera and get arrested
or photograph my friends who were getting arrested, you know,
climbing over the fence. In
fact, for a period in London, I was documenting myself getting
arrested. I was trying to photograph right up to the last minute
[audience laughter].
And
during this period, I really began to understand that the documenting
work that I was doing had a value in and of itself, even if I
wasn't on the street, in front of Greenham Common in England.
Photographing portraits of Japanese descendants of what are known
as hibakcha[?], the children of atomic bomb survivors, [TRACK
3] -- those portraits were a useful contribution, and so I started
to see myself as a social documentarian with a still camera. This
is a long answer.
DZ:
That's okay... [audience laughter]
David
Riker (right) on the set of "La Ciudad"
DR:
This is probably the first venue where I can put these things
in some context. And also I want to say, until La Ciudad came
out, I hadn't had to go through this self-reflection until people
started to ask me the question I'm being asked tonight.
You know, at first, I resisted it, thinking about what happened
in my life to lead me to one direction or another, but these past
two years I've been really trying to put it together.
So,
at the age of about 21, I had assembled a large portfolio of photographs
of the peace movement, and I wanted to join a photo agency such
as Magnum and devote myself to that work. Then
I had a very profound realization one night in Boston, that I
didn't know any of the people in my photographs. I had a whole,
a very extensive portfolio, and I was looking at them and I realized
I didn't know them, I didn't have their addresses or their phone
numbers -- a few of them I knew the names -- but mostly I didn't
know who they were.
And
many of the images were powerful, that is they conveyed a lot.
But it seemed to me that something was missing in the relationship
I had. And at the same time that I had that realization, my grandfather
died. And for the first time, I spent a period of time with my
grandmother, and I drove with her to Florida to meet her old friends
that she and her husband used to see.
One
night, in Florida, a woman began to describe to me her childhood
in Massachusetts. She was a Greek-American, a Greek immigrant.
And she described to me as a child, going to work in the textile
factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, with her mother, every day,
as a young kid. And they lived in a town called Dracut which is
on one side of the Lowell River and on the other side is the factories.
Her name was Georgia. And Georgia was speaking about the experience
of walking to work across the bridge, and at the end of the day
walking back home.
In
Northern Massachusetts, it's very cold in the winter, there's
often ice and slush and snow on the ground. And the bridge between
Lowell and Dracut was freezing. And Georgia told me that every
day after work, her mother gave her a choice, which was to buy
bread at the bakery, next to the factory and walk across the bridge
home or to take a bus home and not buy the bread. And Georgia
told me that she almost always chose to buy the bread and that
she and her mother would, sort of, face the cold weather walking
home...Georgia,
as a young girl, 14 years old, holding the bread.
As
she was telling me this story, I was crouching down with my camera,
I saw the Lowell factories in the background, these kind of Albion
mills, and the gray, jet black sky, and these two workers struggling
in that environment. And then Georgia told me that coming across
the bridge with her mother, was the happiest memory from her childhood.
You see what I'm saying?
In
other words, what I was imagining as a photograph depicted one
side of this experience, which was the experience of exploitation,
and harsh living conditions for the family in Lowell. But for
her this was a moment of real joy, for many different reasons.
Because of how she was welcomed when she came home with a hot
bread. And it was at that moment that I realized that I wanted
to take the photograph of Georgia and her mother but then have
her come up to the camera and start to say how she felt, which
could contradict the photograph. So, it's not much of a story...
you're kind to listen to it [audience laughter]. But for me it
was a revelation.
I
said I want to continue but I just want the people in the photographs
to speak and so I put down my still camera, and I tried to start
making films. I took a kind of an adult ed class in film with
a Bolex 16mm camera. This was 1984 and I photographed, I filmed
women blockading the stock exchange in New York City, and a Reagan
reelection campaign, and a KKK cross burning in Meriden, Connecticut,
a lot of events that were happening, even without realizing that
I had no sound. I was filming these people, and you still couldn't
hear their voices [audience laughter].
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