Audio transcription
For more interviews, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Audio Collection page.
An Evening with Sky Hopinka with introduction by Haden Guest and Sky Hopinka and post-screening discussion and Q&A with audience. Sunday May 5, 2019.
Haden Guest 0:00
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. I want to thank you all for being here tonight, as we welcome artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka, who is a 2018-19 Radcliffe –Film Study Fellow, and as such, has enjoyed really wonderful company this academic year with other artists-in-residence whose work we have showcased this season, including Fern Silva, who's here tonight, as well as Ja’Tovia Gary, and Susan Meiselas, whose films we screened—her larger project we presented last weekend. It's very exciting to present the work of a younger artist at the start of what clearly promises to be an important career. I should say already is an important career. Since completing his MFA in 2015, Sky Hopinka has been remarkably prolific, and has exhibited his films and installations at prominent museums across the country and around the world, most probably at the Whitney Biennial, where he was a featured artist in 2017, and this year he will be a featured curator, presenting a number of film programs in September. In a remarkably short period, he has produced a cohesive body of work that interweaves, with subtle variation, a set of major themes related to landscape, language, and the Native American experience. As a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, Hopinka offers an important corrective to the ethnographic gaze from elsewhere that has for so long defined the image of Native American life and culture in the cinema. Exploring key and contested sites of recent and--and now distant history, Hopinka’s moving-image work, whether single-channel or installation, asks us to consider these landscapes as embodied memories, still not recorded, as mythical places, whose resonant beauty and power still have much to teach those who listen and watch attentively. Hopinka's films are keenly tuned to language, as you will see in the five works presented tonight, whether in the form of oral histories of family or of struggle and resistance, or poetic and incantatory texts. Language itself, imperiled and ephemeral, and often threatened with extinction, is itself a form of resistance in Hopinka's work. I'm very happy that we can welcome Sky Hopinka tonight for this presentation of recent work from the last five years. We will have a conversation afterwards, so please join us for that. I'd like to ask everybody to please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have--please refrain from using them. And now, with no further ado, please join me in welcoming Sky Hopinka!
[APPLAUSE]
Haden Guest 2:50
Hi!
[APPLAUSE]
Sky Hopinka 2:57
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello!
[LAUGHTER]
Hello. My name is Sky [LAUGHS]. Thank you, Haden, and thank you, HFA. Thank you, Harvard. Thank you, everyone, for coming tonight. It means a lot. This program is a culmination of some recent work, mixed with one old one from 2015, which is Jaaji Approx. But it begins with Dislocation Blues, then goes to Fainting Spells, and then Jaaji Approx. And after that, I'll be doing a reading from this text that I wrote and published last year. So, just to prepare you for that. After that is When You're Lost in the Rain, a recent short film, and the very last film in the program is from a two-channel installation called Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer. I'm only showing one channel here at the very end. And that is... it’s challenging, I mean just to see how it plays, and how it exists on the screen. But a little bit of background. It's from a site that is in Florida, Fort Marion, which is one of the oldest forts operating in the country. It was built by the Spanish in the 1600s, and at the end of the Indian Wars in the late 1800s, it was used as a prison for tribal belligerents. And it's a really complicated space. It was where Richard Pratt developed the Indian boarding school system that he spread throughout the United States. And it's where, I don’t know, he came up with the term, “kill the Indian, save the man.” So it's a really complicated space, and I'm really hoping to try and unpack some of that with this film and how it closes out the program. But thank you again, and I'll see you soon.
[APPLAUSE]
Haden Guest 4:50
...bring back Sky Hopinka.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks so much for this wonderful program, and special thanks for that really powerful reading. The text was also a centerpiece, and I found that really quite profound. I was struck by the ways in which language is so important to your work. But in this, you reveal another idea of language, of the sort of grammar—poetic, structural, of the moving image itself. And I was wondering, in terms of Jaaji Approx—this really close and attentive reading to the form itself—you speak at some point in that text about your intuition guiding you, and yet here, you're really showing this level of, again, really precise thinking about form and structure. I'm wondering, was this in mind as you were making this film, this kind of, symbolic reading of the structure itself of the film?
