By Katy Montoya
Naomi Uman is known for her experimental and intervened in film like Removed (1999) and Hand-Eye Coordination (2002). Her reflections on the gaze over women’s bodies don’t fall into a simplistic anti porn stance or reduce the desire to see women’s bodies to a masculine whim. Other segments of her work can be characterized by an impulse to reach out into the world that is accompanied intimately by an impulse to reach inward and make herself vulnerable. That is, she exposes herself as she exposes others, for example in Videodiary (2011) made during her time in a rural Ukranian village. She spends long periods of time with families or communities and invests in the films she makes by learning the language spoken at least at an elementary level. Though sometimes falling into using the tools and voice of traditional ethnography, her films are increasingly situated glimpses into her time with a community, a repository of what she learned rather than claims to authoritatively speak “about” others. In three sparks, a three-part film made during her time in Rabdisht, a village in northern Albania, she emphasizes the forging of bonds over the study of subjects. Naomi Uman’s three sparks competes in the International section of FICUNAM 13, the 13th annunal UNAM International Film Festival.
Desistfilm: Did your BA in Medieval Studies provide you with skills that were transferable to your filmic practice?
Naomi Uman: I was interested in languages which was the only reason I was in Medieval Studies. It’s always really important to me to have some language skills when I go to make a film, because I work alone, not with a translator. If I worked with a translator it would completely change my relationship with my subject, so I refuse to do this. For Videodiary, I studied Russian for one month intensively, but the village I went to everyone spoke Ukranian. Because of the political situation, Russian had been imposed on them. Everyone understood Russian but no one wanted to speak it. Then I tried to study Ukranian with people who knew Russian, but my Russian was not all that profound. That is where the film Kalendar was born. I was studying language with people with whom I didn’t really have a common language. For every word they wanted to show me, they had to act it out or show it to me in some concrete way. That’s how the whole film came about. We were studying in July and the word for July is “lipen” which is, in English…
Desistfilm: Linden.
Naomi Uman: Linden, or tilo in Spanish. So they showed me they were drying the leaves from that tree. They could show me a physical thing that was happening at that time and I knew we were talking about months. A light bulb went off for me, that that was a really interesting way to learn, when you have to act things out or concretely show them.
Desistfilm: There’s a nice parallel between that form of language learning and film.
Naomi Uman: And also, in Albania with three sparks, I spent one month learning Albanian language with someone who later appears in the film as the man dressed in white. Studying became a way of forming a friendship with him, and I learned a lot about the culture by studying the language. For example, the word “xixa” which “spark” and is the name of the third part: He spoke about that word with a lot of affection because it’s one of the few words that starts with an “x” in the Albanian language. The little girl was later in a scene writing it as part of her homework. There was a parallel between me and her. She was also learning to write her letters and I always feel very child-like only knowing how to speak a language in the present-tense (I had only studied the present tense of Albanian). So my formation in terms of language is really important. But I don’t think there’s anything else from Medieval Studies that has been very important to my filmic practice.
Desistfilm: You learned Latin in high school, you said. And as part of your BA you had to study Old Spanish and Old Italian.
Naomi Uman: And I had lived in Spain before I started University so I already spoke some Spanish. I studied Spanish composition. I read a lot of old texts in Spanish and Italian and drew on my knowledge of Latin. But I really feel child-like when learning new languages and have to sound out the words or look up every word. It removes any sense of authority I have and that’s a position I often put myself into when making a film— making myself powerless. I mean, I still have power because I have the camera and am making the edit. But I talk about this a lot: making myself vulnerable. Whether I want to or not, this is what happens when you don’t understand the language particularly well.
Desistfilm: This must also have to do with you gravitating toward children when making your films.
Naomi Uman: Yes. When you meet adults, you have a conversation with them. When there are children around it’s so much easier to sound things out or act things out without being self-conscious. There’s an immediate understanding or interest in objects, the camera for instance or the dog I was embroidering. Even now when I went back to Albania to show the film in February the kids were all sledding down the hill when I arrived and they were like, “Naomi! Naomi!” and wanted me to sled with them. Just the fact that I was willing and able to do that meant that we had an immediate bond. I’m sort of down for anything. Children are easy to relate to if you’re not uptight and worried about your clothing or your, you know, good reputation (laughs).
Desistfilm: What were the reactions to the film from the people in the village?
Naomi Uman:I was really nervous that I was going to offend them in some way. The man whose house I stayed in this time organized the screening and we invited the whole village. A lot of people came. The interesting thing was that they were streaming it on Facebook Live via their phones for the people who couldn’t be there. Many people in the film left the village recently. For example, Kejsi, the little girl who you see eating the pear at the beginning— her and her family are in Italy now. The reactions to the film were fantastic. I think the first part about me, people were a little bored. In the second and third part of the film, they just loved seeing themselves on screen. One thing I was really nervous about was the part where the little girl in the graveyard says that the new wife is a blabbermouth. First of all, I don’t know if that’s the correct translation of the word she used, or if the translator was being polite. But the crowd roared with laughter over that.
Desistfilm: It’s a really funny moment. Speaking of self-portraiture and vulnerability, there are a lot of ways in which you make yourself vulnerable in this film are. As you mentioned, one is through feeling powerless when learning the language of the community you film. You begin three sparks with a confession about killing your dog as well. You also include scenes in which people in the community question you, for example the little girls who share with you the rumor that some thought you were a man. You show vulnerability both through filming these scenes and through including scenes that challenge and question you through the eyes of others. I link this to film Videodiary where you were interested in creating vulnerable and idealized images of yourself. How has this evolved in your film practice?