Sky Hopinka 6:11
Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. Well, so the thing that I wrote, the first part, I wrote probably just after I made that film. I made it in grad school, and a professor asked me to, just as an exercise, write about it as what we were doing for our independent study. He was like, “Yeah, I need some justification.” I was like—okay! So I wrote that like, 700-word text as just a way to think about... well, I mean, as an exercise too, in how I'm often--I don't know, a lot of times like the work, the quick read is hallucinogenic, or psychedelic, but that always kind of bothers me because it's removing a sense of agency any one has, in how they experience these things, and also the choices behind them. And I didn't want to talk about too much about, like, my family, or I didn't want to talk too much about, you know, my tribe, or my culture, and I just wanted to focus on the formal aspects of it, and unpack those. But do it in a really overly verbose way that's just kind of ridiculous. And then I guess like last year, I was really trying to think about this film, and how—I don't know—how it's still informing what I'm doing today. At the same time, I am trying to understand, you know, where intuition leads me through the editing process. Because usually, just a first pass of an assemblage, I feel like I'll get a sense of: yeah, this goes here, this goes here, this footage interacts with this, this song goes with this, and it feels right. But then the next step in the editing process is just to think about, well, why does it feel right? And what can I do to either undermine the expectation of an audience, or to support the feelings of how it feels good... or not. And so, intuition is always the first step, and then trying to understand what sorts of things have given me a sense of where it comes from is what follows.
Haden Guest 7:57
You also speak there about the layer. And I feel like this is something else that’s so important on, you could say, many levels, many layers—this idea of simultaneity, of doubling, and also this idea of incompletedness, a need to always go back. And now it seems like, in this case, your reading is adding yet another layer onto it. And I was wondering if you could speak about this kind of process of accretion that seems to be part of your creative process, and also seems to leave—sort of give the works a kind of both density and openness.
Sky Hopinka 8:34
I mean, that relates a lot to how I think about, well, I guess, the reaction to this cinema against more mainstream approaches to indigeneity, where it feels like its definition is by attrition. It's like, well, I'm not this, I'm not this, I'm not this, and it's always like that first step, that first initial sense of like, I need to say what I'm not, in order to get to what I am, or who I am, or what I believe. And so the accretive aspect of this is really about generating all these different intricacies or layers around the things that I'm personally processing, or others may be processing too, as they deal with their identity or being a Native person in this country today. And so it feels very overwhelming, but how can that all function purposefully, where I may be trying to pull your attention in different directions, where there's two subtitle tracks going across on the top and bottom of the screen. Like, I know, you can't read that at the same time. I mean, I can't read it. But it's just like, well, what do you want to look at? Do you want to look at the image? Do you want to look at the text? How do you divide your time and what you're paying attention to? And how do you pay attention to what you're paying attention to? And how can I play around with that through the editing process, and through this maximalist approach of color, image, text, voice, and all these different things.
Haden Guest 9:50
But also, I mean, there's an idea, a really poetic idea, that I think is sort of fundamental here. I mean, this idea of language—just as we read poetry, we read meanings, but we also read the form itself, no? And it's also, again, it's about density and lightness to poetry that allows it to be....its elusivity, to give it a kind of life, of vitality, a kind of propulsive quality, and it seems like that's something that... an ideal, and an idea that your films share.
Sky Hopinka 10:24
Yeah, there's this term the “ethnopoetic,” that I was really into a while ago. I mean, probably 2013 or ‘14, when I really started thinking about cinema, and documentary, and ethnography, and these traditions, and how that offered another approach to, or this idea of what happens when those people who traditionally have had cameras pointed at them, pick up the cameras, and what do they want to look at? And so it's like, what do I want to look at? And how does the poetic function as a tool, or a mechanism in achieving that outside of, you know, trying to quantify and understand every little aspect of my culture and my identity, and using that same sort of approach of scientific study through film, which, I mean, I'm really bad at, you know? And, I don't know. I mean, I just try to figure out how to make it all come together in a certain way. And even still, like with the ethnopoetic, I'm still trying to understand what it means to have that “ethno-” attached to the poetic. It's still under that umbrella. And so I've been trying to not pull away but just look in different directions outside of these ideas of what am I beholden to? And what are these traditions that I'm a part of, whether it is ethnographic documentary experiment, or just being an indigenous filmmaker. So there's all these different things that are at play, as I try to pull and distance myself and dive into others.
Haden Guest 11:41
There's also a dimension of a kind of self-ethnography? I mean, your own personal...your relationship with your father, for instance, that's so important as a kind of diaristic, a sort of, you know, self-reflective, reflexive mode, as well, that's yet another layer of that as well. I was wondering, in terms of thinking of multiple layers—just to ask a very obvious question about the last film, about the second channel that we did not see. I was wondering if you would want to tell us a bit about that?
Sky Hopinka 12:15
Yeah, I mean, it's always a challenge to show that. I don't know how I feel about it, still. But, I don’t know, I also like the space that it provided after the reading and When You're Lost in the Rain, to just looking at images that are 130 years old. So, how it usually would be projected is on opposite walls. You have that channel, and the other channel is more about the space, about the fort itself, and about Coacoochee’s escape from Fort Marion during the Seminole Wars in 1836. And both of them, you know, they play against each other with the soundtrack. And one is about looking at these images, and just the slow sort of deliberate process. And the other is– There's more scrolling text recounting Coacoochee’s escape. And yeah, that's like how it would be if we had two channels, and....
Haden Guest 13:01
Okay. No, I'm just– Because I also wanted to ask just about installation in general, because you've explored different modes of installation work. And I was wondering if you could just... especially after this really mesmerizing screening, where we're really just thinking about the cinematic experience, as opposed to the museum or the gallery experience, the different kind of pressures and possibilities that are placed upon or given to the image. I was wondering if that's something you could... I don't know, I mean, I don't mean to ask you to generalize too much. But if you could maybe speak from your own experience, because again, you're an artist, now, who are given these two possibilities to sort of work with.
Sky Hopinka 13:47
Yeah, where I have had some of these videos screen in gallery spaces, like only up on a monitor, projected, that kind of opened the door for me into thinking about this space as another possibility for screenings, or for making work for it. And so this Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer piece was the first one that I made specifically for an installation. But still, like, I can't get away from the big screen, you know? I mean, the sound is so much better. And the projectors are so much better. But just in coming up with the structure of it too, I felt less like I had to have a beginning, a middle and an end, where what does it mean to enter this, like, halfway through, in the middle? And what do you need to know before you come into it? Or where will the loop take you as you progress through it—hoping that an audience member will stay for the 13-and-a-half minutes of the projected installation. And that's another thing too, it's like--you know, how do you deal with sound, with lights? And what are these different concerns, where, I mean, if I had my druthers, then it'd be– You know, the volume would be really loud in a gallery space, but no one else will be happy with that. So just like, what are concessions that I'm trying to make, are there headphones? Are there speakers? Am I picking out the speakers, is the gallery? So it's just these different things that are swirling around, that are considerations that I hadn't really thought too much about, where I usually trust a projectionist to take care of the image and the sound and let them make the image look as good as it can, and as good as it sounds. So there's these more practical concerns that I feel like I have to take into consideration that I never really had to before. And those inform an edit too.
Haden Guest 15:19
I'm also just thinking about the general size and scope of your work. It seems that, I don't know, I was wondering if that's something that– And again, speaking more in general terms, but it seems that you've found, at least in my experience of your work, a kind of ideal sort of size, and sort of immersive space for your work that is enough to sort of set some elements and ideas sort of floating and yet not...well, yes, there are times—I don't ever think it's overwhelming—but at times, there's a lot of information, but it seems that you're in control there about that, and a lot of that seems to be in terms of your control of time, and not allowing the films to go too long.