Naomi Uman:The idea of the idealized of the crude, raw self portrait began a long time ago. The idealized part is called Humor Rosa which are the airbrushed photographs of myself and others. That has evolved over time into more raw self-portraiture, in which I admit to this horrible accident in which I killed my dog, in the scene where the little girl puts makeup on me. I had no intention of being in this film. I went to Albania to make a portrait of village life. I did not intend to include myself in it. If you’re really an honest filmmaker, there’s no way to keep yourself out of the story in non-fiction film. The presence of the filmmaker changes the situation, the environment, the way people behave, talk and you have to acknowledge that. This idea was really articulated by Trinh T. Minh-ha so beautifully. I think I’ve taken this to another place by not just acknowledging it, but showing it. I never want to be on screen. Every time I see myself on screen I’m so uncomfortable. During the filming of Videodiary in Ukraine, I never intended to use that footage. I used the camera as a friend because I was really lonely. When I went there, I didn’t know a soul. It’s a really xenophobic place. I arrived looking like a weirdo with a shaved head, and a chihuahua that wore clothes, being Jewish. I felt a lot of hatred coming my way. The camera really became my friend. I would talk to the camera as a way of talking to someone. I had no internet, no phone, no connection to anyone. And when I was making the film about Hasidic men, I felt I needed to build out that story, and so the self-portrait material became very important to explain what I was doing, how I got there, what I had been through getting there, and eventually leaving. I didn’t make that footage thinking I would ever share it with anyone.
Desistfilm: How do the scenes of your vulnerability interact with your role as narrator? Ethnographic often involves explaining to an audience what is unknown. It thus involves assumptions about what is known and unknown. Narration can imply placing yourself as a neutral subject or authority. In your films, this takes place alongside your gesture of making your subjectivity very visible in the film.
Naomi Uman: In the first part, the narration is about me and my experience, so that seems like a natural explanation of what I was doing there and how I got there. I consider it an introduction to the second and third part. In the second part which really is a typical ethnographic film explaining things about Albanian culture, I try to start from a point of naiveté, or wonder, or awe like, “these are the things that I didn’t know that I’ve learned and are interesting to me and seem to represent Albanian culture.” I try to state those things without authority, gently. I’m definitely not an expert on Albanian culture, but I try to share the things I learned along the way.
Desistfilm: Something that Trinh T. Minh-ha talks about is how she imagines a gap between what she says and what the person she’s talking about would respond to what she’s saying in order to spare herself the role of being an authority. She imagines the family member in the room speaking back, saying, “Hey, you’re telling my story but you’re getting it wrong.”
Naomi Uman: Definitely. I agonized over the text. For example, the Kanun has many versions. All of my knowledge is based on one version. So I try to tread lightly and be very specific about the things I talk about. In Albanian culture, there is the concept of blood revenge. If I kill certain people in your family, your family has a right to kill certain people in my family, or burn the crops. This is laid out very clearly in the Kanun. In my experience in the village, there was a family that was involved in something like this. A man had killed someone in his wife’s sister’s family. I thought that this father didn’t exist, a family without a father. But actually, he couldn’t leave the premises of his house because he was under threat of blood revenge. But I didn’t know enough about the situation or feel I had the right to tell that story. Albanians are considered gangsters in the United States and suffer from a bad reputation. I didn’t want to add to that so I didn’t touch the subject. I worked on this film for many years. Every piece of text I thought about from so many angles. This is why I was so nervous to show the film. I asked myself if I was going to offend anyone or if I’d gotten anything wrong.
Desistfilm: How do you characterize the three segments of three sparks?
Naomi Uman: The first part is a combination of 16mm and digital. It was shot on digital and they shot to film and hand processed in color. Originally these were three short films to be shown in this order, but also able to stand alone. However, the 3 pieces inform one another. A lot of my work is made in groups. For festivals, I made three sparks into one work.
The second piece is the piece I went there intending to make, which is a romantic portrait of village life. The black and white, dreamy photography. You can get lost in the beauty of the images. And the third piece is reality from the point of view of the inhabitants of Rabdisht, their perception of me, their interaction with the camera. They have more power in the third piece.
I decided the last time I went to film that I would stay with everyone in the village for a few days. So each night I would download all my footage on my laptop and the kids would watch me. They learned how the camera worked, how the framing was. For that reason, you see Barije’s grandson in the scene where he chops the wood who has set up the camera and frames the shot perfectly. This old version of the Go-Pro didn’t have a screen, so the fact that this kid was able to figure out the framing was really impressive. He takes authority over the filming. In the end I edited and chose what to include so I have the ultimate say, but I tried to be balanced.
Desistfilm: You’ve said before that you’re interested in filming disappearing worlds, that you find enhances the beauty of a place. Now that you say your original intention was to create a romantic portrait of village life, I’m wondering how medium changes the way you view and think others view the material. I felt very differing senses of modernity between the analog and the digital portions of the film. If everywhere now exists on a spectrum of modernity, something about seeing the place rendered in digital allowed me to better appreciate the nuances of this spectrum.
Naomi Uman: Exactly. People have commented that it’s a shocking break between the second and third piece. But I think you sort of wake up from a dream when watching it. The second piece uses film normally used for optic sound, which is low ASA, high contrast film. I processed it with dektol which contrasted it even more. The result is this weird, unreal image. It could have been shot 50 or 100 years ago. And really, Barije does live in this other time. But when it cuts to the third piece, we see the crude reality that they live. Even more so now that, as of eight years ago, there are no longer any sheep or goats in the village. The shepherds have since gone to Greece. Kejsi and I are friends on Instagram. The video brings you back into 2023.
International Competition
three sparks
Director, screenplay, cinematography: Naomi Uman
Sound Design: Naomi Uman, Homero Glez
Albania, Mexico, 95 min, 2023