Sky Hopinka 16:03
I worry about that every single day that I'm editing. Is this too long? Is this long enough? And usually, with all these films, I try to get them down to– I mean, usually when I'm halfway through editing, I usually ask myself, well, can this be like two or three minutes shorter? And it usually can. I mean, it's hard to find the footage, or the sequences that, you know, I may have loved when I shot, and may have loved in the editing process, but really don't function in the overall scope of the film. And so, I’ll just try and cut those out and see how it works. And more often than not, cutting those sections out make the film shorter, and a little tighter and a little stronger. I mean, there's a lot of things, like, in Dislocation Blues, that I cut out that I really wanted to keep, but it was just too self-indulgent.
Haden Guest 16:46
Okay, well no, I mean, it speaks to the sort of rigor and the discipline that I think is revealed also in this text of yours. I just wanted to go back to a topic raised earlier about landscape, because one of the things that fascinates me about the films is you point to a different sort of, I think, notion of landscape, of a kind of subjective dimension, this idea that these landscapes that you're inventing and sharing with us, are as much part of the land itself, but also part of your imagination. I love the way, you know—speaking of this lonely trip that you take—there's a kind of love and loneliness intermingled there, a melancholy and longing that is forming this, is shaping this landscape, and perhaps the layers of effects and the colors that you quite literally give to them. The ways in which, in Dislocation Blues, the young woman on the Skype is talking about this landscape, and her evocation of the landscape, and worrying if it's... you know, she's not reinventing it through the lens of nostalgia, and things like this. So I was wondering if this is something you could speak about.
Sky Hopinka 18:06
Yeah....
Haden Guest 18:06
Let’s say the cinematic possibilities to render this.
Sky Hopinka 18:10
Well, in like Dislocation Blues, the landscape means so many different things to so many different people. And Cleo, as he's recounting his experiences, or his memories there, it becomes a part of my landscape, or my understanding of it. But then even more broadly, like, I've often have trouble talking about landscape or my relationship to it, and it's taken me some time to arrive to something. But a few months ago, I read a poem by a friend of mine, called So What? But the last two lines of the poem are: “Why write poems about the land / It describes itself”. And that really resonated with me, as, you know, what does it mean to then try and describe something that needs no description? Or rather, what does it mean to then ingest the description that the landscape is giving you? But then it goes back to this idea: what language do you speak? And what sort of community do you have, and what are the different mores and filters that you have that affect your listening to the landscape, you know? And so the act of listening to a landscape describing itself, then it becomes more about how you process that information, and how you internalize it, and how you reflect it back out. And so a lot of these films are me trying to understand my placement in this landscape, their histories, and also like how they look on screen. But then also, what does it mean to be filming these different places? And how are they markers of who I am right now? Or where I was six months ago when I was shooting them? And how do they become markers of my own experience in trying to understand how a land is describing itself? That's kind of where I'm at with trying to process all of that, or just understand why I shoot landscapes, or what does it mean to shoot landscapes, or the land, where it feels like a constant sort of search, and recognizing the very different ways of understanding it.
Haden Guest 19:56
At times, throughout the films, there’s a kind of emphasis upon the image itself, the image as an image, this sort of, you know, seeing an image being framed. And I was really struck by the end of Dislocation Blues, this pulling back, where suddenly, what we think is with this image suddenly pulls back, and we're in this exterior space, then it's the road, and then we're actually seeing the image again, and there’s this kind of inter-nesting, which seems again, just to be pointing to the constructed nature of the image, and the kind of, I think, its elusiveness. And even in this last film, where we see you framing the drawings themselves. And I was wondering if this is also– So this seems like you're insisting on pointing again to the frame, and suggesting—whether it be subjective, or whether it be pointing to the camera itself—the ways in which it measures and defines the space.
Sky Hopinka 20:56
Yeah, like Dislocation Blues, too, is, I think, one where I really used a lot of the heads and tails of these clips, where there is like a lot of camera movement when I push record, or push record and turn it off. And, I left a lot of those in there, because they also pointed to the construction of it. And they incorporated me in a way where I became more accountable for the footage, and how it's being presented. It’s not just like the film exists in space, and no one knows where it came from. It's a very objective viewpoint around this experience, because I don't think I can be objective to that, and I don't think I want to be. So, rather, I try to incorporate my own subjectivity into these two different formal choices or tactics, where it is accounting for the construction of it. The camera as an apparatus that is capturing these images, me as an editor, making these different choices about what you see and how they're pointed to in the videos. I mean, even with Dislocation Blues, too, you know, t's about this other level, too, of what it means to be present at Standing Rock, or what it meant to be present. What does it mean to share things on social media, and that is, you know, getting the word out to as big of an audience as you can, checking it on Facebook, even if you're not actually there, or just bearing witness to these stories as they appear, or understanding what people are trying to say, or at least just sitting and listening to what they're trying to say. And all that is mediated by the screen. And so, what does it mean to be present, or not present? Or a participant, or not a participant? Is there a hierarchy there? Or is there not? Or does there have to be? I mean, those are different things I was thinking about, specifically with that film, and how the screen mediates all these different experiences. And it is a construction that I constructed, sitting in a room, in front of my computer.
Haden Guest 22:47
Well, I feel like this is also one way in which your films address the political, in this idea that, yes, you want to represent and to show, right? And to document, say, for instance, as you do in An Act of Resistance, and in Dislocation Blues, and at the same time, you don't want to reduce it, and even the conversation within the film about the dangers of distortion within social media, while at the same time acknowledging the powers of it. And I was wondering if you could talk about that, perhaps, struggle, if it is a struggle? This idea of wanting to both challenge, and in what dimensions to teach your audience? I mean, do you ever feel that is part of what you both you want to do, or you don't want to do, or...I don’t know.
Sky Hopinka 23:37
Never want to teach.
Haden Guest 23:38
Um-hmm.
Sky Hopinka 23:40
I mean, I do. Well, it's just I think it comes back to my introduction to filmmaking. It came at the same time as I started being a language teacher, or a language student and a language teacher. And so it really informed how I then approached either these films—as I learned how to teach this Native language—and, you know, it got me into thinking more about, well, what do I need to teach an audience in how to watch these films? Do I need to give them a history lesson? Or can I do things formally that teaches them how to watch the video itself? And so that's like the avenue that I took, where I don't necessarily want to give a lot of background information around what these things mean, because it takes time. And it's kind of private and personal, you know? And so there's other ways outside of the film to then investigate for yourself as an audience, if you're not familiar with some of these references. And then, I don't know, it opens a whole other world of understanding, other than what I can teach you in a 15-minute film. And so I would rather have you learn how to watch the film, or the film teach you how to watch it, and that gives you more access to the contents, at least on a more, I don't know, emotional, or empathetic level, that isn't necessarily about me explaining something, but rather about you feeling something.
Haden Guest 24:50
Absolutely. And one last question before opening to the audience. These films are so quintessentially– I feel like they’re digital, in the way that kind of the plasticity of the image, and the layering, and yet, there were moments where works of great photochemical artists like Bruce Bailey, for instance, were coming to mind, and I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your formation as an artist, and if there were, in fact, you know, who were some of the moving-image artists that were most important to you, or are most important to you still?
Sky Hopinka 25:33
Hmm. Well, Basma Alsharif, definitely. Peter Rose. John Smith. Joyce Wieland. And really any sort of filmmaker that deals with language, or landscape, or just these different realms of identity, even like peripherally, I think I'm drawn to. I mean, even this one film, actually, that Fainting Spells very much references, with the scrolling text, the scrolling hand-written text, is James Bennings’ American Dreams Lost and Found. And, I mean, I've seen that film maybe twice, but it sticks with me, and I don't want to watch it over and over again, you know? Even when I was thinking about the handwriting, or the scrolling text, it was like, how did he do...? Was it typed, was it on the bottom? And then I finally rewatched it, and I was like, oh, it's handwritten, and it’s cursive. And then it was like, yeah, I can do that! You know, no problem! But it's just like these different ways that, you know, filmmakers approach, you know, their different tactics of drawing attention to different things, or combining different elements, whether it's one, two, or three elements, that are really important to how I then utilize them as tools, to then employ in my own videos, and you know, take what I can, and toss what doesn't work, and through the use of these tools, try to make them in dialogue with those other works that I'm inspired by or drawn to. You know, works like by Basma, or Peter Rose that are, you know, just really amazing, beautiful films. And how can I join that conversation formally, you know, whether they're film or video.
Haden Guest 27:08
Right. Well, thank you very much. Let's take some questions or comments from the audience. And we do have microphones on either side. All you have to do is raise your hand. Yes, right there.
Audience 27:22
Thank you so much. These films were amazing, and your reading was incredible as well. I have a question about historical memory and the epistolary form, because something that recurs throughout many of the films is this transmission of knowledge, or song, across generations, and the use of an intimate mode of address to kind of access this other layer of history. So I'm trained as a historian, and there's this fetishization of the archival document. But I appreciate the way that your work is using this intimate mode of address to access those stories that are transmitted across generations. So I just was wondering if you could say a little bit more about the intimate mode of address and the epistolary form in your work.
Sky Hopinka 28:28
Well, like with a lot of these materials, I mean, I'm taught to romanticize them, or to historicize them, where, you know, how my tribe existed 100 years ago is seen as the ideal, and that we're either so far away from we can never get back, or hopelessly trying to attain. And so... how, then, do I engage with these different materials, whether they're from an archive, whether they're texts, or whether they’re documents—any form of documentation. And even with these drawings in the last film, you know, just the thing that struck me was, yeah, they’re these hundred-and-thirty-year-old ledger drawings made by prisoners of war in Fort Marion and Florida. And they're sitting in a banker's box in the basement of the St. Augustine Historical Society. And they're letting me look through them—they're wrapped in plastic—but you know, I can, in some sense, touch them or look at them, or be close to them. And how do they transcend the sort of archival quality, or just the idea of an artifact? And so how can I relate to them as the people that drew them, or what it was like, or how I am very much from that tradition of where they came from. Where, you know, I mean, I'm a citizen now, but our path to citizenship came through incarceration, and through being losers in a war. But just like even the idea of the Indian Wars, are they still going on? Some say "yes, why not?" But even that relationship to history, and how it is still active and being activated through these different modes, where... I mean, I didn't show it tonight, but there's this video that I made, where I'm using recordings from my language teacher’s teacher from like, 1983 or ‘84. And so they're purely linguistic documentations of their conversations as they're learning the language, or it’s being taught. But the thing that drew me to it was the conversations that happened in between the language, sort of a informant-based approach to documentation. It's like where you could hear them becoming friends, you could hear them playing with a language, could hear them making jokes, and trying things out, and teasing, and all these different things. And that brought me more to that presence. And that 1983 then, you know, reading about it in a book, or just viewing it as some distant thing that's, you know, is unattainable, or, I don't know, a way for me to try and understand my culture better through study, rather than trying to relate to the human experiences that were present in the formation of those artifacts.
Haden Guest 30:49
Other questions or comments? I mean, I just want to make a comment about the drawings themselves. I really love the way you animate the drawings, in a way. I know it's a kind of a subtle one, but there's a sense that you're actually giving, or you're drawing on the movement of the images themselves. It's just these little turns and twists. And I was wondering if that was a deliberate idea to the-
Sky Hopinka 31:14
Well I mean like, when I was like shooting, I had like an hour. And I was like, well, how do I shoot these? I wanted to take time with them, and so I just started going through them, just trying to get them all in frame and spend enough time on each image, and then move to the next one. But I didn't know what I was going to do with it. It wasn't until I think I started putting it together that it was like, well, actually, I like how it all fits together. I've never really done anything like that before that has this sort of structure. And, yeah, it's like I made an inventory film, you know? So, I don't know, it’s just something about that that's, you know, it's like how to look at these things, or just how to point at these different things with a camera.
Haden Guest 31:49
Great. Well, any last chance for questions or comments for Sky Hopinka? If not, I know you will join me in thanking Sky for this really wonderful evening of films and readings and...
[APPLAUSE]
Sky Hopinka 32:04
Thank you.
Haden Guest 32:05
...thoughts.
[APPLAUSE]
©Harvard Film Archive
